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Buying on eBay from reputable sellers is just fine. I do it all the time. I can buy a whole workstation with E5-2665, motherboard, 32GB RAM, 1TB HDD, all for $

Buying on eBay from reputable sellers is just fine. I do it all the time. I can buy a whole workstation with E5-2665, motherboard, 32GB RAM, 1TB HDD, all for $414, shipped. http://www.ebay.com/itm/162274529994 http://www.ebay.com/itm/162274529994 I doubt you can find something like that with FX-8350 and cheaper. And it will still be slower.

voltagex_ 10y ago
What's the power usage of those things? I think I'd notice the difference in my power bill vs buying something like an i5.
- walrus01 10y ago
  A xeon e5 2665 is rated at 115W thermal, so two of them at full load (let's say, calculating prime numbers) would be 230W... plus the overhead for fans, motherboard, hard drive other heat producing components in the system. I would guess that the lenovo workstation in the ebay link is probably 310W electrical load as measured by a kill-a-watt if you run simultaneous full cpu, ram and disk benchmarks on it. Depends a lot on your electrical cost. Some people live in places where the power costs $0.05 per kWh. Some people live in places where it cost $0.36 per kWh (Hawaii).
walrus01 10y ago
There are some awesome deals on ebay right now, but I'm getting to the time when it's better to separate cpu performance and things with a lot of RAM, and have a fairly small, low powered quiet workstation... If somebody wants a machine with a lot of xeon cores and a ton of ram (but noisy), you can buy a dell poweredge r910 server with 4 sockets x 8-core xeons and 128GB of RAM for like $1100. Makes an excellent xen or kvm hypervisor dom0/host development machine. It's just noisy, so in a home environment, put it in your garage or something on the far end of a cat5e cable.
geezerjay 10y ago
> I doubt you can find something like that with FX-8350 and cheaper. I have a AMD FX 8320 workstation, and I assembled it brand new for less than €400. In fact, if you take away the €130 referring to the price of an AMD FX 8320, you get the remaining budget for the mobo, RAM, and HDs.

voltagex_ 10y ago

What's the power usage of those things? I think I'd notice the difference in my power bill vs buying something like an i5.

walrus01 10y ago
A xeon e5 2665 is rated at 115W thermal, so two of them at full load (let's say, calculating prime numbers) would be 230W... plus the overhead for fans, motherboard, hard drive other heat producing components in the system. I would guess that the lenovo workstation in the ebay link is probably 310W electrical load as measured by a kill-a-watt if you run simultaneous full cpu, ram and disk benchmarks on it. Depends a lot on your electrical cost. Some people live in places where the power costs $0.05 per kWh. Some people live in places where it cost $0.36 per kWh (Hawaii).

walrus01 10y ago

There are some awesome deals on ebay right now, but I'm getting to the time when it's better to separate cpu performance and things with a lot of RAM, and have a fairly small, low powered quiet workstation... If somebody wants a machine with a lot of xeon cores and a ton of ram (but noisy), you can buy a dell poweredge r910 server with 4 sockets x 8-core xeons and 128GB of RAM for like $1100. Makes an excellent xen or kvm hypervisor dom0/host development machine. It's just noisy, so in a home environment, put it in your garage or something on the far end of a cat5e cable.

geezerjay 10y ago

> I doubt you can find something like that with FX-8350 and cheaper. I have a AMD FX 8320 workstation, and I assembled it brand new for less than €400. In fact, if you take away the €130 referring to the price of an AMD FX 8320, you get the remaining budget for the mobo, RAM, and HDs.