Gaming PCs (high performance gaming PCs, anyway) take advantage of next generation hardware – particularly top performance processors, lightning fast RAM, and incredible graphics cards – that allow you to play the kind of resource intensive games pumped out by AAA development studios these days with no difficulty at all.
At the same time, all of this extra power and all of this extra performance comes at a pretty steep price tag.
According to 5th Geek, you aren’t going to be able to cobble together a high performance gaming PC for any less than $500-$1100 (and it’s possible to spend a whole lot more money than that on a top-of-the-line rig).
If you’re going to be splashing that kind of cash on a gaming PC you’re going to want to make sure that it handles double duty (and then some). You’ll want to know that you can use your high performance gaming PC for purposes other than just gaming – and that’s where this quick guide comes into play.
Here are five other purposes of high performance gaming PCs (aside from playing games) that you’ll want to use your new set up for.
Business Usage
One of the best ways to justify (or rationalize) dropping a lot of money on a new gaming PC is to use its hardware and its advanced components for business purposes.
The odds are pretty good that your new gaming PC will have a lightning fast multi core processor, at least 16 GB of RAM (if not even more), and a graphics card that can handle some serious heavy lifting.
If your new PC can play AAA titles without breaking a sweat it can handle multitasking different resource intensive software setups that allow you to run a business that helps pay for the hardware you’re using to begin with!
Web Server
There are a lot of computer gaming resources online that can show you how to turn a high-powered set up like your new computer into your own personal web server. Believe it or not, it’s actually a whole lot easier than you ever would have thought it would be, too!
You can set up your own personal web server to host a WordPress blog, an e-commerce platform, your own private Wikipedia, or pretty much anything else you’d like to use a server for – and you’ll be able to use your personal server just like you would web hosting you had to pay for monthly or annually from a third-party company.
Crypto Currency Miner
There are a lot of tech websites that have covered crypto currency mining and how it skyrocketed the costs of graphics cards up until about 12 months ago when the value of crypto took a nosedive.
Well, crypto is starting to creep back up again (especially Bitcoin following the news that it is halving) and now is the perfect time to turn your full-time gaming PC into a part-time crypto currency mining rig.
Again, turning your gaming PC into a crypto currency mining set up is pretty simple and straightforward. There are even easy to follow video guides on YouTube (100% free of charge) that walk you through the process from start to finish.
It’s not a bad way to gobble up some crypto currency when you wouldn’t have been using your gaming PC otherwise.
Media Server
Streaming services like Netflix are definitely dominating right now but there are still some advantages to maintaining your own media library – even if your media is 100% digital.
Using software like Kodi (previously XBMC) for Plex you can turn your gaming PC into your own private media server, your own private and personal version of Netflix. You’ll be able to stream your movies and your TV shows (and any other video content you like) to all of your devices – including your TVs and mold devices – using the power of your gaming PC to handle the heavy lifting of transcoding and distributing your content over the web.
You’ll have a lot more power and control over your media server with this approach, too.
Your Own Personal Cloud
Lastly, you might want to think about turning your gaming PC into your own personal version of the cloud.
There are some pretty cool open sourced solutions out there that help you turn gaming PC storage into Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions, letting you transform your folders into a private version of Google Drive or Dropbox.
There are a lot of other ways you can leverage your new personal cloud when you have high-performance hardware under the hood of your gaming PC!
