> 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 h

> 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. ;)