24 ms·

The charm of buying old workstation hardware on the cheap

235 points by artsandsci 7y ago

adrianN 7y ago
If you want a loud computer that consumes ten times as much electricity as it should, then an old Xean Workstation might be for you. Personally I prefer buying old Thinkpads. They're cheap, fast enough, and their electricity consumption is decent.
- ldargin 7y ago
  Some of those computers can heat a room though...
  - cm2187 7y ago
    You feel it in big, packed open spaces when they cut the a/c the week end. It may be freezing outside but the floors become really hot.
- dagw 7y ago
  I can't talk about power consumption, but I have a couple of old HP z420 and the loudest component in them was the old Quadro cards. Swap that out and the system is very quite.
  - tecleandor 7y ago
    Quite quiet ;) :P
- lrem 7y ago
  In my experience Xeon workstations are no more noisy than personal computers. That's including my current Lenovo with can't-even-remember-how-many cores and just shy of 200GB RAM. I never felt a need to measure how much my employer pays for electricity.
  - thrower123 7y ago
    I have a Xeon ThinkServer sitting here on my desk as I type this. It is considerably quieter than the laptop I sometimes use, under typical usage (Slack, VS Code, a couple other Electron apps, Outlook).
- mongol 7y ago
  I have an old Dell Xeon workstation, it is not loud at all.
  - bluedino 7y ago
    The older ones definitely make noise from the fans when running at full tilt. The Precision 3630 on my desk will even make a bit of noise, it only has an i7-8700
- phaedrus 7y ago
  I built a dual-CPU E5- based workstation with 64 GB of DDR4, and kill-a-watt says it draws only 75W at idle.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    A Macbook Pro lasts ten hours on a 80 Watthour Battery
    - DuskStar 7y ago
      Not if you're running Docker it doesn't.
      - adrianN 7y ago
        If you actually run stuff the Dual Xeon system won't be sitting at 75W either.
    - ggg2 7y ago
      > 10h disable lid sleep (well, disable sleep entirely on osx 10+ because apple don't want to give you the option to disable lid sleep only) and it will never pass 4h. the 6/8/10h some people claim is because they don't realize the computer is sleeping most of the time. I guess it is fine if it's just your facebook terminal...
- behringer 7y ago
  My dual cpu z600 running 12 cores (24 with HT) is virtually silent. The GPU is the loudest part and hardly audible. I keep it in my living room.
  - radiowave 7y ago
    Same here. I believe the Z600 series was specifically designed to be quiet.
    - luxpir 7y ago
      BMW designed the case iirc.
      - behringer 7y ago
        It's a great design. My only desire for change really is that I had the z800 which is a bit bigger so I could hold more stuff :)
  - luxpir 7y ago
    Ditto but with a passively cooled GTX1050ti and nvme drive it's a solid workstation.
- yegle 7y ago
  I'm actually using the HP Z420 (the one mentioned in the article) at work. Pretty quiet IMO. Note the Z420 is a workstation not a server. Buying an old server is completely different.
- noisy_boy 7y ago
  Coincidentally I'm considering buying a used Thinkpad X220 for fun projects for me/kids because of the reliability, build quality and the awesome keyboard. The best quote I have received so far is about $145 for i5/8gb ram/no-drive (I already have a spare ssd). Hoping the machine is in a good condition :)
  - vuln 7y ago
    Go for it. You will not regret it... I still have mine powered on and sits on my desk with an external plugged in. I suggest doing the FullHD mode if you're decent with a soldering iron. Here is a great resource for x220s. Enjoy! http://x220.mcdonnelltech.com/resources/ http://x220.mcdonnelltech.com/resources/
    - noisy_boy 7y ago
      I have never touched a soldering iron and quite wary of h/w tinkering - thanks for the link though. Even if I don't know how to work with h/w, I like to read about other people doing it.
  - panpanna 7y ago
    Go for it, but you may need to change battery and the thermal paste
    - noisy_boy 7y ago
      Thats my fear too - not only the battery but even the thermal paste part. I have never tinkered with h/w and have a bit of phobia of breaking things. I'll probably end up paying someone to do it :(
  - hotcrossbunny 7y ago
    If you do go for it look out for one with an original battery that may well fall into the battery recall that Lenovo has been running for years. A "dead" battery to the seller may represent a free replacement from Lenovo without any cycles it's clock.
- iscrewyou 7y ago
  What’s a good place to look for an old reliable thinkpad? Do you find them on Craigslist or eBay? I’d love to get an old one and stick an ssd in there for basic usage.
  - bdcravens 7y ago
    I bought an i5 t460 (2-3 years old) for 300 on eBay. The keyboard was kinda nasty so I bought a replacement for 30 on Amazon.
  - owenmarshall 7y ago
    I googled “used laptops” and found a company that resells off-lease computers. If you’re in a large(ish) city I’d expect you’d be able to find a similar company. I was able to pick up a x240 in great shape for $125, and test drive it in person before I paid.
- bluedino 7y ago
  Don't forget on most of the W-series you can stick 4 DIMMs in to get 32GB of memory.
- jotm 7y ago
  Yeah, no shit, a laptop uses less power. Look at ZBook, Precision workstations for the best performance for your dollar.
- fmajid 7y ago
  HP Z workstations are actually fairly quiet. It's one of the few computer lines that actually has published acoustic decibel ratings (19 dB for the low-end version, 34 dB for the high-end, see https://www.bluechipit.com.au/media/product_spec/Z420_WORKSTATION_1.pdf https://www.bluechipit.com.au/media/product_spec/Z420_WORKST...). My main objection to the Z4xx series is that the cases are so bulky. I prefer the Z2xx small form factor models, or even better the Z2 (fastest computer I own, but also one of the smallest). One of the big advantages of a Xeon is that it will use ECC memory, and thus be more reliable.
- ratling 7y ago
  Old Xeons have a niche use as perfect freenas hosts (it's cheap to get 8g+ ECC memory) as long as you're smart enough to shut them off when you aren't using them. I really want to get on the Thinkpad meme. I really do, I like my t500 I use for docker stuff. The problem is there are a lot of newer models that either have dogshit touchpads, dogshit screens, dogshit wifi cards, or (in the case of edges) all 3. Yeah you can replace a bunch of parts (except for the wifi which is bios locked) but at that point I'd be better off buying an Acer Aspire E15 or something else remotely modern. (Yes I know you can flash the bios to get around the bios lock. I also don't care. I shouldn't have to do this.)
skunkworker 7y ago
I would add another negative to the list from personal experience. About a year ago I built a used server dual Xeon home server with e5-2680v2s. Now the pass mark scores per chip are about 15,000 but the power draw overall can get quite high. If you’re in an area with more expensive kwh I would recommend looking into something like a threadripper or a more efficient and newer cpu.
- archi42 7y ago
  That depends on where you put it and how much uptime the machine sees. My cold storage NAS draws 70W idle, but its up time is at most a few hours per week - and I essentially got it for free. Since the 12 disk file server case sits in the basement it doesn't bother anyone with the turbines running. I thought about going dual Xeon for my desktop, but found that I don't often need that much power (at home) to warrant excessive power draw you mention.
- cm2187 7y ago
  If it's a home server doing not much most of the time, an intel skull/hade canyon can be a good choice. It can be really powerful when it needs to be, is effectively a laptop cpu the rest of the time, so not drawing much power. The only inconvenience is that it has no ipmi and it becomes really loud under heavy load. Also you can sort of get 10gbe through a thunderbolt adapter but I ran into some compatibility issues with hyper-v.
chapium 7y ago
It may feel a bit anachronistic at times, but learning terminal based apps is a good way to beat the cycle of upgrades. Many tasks are not all that complex, and they don't need recent hardware to perform well.
robohoe 7y ago
Yeah, that's a no from me. Who would want another massive heat-generative, power-hungry desktop/server humming along in their home office as their main workstation? Now if I were to build a home lab, heck yeah I would jump on board. A couple of those systems would make a real nice private cloud.
- obenn 7y ago
  > A couple of those systems would make a real nice private cloud. +1. I host an R710, R410 and 2 R610s in my basement and its a lovely cluster. I would never have them on any other floor.
ken 7y ago
Every comment here so far is about power consumption, which is mentioned in the article: > And there are also considerations here from the perspective of power consumption. A big box that’s always plugged in will inevitably use more power than a tiny laptop, even if the big box can do a lot more. [...] > But if you can make the case for it, it might be worth your time. In my case, I was looking to have more of a desktop experience for times when I wanted slightly more horsepower than a laptop, and I also wanted a machine that could do virtualization when needed or desired.
- thinkingemote 7y ago
  Why do the machines use so much power?
  - magduf 7y ago
    Back in those days, Intel simply did not care one iota about power consumption. The P4 processors were absolute power hogs, and all Intel did was brag about how great their memory bandwidth to the RAMBUS memory was.
    - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
      The last Pentium 4 was released in 2008; the Xeon E5-2667 v2 parts discussed in the article were released in 2013, years after Intel abandoned their Netburst approach.
      - mixmastamyk 7y ago
        Xeons are usually a generation behind on process and sometimes other technology as well.
        ericd 7y ago
        Be that as it may, that Xeon is post Nehalem, it’s not at all related to Netburst. Netburst was an evolutionary dead end.
mbell 7y ago
Meh, these old systems can be fun to tinker with but are _slow_. E5-2667v2 vs i9-9900k the i9 is 60% faster single core, 44% faster multi-core (both are 8c16t). At lot of use cases, including the majority of development work for most people, is still dominated by single core performance so you're giving up a lot performance to save a couple bucks. The power draw on these server/workstation systems will likely also suck which will offset some of the $ savings.
- dis-sys 7y ago
  my oldest Xeon workstation is a dual E5-2696v2 with 128G ECC RAM. it has a total of 24 cores. Compared to that, I am pretty sure most i9-9900k setups are just for kids. ;) the cost of the above xeon system (dual cpu + mb + RAM) is slightly more expensive than i9-9900k itself, but much cheaper than a i9-9900k + motherboard + RAM.
  - lunchables 7y ago
    I assume that is massively slower for single threaded or very lightly threaded tasks than a 9900K.
