What to do when your PC is too powerful?

Modern consumer CPUs are ridiculously powerful - often far more than most people will ever need. Still, the mindset among PC enthusiasts, whether they’re gamers, developers, or hardware nerds, tends to lean toward buying the absolute best, even when it’s complete overkill for their day-to-day needs. Not too long ago, I found myself in exactly this situation.

I had built a compact workstation that, in retrospect, was excessive. I crammed an RTX 3090, a Ryzen 9 9700X, 64 GB of RAM, and 3 TB of storage into a tiny 18 L SFF PC case. After spending way too long optimizing airflow - build was a success. Powerful, reasonably quiet, and beautifully displayed next to my desk - but for regular desktop use, it was absurdly powerful.

So I decided to turn it into something more than a desktop, drawing on my time at the Norwegian Offshore Directorate where I worked with infrastructure systems to turn my personal machine into something more.

The first step was ditching native Windows entirely and installing Proxmox as the host operating system. After setting up a Windows virtual machine with full GPU passthrough, my desktop experience felt identical to bare metal - same performance, same responsiveness, no noticeable latency.

For anyone unfamiliar with it, Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) is an open-source, bare-metal hypervisor. Instead of running one operating system directly on your hardware, Proxmox lets you run multiple isolated systems in parallel, each with its own CPU, memory, storage, and even PCI devices like GPUs.

This separation solved two architectural problems. First, it allowed me to run my long-lived services on Linux, which is far more reliable for 24/7 workloads than Windows. Second, it let me keep a full Windows environment for applications and games that simply don’t behave well on Linux.

More importantly, virtualization turned my PC into real infrastructure. I now have clean VLAN boundaries, dedicated firewall rules per service, internal DNS, domain services, and VPN tunnels for secure external access - all without polluting or risking my daily desktop environment.

From here only your imagination (and system specs) sets the limits. Right now I use this setup to host this website with Nginx and Cloudflared, expose SFTP over the LAN, and manage my smart-home devices with Home Assistant.

But in the future I plan to expand the SFTP storage to a full fledged self hosted cloud with NextCloud + Immich, self hosted a large language model, a data pipeline to collect then analyse invoices and card purchases automatically, and much more.

As for now, I have not noticed any difference between running bare Windows and this setup while running all my other services at the same time including intensive tasks. The services I currently run don't demand much hardware, and I suspect I could scale this many times over before noticing any real slowdown. You could do this on an old laptop or even a single-board computer like a Raspberry Pi. The true blessing of this project wasn't the hardware - it was the process. I learned a ton about network design, secure architecture, and open-source tooling. It is also an amazing asset, it has been incredibly rewarding reading about different open-source projects out there that I can host myself, and having this ready to deploy server ready at all times makes it a lot easier to test unfamiliar tools or even contribute.

What surprised me most wasn’t that this worked - it was how little it changed my daily desktop experience. My Windows VM feels identical to bare metal. Games, development tools, even GPU workloads run without me thinking about the hypervisor underneath.

The real difference is that my PC is no longer a single-purpose machine. It’s infrastructure. I can spin up a new service without breaking my desktop, experiment without fear, and tear everything down cleanly when I’m done.

In hindsight, the mistake wasn’t buying too much hardware - it was treating it like a toy instead of a platform. Modern consumer CPUs are already absurdly capable. The real upgrade comes when you stop asking “How fast is my PC?” and start asking “What systems can I build on top of it?”

Note: Some multiplayer games do not run on virtualized hardware due to anti-cheat restrictions.