Swapping a gaming PC for a 6-watt mini PC
My always-on server didn't need a graphics card. It needed to be cheap to leave running.
Marvin, my AI assistant, used to live on my old gaming PC — a big tower with a powerful graphics card. It ran 24/7, burning electricity to do what is mostly waiting for a message.
I moved it to a Beelink mini PC that fits in one hand. It's silent, it barely sips power, and it does the job just as well, because the heavy AI thinking happens in the cloud anyway.
I did a fresh install instead of moving the old drive over. More work up front, but I got to rebuild everything knowing what I know now — and it came out much cleaner than the first time.
Old box: Ryzen 9 3900, 32 GB, RTX 4070. New box: Beelink Mini S12 Pro — Intel N100 (6 W TDP), 16 GB, 512 GB. The agent calls a hosted model, so the GPU was dead weight.
I chose a fresh Ubuntu Server install over an SSD transplant: different chipset, NIC and drivers, plus a chance to fix early mistakes. Secrets came out of plaintext config into a proper secrets store, and the root logical volume got extended to use the whole disk.
sudo lvextend -r -l +100%FREE /dev/ubuntu-vg/ubuntu-lv
Small habit I picked up: the host went from srv-agent to srv-agent01. Naming things with a number from day one pays off the day there's a second one.