  - mbell 7y ago
    > Compared to that, I am pretty sure most i9-9900k setups are just for kids. ;) Your machine is slower than a macbook air for most of my workloads about half the speed of my desktop so I wouldn't be so confident.
    - noir_lord 7y ago
      Update to Right link: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Xeon-E5-2696-v2-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-2700X/m282394vs3958 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Xeon-E5-2696-v2-... I was curious how my home PC stacked against it.
      - dis-sys 7y ago
        so you silently replaced E5-2696v2 with E5-2690v2 and then took one CPU out of the machine before doing the comparison?
dis-sys 7y ago
old Xeon are not all E6-2680v2 kind of junk, you can buy a pair of used Xeon Platinum 8175M + a decent brand new dual socket motherboard for less than $2,500 USD.
milesdyson_phd 7y ago
Oh hey, I have an old z420 that I picked up off of ebay that I use as a hypervisor. It had running for a few years and worked great for what I was using it for. I replaced it earlier this year with a mini-itx ryzen based system, because I didn't want the tower in my office anymore.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  How is the heat management in your Mini-ITX Ryzen system? I've read that Ryzen can generate a good amount of heat. I'd worry that Mini-ITX due to the formfactor may struggle more.
  - jcastro 7y ago
    Works fine with the stock heatsink ootb, even with a mild overclock. They even have smaller than ITX systems now, though not quite as small as a NUC: https://www.asrock.com/nettop/ https://www.asrock.com/nettop/ I have one of these and it runs great.
  - vel0city 7y ago
    I run a Ryzen 5 2600 in a Cooler Master 130 case with the stock cooler. I run it with stock settings and frequencies (XMP enabled). I do not encounter any thermal throttling in normal usage, including long gaming sessions. That said, the 2600 is a 65W chip while the 2700X is rated at 105W. Maybe I would run into more thermal constraints if I used the 105W part, but so far the 2600 has had plenty of performance to meet my needs of a semi-portable gaming/development machine.
  - milesdyson_phd 7y ago
    So far no heat issues with the stock heat sink (2600).
hambursa 7y ago
Used to run an older Xeon system I picked for free as home server/workstation. Now you can pick up 8c16t Ryzens pretty cheap and they even support ECC on cheap consumer motherboards, so unless you get used Xeon for literally next to nothing, you may want to consider other alternatives. There's also the fact that recently more and more vulnerabilities have been discovered in Intel products, which makes Xeon much less attractive platform.
PascLeRasc 7y ago
I've been doing this for years, "upgrading" every 6 months when I find a new machine being thrown away. In the past year I did this with a 2006 Mac Pro and a 2013 System76 desktop. Both of these machines were a delight to work on - I was able to get 16gb of DDR2 ECC RAM and 2 quad-core Xeons for the Mac Pro for around $28 total on ebay. The Mac Pro could be flashed up to a 2007 model and ran El Capitan perfectly with a cheap no-name SSD off Amazon. It took a GTX 760 with some odd power adapters and it was a fantastic machine to do audio editing and playing with tensorflow-gpu on. The System76 machine was a little more modern, with a Haswell i7, and after a new aftermarket cooler, fresh thermal paste, and another no-name SSD it ran Manjaro silently, even with Bazel putting it under some serious load. I'm moving soon, so I sold both machines for around $350 each. It's a fun challenge, since usually these computers don't see modifications or have as good documentation as enthusiast PC parts, so you'll find a tiny community in some obscure forum sharing supported CPU upgrades, how to change out the cooler, stuff like that. Highly recommend it.
ahelwer 7y ago
I was given an HP Z230 workstation when I started at Microsoft five years ago and haven't upgraded since then, despite being well beyond eligible for a hardware refresh. It has 32 GB of RAM and an (edit) 4-core 8-thread i7-4770, plus an OS SSD with several data HDDs (integrated graphics, but meh). CPU performance has been basically stagnant for the past half-decade. Even on my home PC (purchased around the same time) the only thing I've changed is the graphics card - and that was to sell it for a less-powerful one, then buy back the original card years later for cheap! Maybe if you want to play games on the cutting edge of VR then constant upgrades are necessary, but five-year-old desktop hardware should be fine for nearly anyone.
- officialchicken 7y ago
  Minor detail: the entire i7-4770xx line of products are 4-core, 8-threads CPUs[0] [0] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/search.html?_charset_=UTF-8&q=i7-4770 https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/search.html?_cha...
- gruez 7y ago
  >CPU performance has been basically stagnant for the past half-decade what? comparing an i7-4770 to an i7-8700 (current gen, similar launch price), the latter is 25%-86% faster, depending on your workloads. https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-8700-vs-Intel-Core-i7-4770/3940vs1978 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-8700-vs-...
  - eropple 7y ago
    The i7-8700 is heckin' fast, but if you look at it over time, the rate of improvement has slowed down quite a bit. The 4770 is six years old. The Core 2 Duo E6600 is its price-comparable equivalent from six years before that. An E6600 has a PassMark score of 1553. An i7-4770 has a PassMark score of 9780. An i7-8700 has a score of 15155. And we shouldn't miss that that's way faster! But the slope of that curve is a lot shallower than it has been historically, and a 2x improvement probably doesn't move the needle in the way that a 6x improvement does. We're spoiled, in that we can say such an improvement no longer moves the needle. But it also means that hardware stays viable for much, much longer.
dade_ 7y ago
If the noise factor isn't a concern. For me it is, so I'll stick to Intel NUCs (until a good AMD alternative comes along).
- simlevesque 7y ago
  I have a Dell Xeon with passive cooling, no sound.
- Theodores 7y ago
  Join the club - and you can get refurbished NUCs. Mine is running silently right now and I reckon it is using a quarter of the 65W power available to it. The HP Z220 has a 400W power supply and I reckon it is probably using 200W right now. Silence is priceless. But, what if you can't afford silence? If the Z220 can be found in a skip then it comes for free. If you keep it for three years then it eats that much electricity (assuming daily usage) that it costs as much as a NUC. There are a lot of variables here, but I think that the Intel NUC option is just as good value as the Z220 if electricity is factored in and the Z220 is assumed to be free. It all comes down to whether you want to pay up front and save money on the electricity bills or have no up-front costs and pay extra electricity bills over time. In three years time, what would you prefer? I think the Z220 would be hard to rehome. The Intel NUC? I think it would make a nice set top box or hand-me-down for many people. If there were no takers and it had to be eBayed then the postage would be affordable to the buyer. I am not so sure the same could be said for the Z220. There is one final benefit to the NUC - a cleaner conscience when leaving it on. You know that you are not being overly greedy with one's carbon footprint.
Yizahi 7y ago
This will work if you are located in big western city. He bought his Z420 for 50$, and when I check ebay right now they are going for 150-300$ + 100-200$ shipping. And that with E5-1603 CPU, not the E5-2667 or similar. Lets say I have 5 year old AMD FX-8350 due to upgrade this year. That Xeon is actually slower, looking at some basic benchmarks (of course it may be faster in some, but I don't have time for detailed investigation). So ~300$ total for a sidegrade? And that not including hassle with shipping, maybe dealing with scammer seller from ebay, then import tax 30% (and who knows how base price will be calculated at customs). Etc. etc. Not worth it. I'm not saying that upgrading for cheap is bad of course, but getting stuff like described in the article is borderline lottery win in most of the countries. You can't depend on it or plan in advance.
- fishtacos 7y ago
  That Xeon is faster, not slower than your Bulldozer chip. Passmark for the E5-2667: Multithreaded: 10372 Single threaded 1609 Passmark for the FX-8350: Multithreaded 8951 Single threaded: 1510
  - Yizahi 7y ago
    I was comparing E5-1603 vs FX-8350. That was for ~300$ (of course including case, psu, gpu and memory).
pschmot 7y ago
The Xeon workstations I have and can easily access, are all 32bit What good will one let alone several 32bit machines will do for me now a days. I can use Ubuntu, or chain them, but how would you do anything with virtualization and advanced computing.?
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  Completely depends on your use-case. Writing/building/running Java, JS, Python, or anything else architecture-independent? Data processing? You're set. Building release binaries for a native-code application? Yeah, no. But it totally depends what you're doing.
- p_l 7y ago
  That's...interestingly old HW. As in I'd expect it to be more expensive than newer 64 but stuff
robbyt 7y ago
Old xeons are hot, and power hungry. My monthly electric bill decreased by nearly $10 after replacing my 2010 MacPro with a 2018 MacMini.
- howard941 7y ago
  That's cool that you can tell. $10 is 2% of my monthly electric bill. Do you turn your machine off or let it go into deep sleep? I tend to leave the stuff on all the time to minimize heating/cooling cycle stress . It's probably led to some premuturely dried out electrolytics (and maybe a little bit more on the electric bill) but I stopped losing spinning media and the only things that are failing in the old (>10 year) old boxes I have up are the fans. EDIT - FWIW my home office daily drive are dual 6 core Xeon 3104s at 1.7ghz from the Dell refurb site. Although it's my desktop system I also do a lot of parallel stuff on it
  - jdietrich 7y ago
    >$10 is 2% of my monthly electric bill You spend $6000 a year on electricity? Are you running an aluminium smelter in your back yard?
    - howard941 7y ago
      Man I wish - I'd get something in return for the wasted money. The neighborhood just feels like a big smelter.
    - InvaderFizz 7y ago
      Typical for a larger home in the south. Air Conditioning is not exactly optional when it's 95F and 85% humidity for half the year.
      - dublinben 7y ago
        With proper architecture [0], you can have a much more efficient house that requires little if any air conditioning. It'll look much nicer than the typical McMansion too.[1] [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214157X18304131 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214157X1... [1] https://www.buildnative.com/portfolio/peak-ridge/?portfolioCats=299 https://www.buildnative.com/portfolio/peak-ridge/?portfolioC...
whalesalad 7y ago
