If you asked me to pick the worst desktop CPU for a 24/7 home server, I’d probably point at AMD’s old FX series… and in this video I did exactly that. I grabbed an FX-6300 (yes, the same CPU from my first college gaming PC—box fan and all) and tried to answer a simple question: if you already have one of these collecting dust, can you tweak it into something that won’t torch your power bill? I started with Debian 12, measured idle and load power, and then went down the rabbit hole of BIOS settings, C-states, fan curves, undervolting, memory voltage tweaks, and even disabling random onboard stuff out of pure desperation. The punchline is: it actually works… kind of. I got the system from ~57W idle down to ~30W idle after a better PSU and swapping to the proprietary NVIDIA driver, and I cut load power a lot too without really losing performance in my basic checks. From there I ran real “home server stuff” in Portainer—Home Assistant, Jellyfin (with NVENC on a Quadro P620), and even a small Minecraft server—and it held up better than I expected. It’s not great, and you’re stuck with old platform limitations like SATA 2 and PCIe Gen 2, but if the hardware is free (or basically trash-find cheap), it can still be a fun, usable weekend homelab project.