A Reddit user known as Tsuto says weekly visits to their county landfill's electronics recycling area have yielded enough discarded SSDs, HDDs, GPUs, RAM and even a laptop to assemble a working Proxmox home lab server. The rig combines scavenged parts—mirrored 256GB SSDs, a 1TB SSD, and three 2TB HDDs in RAID1 for ZFS storage—with a Core i7-7700 and 64GB of RAM bought separately on Amazon. Tsuto also salvaged an Asus ROG laptop with a GTX 860M GPU, fixed with a $25 replacement battery, for casual gaming.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-14
SRhonyra is selling a single-slot, low-profile RTX 3060 with 12GB of memory and dual monitor outputs that draws all its power from the PCIe slot rather than external connectors, priced at $495.59 on Newegg. The card, once seen for around $340 two months ago, reflects a broader surge in GPU pricing, and the vendor markets it specifically as suitable for running 7B to 13B parameter local LLMs.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-08
A hobbyist in China modified an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 to eliminate its external power connectors entirely, forcing the card to run solely on the 75W supplied by the PCIe slot via a shunt resistor mod. The resulting single-slot, low-profile card uses a bare-bones blower cooler with no proper heatsink or thermal pads on the memory chips, relying on a thin metal shroud touching the core directly for cooling.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-06
GoKawiil