This stuff is fun to do but it’s not s magic bullet. The title would be better named “why your next home computer could be an old Xeon workstation” These older machines use way more power. Modern stuff is far more quiet and can do a lot more with less heat and sound. I have a dual Xeon 2U here at home w/ 48Gb Of Ram, redundant power supplies etc... it’s awesome. But it’s not even remotely close to being as performant as my new MacBook Pro.
Obsnold 7y ago
Perhaps someone here can give me a bit of advice. I've been undecided on whether to buy a refurbished workstation for a while now. I do a lot of aosp builds for some of my clients and on my current setup it can take 3 or 4 hours for a clean build. I've been looking at various builds on https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/ https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/ For about £1500 to £2000. If anyone has any experience or advice it would be greatly appreciated.
- lame88 7y ago
  If you’re ok with a mobile workstation, i grabbed a refurbished P52 on ebay. They go up to xeon (6 core) and you can stuff a ton of ram in there. You can’t get one if these models without a quadro video card unfortunately so that does mark up the price, but it should be useful for running the emulator. And lastly an Nvme SSD - if you have all those it should work well, but i cant comment on the thermal longevity as to whether it might throttle during a long build as it’s been many years since ive done a AOSP build or anything that heavy. I got mine for 1800ish USD but i added some ram on top. It was definitely overkill for what I do, but I think it would suit your case well.
  - Obsnold 7y ago
    Hmm I hadn't thought of a mobile workstation I'll give them a look. I used to have a Dell mobile workstation in one of my previous jobs which put me off them a bit because it weighed a ton and was a pain to carry around but the p52 looks quite interesting.
- KaiserPro 7y ago
  My favourite setup is an HPz620 v2 with e5-xxxxv2 CPUs, and >= 64 gigs of ram. Basically any workstation with 2 Intel Xeon E5-2650 V2, or the L variant (lower power) will do. for example: 1 x HP Z620 Grade A - 800W - V2 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2650 V2 - 8-Core 2.60Ghz (20MB Cache, 8.00GTs, 95W) 1 x HP Z420, Z620 - Heatsink 1 x HP Z620 2nd CPU Riser Board, Fan & Heatsink 8 x 8GB - DDR3L 1333MHz (PC3L-10600R, 2RX4, ECC REG) 1 x 2TB - SATA (7.2K, 3G) HDD - Major Brand You'll need a new graphics card and an SSD, but that is £750 inc vat. this means you can spend £500 on an nvidia RTX, and get a 6k monitor.
supernova87a 7y ago
What a useless article that just talks about intangible social reasons to buy something used. I would've expected some kind of cost analysis for how much compute power $500 buys you on a few years old workstation versus something new, and that you get more for your money used. Nothing.
dashesyan 7y ago
You're giving away my secrets! I've bought 3 of these types of HP workstations over the years, starting with a Z210 with a Xeon E3-1240. I added a graphics card to make it a super budget gaming PC. My most recent one is an HP Z420 workstation with 128GB of ECC memory, an 8-core Xeon, and Win10 Pro installed for $620 delivered. Benchmarks of the CPU show its comparable to a Ryzen 1700X in single and multi core, but I really bought it for the RAM. It's a great machine for homelab-type virtualization.
- dev_dull 7y ago
  Where do you buy them?
  - dashesyan 7y ago
    NewEgg and eBay
- behringer 7y ago
  I'm still on the z600 after years and I love it. I just upgrade the GPU every few years. I have an extra PSU for it somewhere around here. This thing will outlive me I think.
- izzydata 7y ago
  Do these older CPUs have hardware level decoding for modern video formats such as AV1?
  - chronogram 7y ago
    Does any modern chip have that yet then?
    - izzydata 7y ago
      Perhaps not. I might be thinking of VP9 if that is what YouTube has been using.
gravypod 7y ago
If a lot of HN users were interested it would be cool if someone could organize group-buys of these types of hardware. Usually buying old hardware (for super cheap) is limited by volume and most sellers aren't willing to ship something. If someone removed those pains and hand-picked "worth it" (for the home/small business server lab) items it would be something a few people might be interested in.
deadfece 7y ago
On a vastly more practical note, check out JDM_WAAAT's site https://www.serverbuilds.net/ https://www.serverbuilds.net/ . They're more piecemeal parts list, but he has a very reasoned approach to select parts that deliver value/performance at their price point, and are available at the selected price in sufficient quantities.
fnord77 7y ago
The power consumption of some of these old workstations is obscene. There's probably some optimal intersection between cost of the computer and the cost of power consumption. an older macbook pro (2012ish) gives 12,000 on the MT benchmark and only draws what, 85w? the author briefly touches on this, but unless you get free electricity, this is a bigger issue than presented.
- hak8or 7y ago
  Yes! I am shocked that almost no one seems to comment on power consumption for these units. Sure, they cost $200 while being just as fast as $700 machines, but they can easily pull $50 a month in power, assuming 25 cents per kwh. Not only is that a waste of money for power, it is horrible for the environment. These machines are obscenely inefficient power wise. It's likte folks who buy a r720 for $150 that comes with 32GB ECC ram and dual cpu's, but it pulls $75 per month in power. Even if you don't pay for electricity directly (you do in rent then), it's still terrible for the environment.
  - cheerlessbog 7y ago
    And loud as well - servers aren't as optimized for noise as desktops are. I use ThinkPads from Ebay - I get the high end model from 4-5 years ago. Coming off lease they can be in great condition often loaded with RAM and just need an SSD. The build quality is great, and they're cheap.
    - LeonM 7y ago
      I looked into buying a server to harvest the CPU and RAM, then building a desktop machine using a regular cooling components to keep it quiet. I found the real problem of a re-purposing server is not the noise, but rather that the motherboards are completely unsuitable for desktop work. And buying a new workstation motherboard that would take the Xeon(s) and ECC ram would make the build more expensive than just buying a new desktop machine with consumer grade hardware.
      - 7y ago
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aloer 7y ago
In late 2017 I built myself a threadripper based workstation for ~5000$ with a 1950x, 64gb ECC (can fit up to 128), a single 1080 ti, single NVMe drive and two 8tb HDDs. The system was designed to allow for more HDDs (case space and thermal capacity, 8 should fit easily), 4 GPUs and durable enough so that I can wrap it up and ship it around the world if needed (The whole thing weighs ~18kg with a single GPU. Whether shipping a PC is a good idea or not I have yet to find out) Threadripper was still 1000$ + motherboard for 300$. And RAM was at all time high with 750$ for 64gb ECC. Because of this price tag I considered getting a used xeon, but looking at the total I probably would have only saved less than 1000$, or 20%, perhaps 100-200$ more due to used RAM for a total of 24%. That percentage saving is much lower than expected. Other factors: The cpu mentioned in the article has 40 PCIe lanes vs. 60 in threadripper and I figured more lanes is better should I ever put in all 4 GPUs. This seems to more or less not matter though. Something learned since then. Better energy efficiency (newer processor and better PSU), more control over heat and noise (assumption, I have 6 quiet fans in there), more lanes (although near useless for GPUs apparently), more room for storage (8-12 drives possible), GPUs (4 possible) and simply all parts new with warranty for 20-24% more This is very use case specific of course and there might be better used systems available as well but I would probably do it again. The savings were less than I initially thought and that was at an all time high for RAM prices and the first generation of threadrippers, should be even less now. What I should have done differently is use it more often, but that's a different story. -> The expensive parts are storage, GPU and high quality case/PSU/fans. If you want to build your first workstation, storage and GPUs should be bought separately anyways. But if you don't need them or already have those from a different system, a used xeon sounds interesting. You still probably save less than expected though, over the years with less warranty, more power draw and more work necessary (which can be fun! not denying that) (Yes the linked article is about home computer, not workstation. This is a different scenario. I figured it's nonetheless relevant for some)
Johnny555 7y ago
I used to love upgrading my home desktop, I'd research specs, figure out the best price/performance and upgrade components regularly (motherboard, CPU, hard drive, etc). But now that most of my computer time is spent in a web browser (most of my coding is done at work so I rarely even run an IDE at home), I'm happy with my 5 year old laptop. I built a nice 8 core Xeon desktop about 4 years ago, but haven't powered it on at all in at least the past 2 years, I moved a year ago and haven't even taken it out of the box, it's still sitting beside the computer desk.
nurettin 7y ago
Power consumption and fan sounds on those things were insane.
cr0sh 7y ago
I've looked into this kind of thing in the past, but there was always something that made me shy away, despite the prices being relatively favorable. Most of the time, I think it was a worry of "if the power supply dies" - because usually, these workstations have a very proprietary PSU, which can sometimes be difficult to source, and when you find one, the price can be nothing short of insane. Then there was RAM - most of the time, you needed ECC RAM, and that stuff could be expensive if you wanted to push the system to its maximum config. Of course, this was years ago, maybe things have changed in the market? Last was the potential noise and heat factors. I once had a Core2Duo that I dropped in a 8800 GTX (or something like that) - and while the noise wasn't bothersome, the heat output was something else. But I do know what a server fan system sounds like, and I'd worry about a workstation having that same kind of jet-engine experience. So I never pulled the trigger, so to speak. Today, I've been almost going the direct opposite direction. I've got on my "list of things to repair/build" a TRS-80 Model 100 (portable), an old Toughbook C29 to refresh, and I'm contemplating building a custom "cyberdeck", using a variety of different parts and components (probably an ESP-32 coupled to an Arduino Nano, with the Nano acting as a keyboard interface, because the keyboard isn't off-the-shelf, it's from a toy computer, the ESP will probably drive some kind of GLCD, then custom firmware, etc for everything else - not really a practical system, but probably more fun).
