Tried running an AI art generator on a 6 year old laptop and the results were wild

I have this old Dell from 2018 with just 8GB of RAM and no dedicated GPU. Last week I installed a local Stable Diffusion build just to see if it would even boot up. Took almost 12 minutes to generate one 512x512 image but honestly the quality shocked me. It wasn't fast but the outputs looked just as good as what my friend gets on his $3000 rig. The lesson I learned is that older hardware can still handle some AI stuff if you're patient. Has anyone else tried running these tools on old machines and got something usable?

3 comments

3 Comments

hannah4007d ago

Yeah people throw away perfectly good hardware" - that's so true! My buddy Dave had this ancient ThinkPad from like 2011 that he was about to recycle. I told him to try running a barebones Stable Diffusion build on it just for kicks. First image took almost 20 minutes and the fan sounded like a jet engine the whole time. But the output was actually decent, like a kinda blurry picture of a cat wearing a space helmet. He was honestly shocked it worked at all. Now he keeps it around just to mess with people who say you need top tier gear for AI stuff. It's not practical for daily use but it definitely proves a point about old hardware still having some life left.

ruby_henderson3621d ago

It's always like that with older tech, right? People throw away perfectly good hardware because they think it can't handle anything new. Last year I pulled an old laptop out of my closet, cleaned it up, and now it runs Linux perfectly as a media server. Meanwhile my friend just spent $2000 on a machine that plays Steam games slightly faster than his old one. It reminds me of how people used to toss CRT monitors only to pay a fortune for them later when retro gaming got popular. Older stuff isn't always useless, you just have to know what to use it for.

wood.eric7d ago

Repurposing old hardware with Linux always saves money if you're willing to put in a little elbow grease. I've got an old Dell from 2012 running Plex and it handles four streams without breaking a sweat. Newer isn't always better, you just have to match the machine to the job.