Picked up a 12 core and an 8 core with 64gb ram, both with d700 GPUs for a steal (150 each). Was thinking of running the 12 core as a server and maybe another as a dedicated router running pfsense and connecting a thunderbolt raid array for local media and jellyfin? Havent done any home server/homelab stuff before so was wondering if there were any Mac server things worth running or if I should just format them to run Ubuntu or something.
Echoing that power concern… if it’s just for home lab file server use there are more efficient choices. I’ve been running a Samba file server (Ubuntu 22.04) on an old Lenovo M93p machine with good results - at somewhere around a 10th of the power consumed by that Mac Pro. Seems like a those machines would be good for animation work.
And if you want to stay with macOS there’s always the mini. Just upgraded my aging 2012 with an M2, idle even when powered on and not in sleep mode is like 2-4 watts it’s amazing. Not that the 2012 was that bad at 7-10w idle