- user5994461 7y ago
  +1 on the PSU. Having attempted to replace power supplies on both Dell and HP workstations, that's just not possible. It doesn't boot without a one from the manufacturer. Surprised that none of the comments mention it.
- lichenwarp 7y ago
  my hp z210 came with 8gb ecc mem, I had I believe it's ddr3 24gb was kind of upset that the hp site said max 16gb (that's not the case) the 24gb ddr3 worked anyway. (hopefully the ram issue helps someone else) yes the mobo died a few months after so that's a downside of used equipment, but the replacement mobo was $30 + an extra $30 in case it happened again. I put a 1050 ti pci-e powered for budget gaming since I'm not made of money, works well and can multitask like crazy. I believe my e3-1270v1 3.4ghz is comparable to my old i5-2500k without the oc capability
elagost 7y ago
The arguments about power consumption only apply to a specific set of old workstation CPUs. You can buy old hardware that isn't super inefficient. I bought an HP EliteDesk tower on the cheap ($150) last year that had a i7-4790 (an all-around great CPU) and is super quiet. With a lower-power GPU in it (nvidia 1030) it's even decent for light games or video decoding. I've not directly measured the power consumption, but it's not nearly the monster these old Xeons can be. The main point, from what I gather, is that you can buy older hardware that's just as powerful as something you'd buy today, but you get the benefit of better repairability, cheap replacement parts, and saving a bunch of plastic from the trash. I don't see the need for buying brand-new hardware when the old stuff works just fine. (My main machine is a 6-year-old Thinkpad)
w_s_l 7y ago
For one I would love to have an SGI workstation, I still have CG magazines from this era and its plastered everywhere in the ads, and I'm still amazed at the graphic output (so smooth) and what we had in the 90s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDxLa6P6exc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDxLa6P6exc I'd imagine something like this would've been used to make Crash Bandicoot and likes. It'd be really interesting to play games built on this thing.
galkk 7y ago
I bought once Supermicro workstation (dual Xeon 2680), and it was LOUD. Even when shut down, the fans were still making noise, so I've had a habit of turning it off from power to make it silent. While the idea looked appealing at the beginning (dual CPU, 64GB RAM, great cable management), at the end I've decided that it doesn't justify the cost and hassle. Plus sometimes there were very funny issues - for example to run Rocksmith you needed to manually set affinity on windows to run it on only one CPU. After upgrading to last gen Thinkpad extreme it feels that Thinkpad even does 4k rendering faster.
alkonaut 7y ago
We’re in a 5-10 year plateau where buying yesterday’s machines dorsn’t cost much performance, at least for CPUs. If you bought a 5 year old computer in 2011 you’d be buying last gen stuff. But in 2019 even the sandy bridge (2012) intel processors aren’t that bad. Obviously you are paying with power because you’ll buy a 2 or 4 way system to compensate, but if you use it just a few hours per day it’s a steal.
dillonmckay 7y ago
This article is a bit verbose, not very succinct. I was trying to find the actual specs on his purchase. Is it using ECC RAM?
glaurung_ 7y ago
My gaming desktop right now is actually an old Dell Precision tower with a third gen i7 that I got for $140 off eBay. I swapped out the PSU, upped the ram to 16gb, added an SSD I had laying around, and replaced the Quadro GPU with a 1060. In all it cost me about $350 and comfortably runs every game I own. Power draw isn't too much of a concern since it isn't used too often.
mrbill 7y ago
It's not just workstation hardware - I've recently bought a couple of Dell T410s off eBay for $125 each (shipped!). Quad-core Xeon E5620s, 4G RAM, 6-bay hotswap chassis, DVD-ROM, iDRAC 6 Enterprise, PERC 6i RAID card. Upgrades: $25 for 120G SSD (boot drive, goes in the empty second 5.25" bay), $27 for 16G RAM, $20ish for an E5670 6-core CPU, $35 for an LSI HBA in IT-mode (supports >2T drives), $10 for a set of SFF-8087 cables to go from the HBA to the existing hotswap backplane. 30-45 minutes to upgrade all the firmware for the DRAC, lifecycle controller, BIOS, etc. Grand total of around $250 for a really nice server with full remote management, and for the cost of another E5670 and a Dell heatsink I can upgrade to dual-CPU (12 cores/24 threads). They're so cheap that I've gotten two systems to upgrade as described, and this morning ordered a third (yet again $125) to have for spare parts. The eBay vendor emailed me and offered to sell me a pallet of 24 for $80 each, but I don't have that kind of need or money lying around... As for laptops, I tend to get refurb/off-lease Thinkpads from arrowdirect.com (coupon code ARROW gives 15% off), then max out the (cheap DDR3) RAM and throw a SSD in where the HD was. I've built up a T420s and an X230 like this for when I need a decent portable machine but don't want to take my expensive Macbook Pro somewhere. For the T420s I even got a $50 adapter board from a guy in China that let me put a FHD IPS screen in, instead of the 1440x900 TN LCD that it came with...
- colechristensen 7y ago
  Building my own home server I went a different route with the latest, fastest i3 processor (at the time i3-7350k, not i3-8350k) to prioritize lower power and single thread execution speed. E5670 holds up surprisingly well, similar total performance – 1/2 single thread execution speed 2x threads – in a similar power envelope for half the cost. The value in those used workstations is mostly in the case and that is hard to replicate in these days of style-driven (wtf?) computer hardware where everything has LEDs and is generally targeted to excite 12-year-olds.
- magashna 7y ago
  >pallet of 24 for $80 each at those prices I really do wonder about that cross section of recycling/dumping and inefficient power consumption
unixhero 7y ago
I do this. HP Z620 is a phenomenal workstation.
mNovak 7y ago
I like to do this with laptops -- you can get a few years old maxed out Dell Latitudes, Thinkpads etc on ebay for 80% off. These outperform a standard new $800 laptop easily, though obviously you pay in sleekness/weight (mine is 90% stationary so I don't much care).
keeptrying 7y ago
I dont know what it is but I love looking through junk to see if I can find something valuable. I rarely find anything useful but I just love going through junk of any sort. I'm guessing my ancestors were some sort of scavangers or something?? I've never understood why it gives me so much pleasure!
louwrentius 7y ago
For what it's worth: I keep my computers / servers off all the time. When I need them I use Wake-On-Lan to remotely turn them on when needed. Even my power hungry 71TB NAS is off 99% of the time and only turned on when needed. Saving me 150-200 Watt idle power usage. If you don't need your stuff to be on 24/7 you can buy older more power-hungry stuff as long as you turn it off when done.
meerita 7y ago
I always wanted to buy a SGI station, and use the old OS. I hope someday find one example that it's pristine.
heelix 7y ago
Funny story. Back in when my Bride and I lived in a single bedroom compartment, she looked at my small stack of computers and said "why don't you get one big one"? Later that month, I was shopping at the Lockheed Martin outlet/surplus store, and spied a lovely Sun 3/280 in a 8', 19" rackmount for $25. I could not resist, much to her dismay as the refrigerator sized chassis got home. The original hardware hosting a threadripper in the case of theseus.
cptnapalm 7y ago
The family machine is a 2009 Mac Pro with dual hex core processors, 48 gigs of RAM and 2 low watt video cards running Ubuntu. It does multiseat like a champ: one side was playing Hitman (2016) while the other was doing Tomb Raider (2013). I had been wanting to do multiseat for about a decade. In addition to using it remotely with ssh, I have guacamole on it, connecting to GDM so I can if I need to get to my desktop through a web browser. Total cost was about $600. I'm very much enjoying it.
yardie 7y ago
I don't find any of these workstations really interesting. They are all the same x86_64 architecture so just getting the latest and greatest puts you leagues ahead. I find the really old workstations to be way more interesting. You rarely see a MIPS, Sparc, PA-RISC anymore. Once the CPU wars were over (Intel won, btw) you could get old SGI supercomputers, DEC Alphas, Sun Sparcstations, and NeXT Turbo Cubes for almost nothing. My very first website was run from an Alpha workstation on NetBSD under my dorm room bed. They were power hungry, not state of the art, and sometimes quirky to use (Irix Motif comes to mind) but they were a blast.
s09dfhks 7y ago
Currently using a Dell r710 I got from a recycler for $75 as a freenas box It's not THAT loud and serves my needs pretty well. Came with a single 2.1gHz xenon and has room for a second
hermitdev 7y ago
Takes me back. I bought a used Dell workstation for a few hundred bucks. Was pretty bare, basically case, power supply and motherboard. At the time, it was the only motherboard I was aware of that supported dual socket CPUs and AGP graphics. Even though I bought it used, Dell support was willing to help me out debugging why it wouldn't boot (something to due with a mismatch between the CPU power control units - I think that's what they were called- with a dual P4 Xeon setup). For the workstation, it was pretty damned affordable for what I got. The kick in the jaw was that it took RDRAM. To put in 1.5 GB of RAM doubled the cost of the build, easily. Few years later when I was an FTE, and no longer in school, dropped a couple of grand USD to upgrade the RAM to 3 GB. That was circa 2005. Great workstation, but boy was that RDRAM expensive...
h9n 7y ago
Great article. It expresses ideas similar to Game & Watch and GameBoy creator Gunpei Yokoi's philosophy of Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology.[0] > Yokoi said, "The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply." > "Withered technology" in this context refers to a mature technology which is cheap and well understood. "Lateral thinking" refers to finding radical new ways of using such technology. When designing the GameBoy, Yokoi realised that the older, simpler Z80 processor would just as well serve the purpose of making fun handheld games as the more contemporary options would (and one might argue that the limitations of the machine forced game developers to be more creative than they might have otherwise). Likewise with the monochromatic display. The GameBoy was cheaper to manufacture and buy, more well-understood by developers, and crucially, much more power efficient than its several competitors. And it killed them. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_with_Withered_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_...
mandeepj 7y ago
Great idea. You can easily buy a Mac Pro quad-core (single or dual cpu) for anywhere between $300 to $900. It's going to work on par with today's expensive machines :-)

