From Gaming Rig to Fanless Console: Reviving Old Hardware with Batocera Linux and NVMe workarounds

More than ten years ago, I bought a MAINGEAR Potenza mainly for gaming. It was a decent enough machine, but fell out of use over the years and ended up serving as a Proxmox testbed until I decided against its power-hungry third-generation i7-3770 and continued hosting via a much more recent Intel NUC. I still had a Streacom FC8 fanless ITX case lying around, hoping to turn the motherboard and…