Success: What should I do next?

The short story

Got scammed on eBay. Seller shipped me a lower-clock logic board than advertised and a faulty nvidia chip, and tried to pin it on me.

Made lemonade anyway. Used a new seller for a board that works. Swapped in a top-spec 2014 dGPU board, patched with OpenCore Legacy Patcher and it’s running macOS Sequoia 15.5 flawlessly.

Daily drivers now:

13-inch 2017 MBP (2.5 GHz i7, 16 GB, Iris 640) — Sequoia, lives in my backpack.

15-inch 2013/2014 hybrid MBP (2.8 GHz i7, 16 GB, GT 750M) — stays on the desk for medium-duty work.

What’s left over

I’ve got an headless 2013 MBP (keyboard, I/O all intact) logic board, and spare ssd from my nvme upgrade—essentially begging for a new purpose.

Looking for ideas

I’m open to anything—macOS, Linux, or something weird. A few thoughts I’ve had:

Head-less home server (Ubuntu/TrueNAS) eGPU workhorse (Blackmagic/RAZER Core) Use TB2→TB3 adapter, offload renders or ML workloads Bottlenecked to PCIe 2.0... Network appliance (Pi-hole, WireGuard, Home-Assistant) Portable capture/OBS box Thunderbolt video capture + SSD for field work

My ask to the community

Anyone running a head-less 2013/2014 MBP successfully? Power draw numbers?

Creative uses I haven’t thought about? (Cluster node? DIY NAS with TB-to-SATA? Something hacky?)

Thanks in advance for any wild suggestions—you folks kept these machines alive, so I figured this was the best place to brainstorm!

(Mods: let me know if I should tag this differently or add more build details.)