235 points by artsandsci 7y ago

If you want a loud computer that consumes ten times as much electricity as it should, then an old Xean Workstation might be for you. Personally I prefer buying old Thinkpads. They're cheap, fast enough, and their electricity consumption is decent.

ldargin 7y ago
Some of those computers can heat a room though...
- cm2187 7y ago
  You feel it in big, packed open spaces when they cut the a/c the week end. It may be freezing outside but the floors become really hot.
dagw 7y ago
I can't talk about power consumption, but I have a couple of old HP z420 and the loudest component in them was the old Quadro cards. Swap that out and the system is very quite.
- tecleandor 7y ago
  Quite quiet ;) :P
lrem 7y ago
In my experience Xeon workstations are no more noisy than personal computers. That's including my current Lenovo with can't-even-remember-how-many cores and just shy of 200GB RAM. I never felt a need to measure how much my employer pays for electricity.
- thrower123 7y ago
  I have a Xeon ThinkServer sitting here on my desk as I type this. It is considerably quieter than the laptop I sometimes use, under typical usage (Slack, VS Code, a couple other Electron apps, Outlook).
mongol 7y ago
I have an old Dell Xeon workstation, it is not loud at all.
- bluedino 7y ago
  The older ones definitely make noise from the fans when running at full tilt. The Precision 3630 on my desk will even make a bit of noise, it only has an i7-8700
phaedrus 7y ago
I built a dual-CPU E5- based workstation with 64 GB of DDR4, and kill-a-watt says it draws only 75W at idle.
- adrianN 7y ago
  A Macbook Pro lasts ten hours on a 80 Watthour Battery
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    Not if you're running Docker it doesn't.
    - adrianN 7y ago
      If you actually run stuff the Dual Xeon system won't be sitting at 75W either.
  - ggg2 7y ago
    > 10h disable lid sleep (well, disable sleep entirely on osx 10+ because apple don't want to give you the option to disable lid sleep only) and it will never pass 4h. the 6/8/10h some people claim is because they don't realize the computer is sleeping most of the time. I guess it is fine if it's just your facebook terminal...
behringer 7y ago
My dual cpu z600 running 12 cores (24 with HT) is virtually silent. The GPU is the loudest part and hardly audible. I keep it in my living room.
- radiowave 7y ago
  Same here. I believe the Z600 series was specifically designed to be quiet.
  - luxpir 7y ago
    BMW designed the case iirc.
    - behringer 7y ago
      It's a great design. My only desire for change really is that I had the z800 which is a bit bigger so I could hold more stuff :)
- luxpir 7y ago
  Ditto but with a passively cooled GTX1050ti and nvme drive it's a solid workstation.
yegle 7y ago
I'm actually using the HP Z420 (the one mentioned in the article) at work. Pretty quiet IMO. Note the Z420 is a workstation not a server. Buying an old server is completely different.
noisy_boy 7y ago
Coincidentally I'm considering buying a used Thinkpad X220 for fun projects for me/kids because of the reliability, build quality and the awesome keyboard. The best quote I have received so far is about $145 for i5/8gb ram/no-drive (I already have a spare ssd). Hoping the machine is in a good condition :)
- vuln 7y ago
  Go for it. You will not regret it... I still have mine powered on and sits on my desk with an external plugged in. I suggest doing the FullHD mode if you're decent with a soldering iron. Here is a great resource for x220s. Enjoy! http://x220.mcdonnelltech.com/resources/ http://x220.mcdonnelltech.com/resources/
  - noisy_boy 7y ago
    I have never touched a soldering iron and quite wary of h/w tinkering - thanks for the link though. Even if I don't know how to work with h/w, I like to read about other people doing it.
- panpanna 7y ago
  Go for it, but you may need to change battery and the thermal paste
  - noisy_boy 7y ago
    Thats my fear too - not only the battery but even the thermal paste part. I have never tinkered with h/w and have a bit of phobia of breaking things. I'll probably end up paying someone to do it :(
- hotcrossbunny 7y ago
  If you do go for it look out for one with an original battery that may well fall into the battery recall that Lenovo has been running for years. A "dead" battery to the seller may represent a free replacement from Lenovo without any cycles it's clock.
iscrewyou 7y ago
What’s a good place to look for an old reliable thinkpad? Do you find them on Craigslist or eBay? I’d love to get an old one and stick an ssd in there for basic usage.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  I bought an i5 t460 (2-3 years old) for 300 on eBay. The keyboard was kinda nasty so I bought a replacement for 30 on Amazon.
- owenmarshall 7y ago
  I googled “used laptops” and found a company that resells off-lease computers. If you’re in a large(ish) city I’d expect you’d be able to find a similar company. I was able to pick up a x240 in great shape for $125, and test drive it in person before I paid.
bluedino 7y ago
Don't forget on most of the W-series you can stick 4 DIMMs in to get 32GB of memory.
jotm 7y ago
Yeah, no shit, a laptop uses less power. Look at ZBook, Precision workstations for the best performance for your dollar.
fmajid 7y ago
HP Z workstations are actually fairly quiet. It's one of the few computer lines that actually has published acoustic decibel ratings (19 dB for the low-end version, 34 dB for the high-end, see https://www.bluechipit.com.au/media/product_spec/Z420_WORKSTATION_1.pdf https://www.bluechipit.com.au/media/product_spec/Z420_WORKST...). My main objection to the Z4xx series is that the cases are so bulky. I prefer the Z2xx small form factor models, or even better the Z2 (fastest computer I own, but also one of the smallest). One of the big advantages of a Xeon is that it will use ECC memory, and thus be more reliable.
ratling 7y ago
Old Xeons have a niche use as perfect freenas hosts (it's cheap to get 8g+ ECC memory) as long as you're smart enough to shut them off when you aren't using them. I really want to get on the Thinkpad meme. I really do, I like my t500 I use for docker stuff. The problem is there are a lot of newer models that either have dogshit touchpads, dogshit screens, dogshit wifi cards, or (in the case of edges) all 3. Yeah you can replace a bunch of parts (except for the wifi which is bios locked) but at that point I'd be better off buying an Acer Aspire E15 or something else remotely modern. (Yes I know you can flash the bios to get around the bios lock. I also don't care. I shouldn't have to do this.)

skunkworker 7y ago

I would add another negative to the list from personal experience. About a year ago I built a used server dual Xeon home server with e5-2680v2s. Now the pass mark scores per chip are about 15,000 but the power draw overall can get quite high. If you’re in an area with more expensive kwh I would recommend looking into something like a threadripper or a more efficient and newer cpu.

archi42 7y ago
That depends on where you put it and how much uptime the machine sees. My cold storage NAS draws 70W idle, but its up time is at most a few hours per week - and I essentially got it for free. Since the 12 disk file server case sits in the basement it doesn't bother anyone with the turbines running. I thought about going dual Xeon for my desktop, but found that I don't often need that much power (at home) to warrant excessive power draw you mention.
cm2187 7y ago
If it's a home server doing not much most of the time, an intel skull/hade canyon can be a good choice. It can be really powerful when it needs to be, is effectively a laptop cpu the rest of the time, so not drawing much power. The only inconvenience is that it has no ipmi and it becomes really loud under heavy load. Also you can sort of get 10gbe through a thunderbolt adapter but I ran into some compatibility issues with hyper-v.

chapium 7y ago

It may feel a bit anachronistic at times, but learning terminal based apps is a good way to beat the cycle of upgrades. Many tasks are not all that complex, and they don't need recent hardware to perform well.

robohoe 7y ago

Yeah, that's a no from me. Who would want another massive heat-generative, power-hungry desktop/server humming along in their home office as their main workstation? Now if I were to build a home lab, heck yeah I would jump on board. A couple of those systems would make a real nice private cloud.

obenn 7y ago
> A couple of those systems would make a real nice private cloud. +1. I host an R710, R410 and 2 R610s in my basement and its a lovely cluster. I would never have them on any other floor.

ken 7y ago

Every comment here so far is about power consumption, which is mentioned in the article: > And there are also considerations here from the perspective of power consumption. A big box that’s always plugged in will inevitably use more power than a tiny laptop, even if the big box can do a lot more. [...] > But if you can make the case for it, it might be worth your time. In my case, I was looking to have more of a desktop experience for times when I wanted slightly more horsepower than a laptop, and I also wanted a machine that could do virtualization when needed or desired.

thinkingemote 7y ago
Why do the machines use so much power?
- magduf 7y ago
  Back in those days, Intel simply did not care one iota about power consumption. The P4 processors were absolute power hogs, and all Intel did was brag about how great their memory bandwidth to the RAMBUS memory was.
  - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
    The last Pentium 4 was released in 2008; the Xeon E5-2667 v2 parts discussed in the article were released in 2013, years after Intel abandoned their Netburst approach.
    - mixmastamyk 7y ago
      Xeons are usually a generation behind on process and sometimes other technology as well.
      - ericd 7y ago
        Be that as it may, that Xeon is post Nehalem, it’s not at all related to Netburst. Netburst was an evolutionary dead end.

