Total e-waste and a power draw. Even a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B can beat it to oblivion:
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/6390478?baseline=5583060
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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E-waste
Your primary issue is going to be the power draw. If your electricity supplier has cheap rates, or if you have an abundance of solar power, then it could maybe find life as some sort of traffic analyzer or honeypot.
But I think even finding a PCI NIC nowadays will be rather difficult. And that CPU probably doesn't have any sort of virtualization extensions to make it competitive against, say, a Raspberry Pi 5.
I have a Realtek and an intel NIC which I have not tried. Both are PCI. I am more worried about software, OpenWRT or DDR WRT work with it.
Code is code -- if it's compiled for the CPU and you have the libraries then it will work. The question is why? That hardware is ancient and will get destroyed by SBPCs that will pay for themselves in a few months of electric bills.
Best use is ewasting it because of power draw.
Does it have onboard graphics? It will be hard without that. If it has, you can make a vintage arcade machine, but with multiple games. You could, for example, run linux with OpenTyrian on it, which is one of my favorite games. Xgalaga++ and a lot of old games with DOS emulation should also be possible. You can strip down the OS, so only the barest minimum runs; should save some RAM and CPU.
It has intel graphics.
That is a cool idea, perhaps a project of router thing doesn't work out.
It's not power efficient, you're better off buying a cheaper computer, that runs on far fewer watts
If you want to run it as a museum piece, or for archaeological purposes, go for it.
You could run it as a router, I question how much throughput you can get... But again, a cheap $20 off-the-shelf openwrt router like gli.net will be much cheaper on your power bill.
I don't know how much your electric rate is, but a router or server that sucks down a hundred watts 24 hours a day may be a concern. An arcade machine would be my choice.
You could use it for Windows 98/XP retro gaming if you add a graphics gard, but for anything else it's far too inefficient to be useful
N100 mini computer with five Ethernet ports make a good router. And can be bought for around $100 USD.