3 ms·

I just built myself a dual E5-2696v4 workstation last week. ebay/taobao has loads of very affordable E5-2696v4, they are not ES/QS junks but the official versio

I just built myself a dual E5-2696v4 workstation last week. ebay/taobao has loads of very affordable E5-2696v4, they are not ES/QS junks but the official version provided to manufacturers. I paid $1,000 for each processor. Supermicro X10DAI motherboard is just a piece of art, as usual. They sell you this brand new beauty for $350 - it is more like running a charity given the fact that those so called "high end" consumer grade motherboard with one socket and 8 DIMM slots can easily cost you $500 or more. RAM is pretty expensive now, 128G DDR4-2133P ECC REG RAM cost around $1,000 on taobao.com, unless you buy some shitty brands to save a couple hundred $. Then you need a EEB case, a solid reliable PSU and two heatsinks, that is another $250 to spend. I can't afford a 3T RAM HP workstation, but the good news is every programmer in fact can afford a 44 cores dual E5-2696v4 workstation like the one I just built. ;)

sireat 9y ago
How's the buying experience for computer hardware on taobao? I bought everything for a dual Xeon 2670v1 system (starting with Dell T5600 as base) from ebay and it came out to $1000 last year including $150 for 64GB of ECC RAM. Very happy with it but could definitely use an upgrade now. Dual E5-2696v4 seems like the current sweet spot for DIY.
- dis-sys 9y ago
  > How's the buying experience for computer hardware on taobao? pretty happy with my experience. vendors posted the stuff on the same day, delivered within 24 hours as I live in Shanghai. it might be different story if you live in other countries as the refund policy says you can return the stuff within 7 days with no questions asked, you probably can't do that within the 7 days time frame if the package need to be posted overseas. > I bought everything for a dual Xeon 2670v1 system (starting with Dell T5600 as base) from ebay and it came out to $1000 last year including $150 for 64GB of ECC RAM. I also have a dual E5-2670v1 system, actually I am posting from it now. I found a single E5-2696v4 is going to be 40-50% faster than the dual E5-2670v1, dual 2696v4 almost triples the CPU performance for my workload. this has been confirmed by both cinebench score and benchmark results of an in-house application I developed. RAM bandwidth is not going to be a big jump. > Dual E5-2696v4 seems like the current sweet spot for DIY. Dual E5-2696v3 with some firmware/bios hack to push all cores running at higher speed is probably more $ efficient. You can get a faster system that is $500 cheaper. ;)
  - sireat 9y ago
    Makes sense that Taobao would be a great option in Shanghai :) I wonder how easy it is to receive Taobao merchandise in Europe. It appears you have to go through an agent.

sireat 9y ago

How's the buying experience for computer hardware on taobao? I bought everything for a dual Xeon 2670v1 system (starting with Dell T5600 as base) from ebay and it came out to $1000 last year including $150 for 64GB of ECC RAM. Very happy with it but could definitely use an upgrade now. Dual E5-2696v4 seems like the current sweet spot for DIY.

dis-sys 9y ago
> How's the buying experience for computer hardware on taobao? pretty happy with my experience. vendors posted the stuff on the same day, delivered within 24 hours as I live in Shanghai. it might be different story if you live in other countries as the refund policy says you can return the stuff within 7 days with no questions asked, you probably can't do that within the 7 days time frame if the package need to be posted overseas. > I bought everything for a dual Xeon 2670v1 system (starting with Dell T5600 as base) from ebay and it came out to $1000 last year including $150 for 64GB of ECC RAM. I also have a dual E5-2670v1 system, actually I am posting from it now. I found a single E5-2696v4 is going to be 40-50% faster than the dual E5-2670v1, dual 2696v4 almost triples the CPU performance for my workload. this has been confirmed by both cinebench score and benchmark results of an in-house application I developed. RAM bandwidth is not going to be a big jump. > Dual E5-2696v4 seems like the current sweet spot for DIY. Dual E5-2696v3 with some firmware/bios hack to push all cores running at higher speed is probably more $ efficient. You can get a faster system that is $500 cheaper. ;)
- sireat 9y ago
  Makes sense that Taobao would be a great option in Shanghai :) I wonder how easy it is to receive Taobao merchandise in Europe. It appears you have to go through an agent.