mbell 7y ago

Meh, these old systems can be fun to tinker with but are _slow_. E5-2667v2 vs i9-9900k the i9 is 60% faster single core, 44% faster multi-core (both are 8c16t). At lot of use cases, including the majority of development work for most people, is still dominated by single core performance so you're giving up a lot performance to save a couple bucks. The power draw on these server/workstation systems will likely also suck which will offset some of the $ savings.

dis-sys 7y ago
my oldest Xeon workstation is a dual E5-2696v2 with 128G ECC RAM. it has a total of 24 cores. Compared to that, I am pretty sure most i9-9900k setups are just for kids. ;) the cost of the above xeon system (dual cpu + mb + RAM) is slightly more expensive than i9-9900k itself, but much cheaper than a i9-9900k + motherboard + RAM.
- lunchables 7y ago
  I assume that is massively slower for single threaded or very lightly threaded tasks than a 9900K.
- mbell 7y ago
  > Compared to that, I am pretty sure most i9-9900k setups are just for kids. ;) Your machine is slower than a macbook air for most of my workloads about half the speed of my desktop so I wouldn't be so confident.
  - noir_lord 7y ago
    Update to Right link: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Xeon-E5-2696-v2-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-2700X/m282394vs3958 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Xeon-E5-2696-v2-... I was curious how my home PC stacked against it.
    - dis-sys 7y ago
      so you silently replaced E5-2696v2 with E5-2690v2 and then took one CPU out of the machine before doing the comparison?

dis-sys 7y ago

old Xeon are not all E6-2680v2 kind of junk, you can buy a pair of used Xeon Platinum 8175M + a decent brand new dual socket motherboard for less than $2,500 USD.

milesdyson_phd 7y ago

Oh hey, I have an old z420 that I picked up off of ebay that I use as a hypervisor. It had running for a few years and worked great for what I was using it for. I replaced it earlier this year with a mini-itx ryzen based system, because I didn't want the tower in my office anymore.

Someone1234 7y ago
How is the heat management in your Mini-ITX Ryzen system? I've read that Ryzen can generate a good amount of heat. I'd worry that Mini-ITX due to the formfactor may struggle more.
- jcastro 7y ago
  Works fine with the stock heatsink ootb, even with a mild overclock. They even have smaller than ITX systems now, though not quite as small as a NUC: https://www.asrock.com/nettop/ https://www.asrock.com/nettop/ I have one of these and it runs great.
- vel0city 7y ago
  I run a Ryzen 5 2600 in a Cooler Master 130 case with the stock cooler. I run it with stock settings and frequencies (XMP enabled). I do not encounter any thermal throttling in normal usage, including long gaming sessions. That said, the 2600 is a 65W chip while the 2700X is rated at 105W. Maybe I would run into more thermal constraints if I used the 105W part, but so far the 2600 has had plenty of performance to meet my needs of a semi-portable gaming/development machine.
- milesdyson_phd 7y ago
  So far no heat issues with the stock heat sink (2600).

hambursa 7y ago

Used to run an older Xeon system I picked for free as home server/workstation. Now you can pick up 8c16t Ryzens pretty cheap and they even support ECC on cheap consumer motherboards, so unless you get used Xeon for literally next to nothing, you may want to consider other alternatives. There's also the fact that recently more and more vulnerabilities have been discovered in Intel products, which makes Xeon much less attractive platform.

PascLeRasc 7y ago

I've been doing this for years, "upgrading" every 6 months when I find a new machine being thrown away. In the past year I did this with a 2006 Mac Pro and a 2013 System76 desktop. Both of these machines were a delight to work on - I was able to get 16gb of DDR2 ECC RAM and 2 quad-core Xeons for the Mac Pro for around $28 total on ebay. The Mac Pro could be flashed up to a 2007 model and ran El Capitan perfectly with a cheap no-name SSD off Amazon. It took a GTX 760 with some odd power adapters and it was a fantastic machine to do audio editing and playing with tensorflow-gpu on. The System76 machine was a little more modern, with a Haswell i7, and after a new aftermarket cooler, fresh thermal paste, and another no-name SSD it ran Manjaro silently, even with Bazel putting it under some serious load. I'm moving soon, so I sold both machines for around $350 each. It's a fun challenge, since usually these computers don't see modifications or have as good documentation as enthusiast PC parts, so you'll find a tiny community in some obscure forum sharing supported CPU upgrades, how to change out the cooler, stuff like that. Highly recommend it.

ahelwer 7y ago

I was given an HP Z230 workstation when I started at Microsoft five years ago and haven't upgraded since then, despite being well beyond eligible for a hardware refresh. It has 32 GB of RAM and an (edit) 4-core 8-thread i7-4770, plus an OS SSD with several data HDDs (integrated graphics, but meh). CPU performance has been basically stagnant for the past half-decade. Even on my home PC (purchased around the same time) the only thing I've changed is the graphics card - and that was to sell it for a less-powerful one, then buy back the original card years later for cheap! Maybe if you want to play games on the cutting edge of VR then constant upgrades are necessary, but five-year-old desktop hardware should be fine for nearly anyone.

officialchicken 7y ago
Minor detail: the entire i7-4770xx line of products are 4-core, 8-threads CPUs[0] [0] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/search.html?_charset_=UTF-8&q=i7-4770 https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/search.html?_cha...
gruez 7y ago
>CPU performance has been basically stagnant for the past half-decade what? comparing an i7-4770 to an i7-8700 (current gen, similar launch price), the latter is 25%-86% faster, depending on your workloads. https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-8700-vs-Intel-Core-i7-4770/3940vs1978 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-8700-vs-...
- eropple 7y ago
  The i7-8700 is heckin' fast, but if you look at it over time, the rate of improvement has slowed down quite a bit. The 4770 is six years old. The Core 2 Duo E6600 is its price-comparable equivalent from six years before that. An E6600 has a PassMark score of 1553. An i7-4770 has a PassMark score of 9780. An i7-8700 has a score of 15155. And we shouldn't miss that that's way faster! But the slope of that curve is a lot shallower than it has been historically, and a 2x improvement probably doesn't move the needle in the way that a 6x improvement does. We're spoiled, in that we can say such an improvement no longer moves the needle. But it also means that hardware stays viable for much, much longer.

dade_ 7y ago

If the noise factor isn't a concern. For me it is, so I'll stick to Intel NUCs (until a good AMD alternative comes along).

simlevesque 7y ago
I have a Dell Xeon with passive cooling, no sound.
Theodores 7y ago
Join the club - and you can get refurbished NUCs. Mine is running silently right now and I reckon it is using a quarter of the 65W power available to it. The HP Z220 has a 400W power supply and I reckon it is probably using 200W right now. Silence is priceless. But, what if you can't afford silence? If the Z220 can be found in a skip then it comes for free. If you keep it for three years then it eats that much electricity (assuming daily usage) that it costs as much as a NUC. There are a lot of variables here, but I think that the Intel NUC option is just as good value as the Z220 if electricity is factored in and the Z220 is assumed to be free. It all comes down to whether you want to pay up front and save money on the electricity bills or have no up-front costs and pay extra electricity bills over time. In three years time, what would you prefer? I think the Z220 would be hard to rehome. The Intel NUC? I think it would make a nice set top box or hand-me-down for many people. If there were no takers and it had to be eBayed then the postage would be affordable to the buyer. I am not so sure the same could be said for the Z220. There is one final benefit to the NUC - a cleaner conscience when leaving it on. You know that you are not being overly greedy with one's carbon footprint.

Yizahi 7y ago

This will work if you are located in big western city. He bought his Z420 for 50$, and when I check ebay right now they are going for 150-300$ + 100-200$ shipping. And that with E5-1603 CPU, not the E5-2667 or similar. Lets say I have 5 year old AMD FX-8350 due to upgrade this year. That Xeon is actually slower, looking at some basic benchmarks (of course it may be faster in some, but I don't have time for detailed investigation). So ~300$ total for a sidegrade? And that not including hassle with shipping, maybe dealing with scammer seller from ebay, then import tax 30% (and who knows how base price will be calculated at customs). Etc. etc. Not worth it. I'm not saying that upgrading for cheap is bad of course, but getting stuff like described in the article is borderline lottery win in most of the countries. You can't depend on it or plan in advance.

fishtacos 7y ago
That Xeon is faster, not slower than your Bulldozer chip. Passmark for the E5-2667: Multithreaded: 10372 Single threaded 1609 Passmark for the FX-8350: Multithreaded 8951 Single threaded: 1510
- Yizahi 7y ago
  I was comparing E5-1603 vs FX-8350. That was for ~300$ (of course including case, psu, gpu and memory).

pschmot 7y ago

The Xeon workstations I have and can easily access, are all 32bit What good will one let alone several 32bit machines will do for me now a days. I can use Ubuntu, or chain them, but how would you do anything with virtualization and advanced computing.?

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
Completely depends on your use-case. Writing/building/running Java, JS, Python, or anything else architecture-independent? Data processing? You're set. Building release binaries for a native-code application? Yeah, no. But it totally depends what you're doing.
p_l 7y ago
That's...interestingly old HW. As in I'd expect it to be more expensive than newer 64 but stuff

robbyt 7y ago

Old xeons are hot, and power hungry. My monthly electric bill decreased by nearly $10 after replacing my 2010 MacPro with a 2018 MacMini.

howard941 7y ago
That's cool that you can tell. $10 is 2% of my monthly electric bill. Do you turn your machine off or let it go into deep sleep? I tend to leave the stuff on all the time to minimize heating/cooling cycle stress . It's probably led to some premuturely dried out electrolytics (and maybe a little bit more on the electric bill) but I stopped losing spinning media and the only things that are failing in the old (>10 year) old boxes I have up are the fans. EDIT - FWIW my home office daily drive are dual 6 core Xeon 3104s at 1.7ghz from the Dell refurb site. Although it's my desktop system I also do a lot of parallel stuff on it
- jdietrich 7y ago
  >$10 is 2% of my monthly electric bill You spend $6000 a year on electricity? Are you running an aluminium smelter in your back yard?
  - howard941 7y ago
    Man I wish - I'd get something in return for the wasted money. The neighborhood just feels like a big smelter.
  - InvaderFizz 7y ago
    Typical for a larger home in the south. Air Conditioning is not exactly optional when it's 95F and 85% humidity for half the year.
    - dublinben 7y ago
      With proper architecture [0], you can have a much more efficient house that requires little if any air conditioning. It'll look much nicer than the typical McMansion too.[1] [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214157X18304131 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214157X1... [1] https://www.buildnative.com/portfolio/peak-ridge/?portfolioCats=299 https://www.buildnative.com/portfolio/peak-ridge/?portfolioC...

whalesalad 7y ago

This stuff is fun to do but it’s not s magic bullet. The title would be better named “why your next home computer could be an old Xeon workstation” These older machines use way more power. Modern stuff is far more quiet and can do a lot more with less heat and sound. I have a dual Xeon 2U here at home w/ 48Gb Of Ram, redundant power supplies etc... it’s awesome. But it’s not even remotely close to being as performant as my new MacBook Pro.

Obsnold 7y ago

Perhaps someone here can give me a bit of advice. I've been undecided on whether to buy a refurbished workstation for a while now. I do a lot of aosp builds for some of my clients and on my current setup it can take 3 or 4 hours for a clean build. I've been looking at various builds on https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/ https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/ For about £1500 to £2000. If anyone has any experience or advice it would be greatly appreciated.

lame88 7y ago
If you’re ok with a mobile workstation, i grabbed a refurbished P52 on ebay. They go up to xeon (6 core) and you can stuff a ton of ram in there. You can’t get one if these models without a quadro video card unfortunately so that does mark up the price, but it should be useful for running the emulator. And lastly an Nvme SSD - if you have all those it should work well, but i cant comment on the thermal longevity as to whether it might throttle during a long build as it’s been many years since ive done a AOSP build or anything that heavy. I got mine for 1800ish USD but i added some ram on top. It was definitely overkill for what I do, but I think it would suit your case well.
- Obsnold 7y ago
  Hmm I hadn't thought of a mobile workstation I'll give them a look. I used to have a Dell mobile workstation in one of my previous jobs which put me off them a bit because it weighed a ton and was a pain to carry around but the p52 looks quite interesting.
KaiserPro 7y ago
My favourite setup is an HPz620 v2 with e5-xxxxv2 CPUs, and >= 64 gigs of ram. Basically any workstation with 2 Intel Xeon E5-2650 V2, or the L variant (lower power) will do. for example: 1 x HP Z620 Grade A - 800W - V2 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2650 V2 - 8-Core 2.60Ghz (20MB Cache, 8.00GTs, 95W) 1 x HP Z420, Z620 - Heatsink 1 x HP Z620 2nd CPU Riser Board, Fan & Heatsink 8 x 8GB - DDR3L 1333MHz (PC3L-10600R, 2RX4, ECC REG) 1 x 2TB - SATA (7.2K, 3G) HDD - Major Brand You'll need a new graphics card and an SSD, but that is £750 inc vat. this means you can spend £500 on an nvidia RTX, and get a 6k monitor.

supernova87a 7y ago

What a useless article that just talks about intangible social reasons to buy something used. I would've expected some kind of cost analysis for how much compute power $500 buys you on a few years old workstation versus something new, and that you get more for your money used. Nothing.

dashesyan 7y ago

You're giving away my secrets! I've bought 3 of these types of HP workstations over the years, starting with a Z210 with a Xeon E3-1240. I added a graphics card to make it a super budget gaming PC. My most recent one is an HP Z420 workstation with 128GB of ECC memory, an 8-core Xeon, and Win10 Pro installed for $620 delivered. Benchmarks of the CPU show its comparable to a Ryzen 1700X in single and multi core, but I really bought it for the RAM. It's a great machine for homelab-type virtualization.

dev_dull 7y ago
Where do you buy them?
- dashesyan 7y ago
  NewEgg and eBay
behringer 7y ago
I'm still on the z600 after years and I love it. I just upgrade the GPU every few years. I have an extra PSU for it somewhere around here. This thing will outlive me I think.
izzydata 7y ago
Do these older CPUs have hardware level decoding for modern video formats such as AV1?
- chronogram 7y ago
  Does any modern chip have that yet then?
  - izzydata 7y ago
    Perhaps not. I might be thinking of VP9 if that is what YouTube has been using.

gravypod 7y ago

If a lot of HN users were interested it would be cool if someone could organize group-buys of these types of hardware. Usually buying old hardware (for super cheap) is limited by volume and most sellers aren't willing to ship something. If someone removed those pains and hand-picked "worth it" (for the home/small business server lab) items it would be something a few people might be interested in.

deadfece 7y ago

On a vastly more practical note, check out JDM_WAAAT's site https://www.serverbuilds.net/ https://www.serverbuilds.net/ . They're more piecemeal parts list, but he has a very reasoned approach to select parts that deliver value/performance at their price point, and are available at the selected price in sufficient quantities.

fnord77 7y ago

The power consumption of some of these old workstations is obscene. There's probably some optimal intersection between cost of the computer and the cost of power consumption. an older macbook pro (2012ish) gives 12,000 on the MT benchmark and only draws what, 85w? the author briefly touches on this, but unless you get free electricity, this is a bigger issue than presented.

hak8or 7y ago
Yes! I am shocked that almost no one seems to comment on power consumption for these units. Sure, they cost $200 while being just as fast as $700 machines, but they can easily pull $50 a month in power, assuming 25 cents per kwh. Not only is that a waste of money for power, it is horrible for the environment. These machines are obscenely inefficient power wise. It's likte folks who buy a r720 for $150 that comes with 32GB ECC ram and dual cpu's, but it pulls $75 per month in power. Even if you don't pay for electricity directly (you do in rent then), it's still terrible for the environment.
- cheerlessbog 7y ago
  And loud as well - servers aren't as optimized for noise as desktops are. I use ThinkPads from Ebay - I get the high end model from 4-5 years ago. Coming off lease they can be in great condition often loaded with RAM and just need an SSD. The build quality is great, and they're cheap.
  - LeonM 7y ago
    I looked into buying a server to harvest the CPU and RAM, then building a desktop machine using a regular cooling components to keep it quiet. I found the real problem of a re-purposing server is not the noise, but rather that the motherboards are completely unsuitable for desktop work. And buying a new workstation motherboard that would take the Xeon(s) and ECC ram would make the build more expensive than just buying a new desktop machine with consumer grade hardware.
    - 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

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aloer 7y ago

In late 2017 I built myself a threadripper based workstation for ~5000$ with a 1950x, 64gb ECC (can fit up to 128), a single 1080 ti, single NVMe drive and two 8tb HDDs. The system was designed to allow for more HDDs (case space and thermal capacity, 8 should fit easily), 4 GPUs and durable enough so that I can wrap it up and ship it around the world if needed (The whole thing weighs ~18kg with a single GPU. Whether shipping a PC is a good idea or not I have yet to find out) Threadripper was still 1000$ + motherboard for 300$. And RAM was at all time high with 750$ for 64gb ECC. Because of this price tag I considered getting a used xeon, but looking at the total I probably would have only saved less than 1000$, or 20%, perhaps 100-200$ more due to used RAM for a total of 24%. That percentage saving is much lower than expected. Other factors: The cpu mentioned in the article has 40 PCIe lanes vs. 60 in threadripper and I figured more lanes is better should I ever put in all 4 GPUs. This seems to more or less not matter though. Something learned since then. Better energy efficiency (newer processor and better PSU), more control over heat and noise (assumption, I have 6 quiet fans in there), more lanes (although near useless for GPUs apparently), more room for storage (8-12 drives possible), GPUs (4 possible) and simply all parts new with warranty for 20-24% more This is very use case specific of course and there might be better used systems available as well but I would probably do it again. The savings were less than I initially thought and that was at an all time high for RAM prices and the first generation of threadrippers, should be even less now. What I should have done differently is use it more often, but that's a different story. -> The expensive parts are storage, GPU and high quality case/PSU/fans. If you want to build your first workstation, storage and GPUs should be bought separately anyways. But if you don't need them or already have those from a different system, a used xeon sounds interesting. You still probably save less than expected though, over the years with less warranty, more power draw and more work necessary (which can be fun! not denying that) (Yes the linked article is about home computer, not workstation. This is a different scenario. I figured it's nonetheless relevant for some)

Johnny555 7y ago

I used to love upgrading my home desktop, I'd research specs, figure out the best price/performance and upgrade components regularly (motherboard, CPU, hard drive, etc). But now that most of my computer time is spent in a web browser (most of my coding is done at work so I rarely even run an IDE at home), I'm happy with my 5 year old laptop. I built a nice 8 core Xeon desktop about 4 years ago, but haven't powered it on at all in at least the past 2 years, I moved a year ago and haven't even taken it out of the box, it's still sitting beside the computer desk.

nurettin 7y ago

Power consumption and fan sounds on those things were insane.

cr0sh 7y ago

I've looked into this kind of thing in the past, but there was always something that made me shy away, despite the prices being relatively favorable. Most of the time, I think it was a worry of "if the power supply dies" - because usually, these workstations have a very proprietary PSU, which can sometimes be difficult to source, and when you find one, the price can be nothing short of insane. Then there was RAM - most of the time, you needed ECC RAM, and that stuff could be expensive if you wanted to push the system to its maximum config. Of course, this was years ago, maybe things have changed in the market? Last was the potential noise and heat factors. I once had a Core2Duo that I dropped in a 8800 GTX (or something like that) - and while the noise wasn't bothersome, the heat output was something else. But I do know what a server fan system sounds like, and I'd worry about a workstation having that same kind of jet-engine experience. So I never pulled the trigger, so to speak. Today, I've been almost going the direct opposite direction. I've got on my "list of things to repair/build" a TRS-80 Model 100 (portable), an old Toughbook C29 to refresh, and I'm contemplating building a custom "cyberdeck", using a variety of different parts and components (probably an ESP-32 coupled to an Arduino Nano, with the Nano acting as a keyboard interface, because the keyboard isn't off-the-shelf, it's from a toy computer, the ESP will probably drive some kind of GLCD, then custom firmware, etc for everything else - not really a practical system, but probably more fun).

user5994461 7y ago
+1 on the PSU. Having attempted to replace power supplies on both Dell and HP workstations, that's just not possible. It doesn't boot without a one from the manufacturer. Surprised that none of the comments mention it.
lichenwarp 7y ago
my hp z210 came with 8gb ecc mem, I had I believe it's ddr3 24gb was kind of upset that the hp site said max 16gb (that's not the case) the 24gb ddr3 worked anyway. (hopefully the ram issue helps someone else) yes the mobo died a few months after so that's a downside of used equipment, but the replacement mobo was $30 + an extra $30 in case it happened again. I put a 1050 ti pci-e powered for budget gaming since I'm not made of money, works well and can multitask like crazy. I believe my e3-1270v1 3.4ghz is comparable to my old i5-2500k without the oc capability

elagost 7y ago

The arguments about power consumption only apply to a specific set of old workstation CPUs. You can buy old hardware that isn't super inefficient. I bought an HP EliteDesk tower on the cheap ($150) last year that had a i7-4790 (an all-around great CPU) and is super quiet. With a lower-power GPU in it (nvidia 1030) it's even decent for light games or video decoding. I've not directly measured the power consumption, but it's not nearly the monster these old Xeons can be. The main point, from what I gather, is that you can buy older hardware that's just as powerful as something you'd buy today, but you get the benefit of better repairability, cheap replacement parts, and saving a bunch of plastic from the trash. I don't see the need for buying brand-new hardware when the old stuff works just fine. (My main machine is a 6-year-old Thinkpad)

w_s_l 7y ago

For one I would love to have an SGI workstation, I still have CG magazines from this era and its plastered everywhere in the ads, and I'm still amazed at the graphic output (so smooth) and what we had in the 90s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDxLa6P6exc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDxLa6P6exc I'd imagine something like this would've been used to make Crash Bandicoot and likes. It'd be really interesting to play games built on this thing.

galkk 7y ago

I bought once Supermicro workstation (dual Xeon 2680), and it was LOUD. Even when shut down, the fans were still making noise, so I've had a habit of turning it off from power to make it silent. While the idea looked appealing at the beginning (dual CPU, 64GB RAM, great cable management), at the end I've decided that it doesn't justify the cost and hassle. Plus sometimes there were very funny issues - for example to run Rocksmith you needed to manually set affinity on windows to run it on only one CPU. After upgrading to last gen Thinkpad extreme it feels that Thinkpad even does 4k rendering faster.

alkonaut 7y ago

We’re in a 5-10 year plateau where buying yesterday’s machines dorsn’t cost much performance, at least for CPUs. If you bought a 5 year old computer in 2011 you’d be buying last gen stuff. But in 2019 even the sandy bridge (2012) intel processors aren’t that bad. Obviously you are paying with power because you’ll buy a 2 or 4 way system to compensate, but if you use it just a few hours per day it’s a steal.

dillonmckay 7y ago

This article is a bit verbose, not very succinct. I was trying to find the actual specs on his purchase. Is it using ECC RAM?

glaurung_ 7y ago

My gaming desktop right now is actually an old Dell Precision tower with a third gen i7 that I got for $140 off eBay. I swapped out the PSU, upped the ram to 16gb, added an SSD I had laying around, and replaced the Quadro GPU with a 1060. In all it cost me about $350 and comfortably runs every game I own. Power draw isn't too much of a concern since it isn't used too often.

mrbill 7y ago

It's not just workstation hardware - I've recently bought a couple of Dell T410s off eBay for $125 each (shipped!). Quad-core Xeon E5620s, 4G RAM, 6-bay hotswap chassis, DVD-ROM, iDRAC 6 Enterprise, PERC 6i RAID card. Upgrades: $25 for 120G SSD (boot drive, goes in the empty second 5.25" bay), $27 for 16G RAM, $20ish for an E5670 6-core CPU, $35 for an LSI HBA in IT-mode (supports >2T drives), $10 for a set of SFF-8087 cables to go from the HBA to the existing hotswap backplane. 30-45 minutes to upgrade all the firmware for the DRAC, lifecycle controller, BIOS, etc. Grand total of around $250 for a really nice server with full remote management, and for the cost of another E5670 and a Dell heatsink I can upgrade to dual-CPU (12 cores/24 threads). They're so cheap that I've gotten two systems to upgrade as described, and this morning ordered a third (yet again $125) to have for spare parts. The eBay vendor emailed me and offered to sell me a pallet of 24 for $80 each, but I don't have that kind of need or money lying around... As for laptops, I tend to get refurb/off-lease Thinkpads from arrowdirect.com (coupon code ARROW gives 15% off), then max out the (cheap DDR3) RAM and throw a SSD in where the HD was. I've built up a T420s and an X230 like this for when I need a decent portable machine but don't want to take my expensive Macbook Pro somewhere. For the T420s I even got a $50 adapter board from a guy in China that let me put a FHD IPS screen in, instead of the 1440x900 TN LCD that it came with...

colechristensen 7y ago
Building my own home server I went a different route with the latest, fastest i3 processor (at the time i3-7350k, not i3-8350k) to prioritize lower power and single thread execution speed. E5670 holds up surprisingly well, similar total performance – 1/2 single thread execution speed 2x threads – in a similar power envelope for half the cost. The value in those used workstations is mostly in the case and that is hard to replicate in these days of style-driven (wtf?) computer hardware where everything has LEDs and is generally targeted to excite 12-year-olds.
magashna 7y ago
>pallet of 24 for $80 each at those prices I really do wonder about that cross section of recycling/dumping and inefficient power consumption

unixhero 7y ago

I do this. HP Z620 is a phenomenal workstation.

mNovak 7y ago

I like to do this with laptops -- you can get a few years old maxed out Dell Latitudes, Thinkpads etc on ebay for 80% off. These outperform a standard new $800 laptop easily, though obviously you pay in sleekness/weight (mine is 90% stationary so I don't much care).

keeptrying 7y ago

I dont know what it is but I love looking through junk to see if I can find something valuable. I rarely find anything useful but I just love going through junk of any sort. I'm guessing my ancestors were some sort of scavangers or something?? I've never understood why it gives me so much pleasure!

louwrentius 7y ago

For what it's worth: I keep my computers / servers off all the time. When I need them I use Wake-On-Lan to remotely turn them on when needed. Even my power hungry 71TB NAS is off 99% of the time and only turned on when needed. Saving me 150-200 Watt idle power usage. If you don't need your stuff to be on 24/7 you can buy older more power-hungry stuff as long as you turn it off when done.

meerita 7y ago

I always wanted to buy a SGI station, and use the old OS. I hope someday find one example that it's pristine.

heelix 7y ago

Funny story. Back in when my Bride and I lived in a single bedroom compartment, she looked at my small stack of computers and said "why don't you get one big one"? Later that month, I was shopping at the Lockheed Martin outlet/surplus store, and spied a lovely Sun 3/280 in a 8', 19" rackmount for $25. I could not resist, much to her dismay as the refrigerator sized chassis got home. The original hardware hosting a threadripper in the case of theseus.

cptnapalm 7y ago

The family machine is a 2009 Mac Pro with dual hex core processors, 48 gigs of RAM and 2 low watt video cards running Ubuntu. It does multiseat like a champ: one side was playing Hitman (2016) while the other was doing Tomb Raider (2013). I had been wanting to do multiseat for about a decade. In addition to using it remotely with ssh, I have guacamole on it, connecting to GDM so I can if I need to get to my desktop through a web browser. Total cost was about $600. I'm very much enjoying it.

yardie 7y ago

I don't find any of these workstations really interesting. They are all the same x86_64 architecture so just getting the latest and greatest puts you leagues ahead. I find the really old workstations to be way more interesting. You rarely see a MIPS, Sparc, PA-RISC anymore. Once the CPU wars were over (Intel won, btw) you could get old SGI supercomputers, DEC Alphas, Sun Sparcstations, and NeXT Turbo Cubes for almost nothing. My very first website was run from an Alpha workstation on NetBSD under my dorm room bed. They were power hungry, not state of the art, and sometimes quirky to use (Irix Motif comes to mind) but they were a blast.

s09dfhks 7y ago

Currently using a Dell r710 I got from a recycler for $75 as a freenas box It's not THAT loud and serves my needs pretty well. Came with a single 2.1gHz xenon and has room for a second

hermitdev 7y ago

Takes me back. I bought a used Dell workstation for a few hundred bucks. Was pretty bare, basically case, power supply and motherboard. At the time, it was the only motherboard I was aware of that supported dual socket CPUs and AGP graphics. Even though I bought it used, Dell support was willing to help me out debugging why it wouldn't boot (something to due with a mismatch between the CPU power control units - I think that's what they were called- with a dual P4 Xeon setup). For the workstation, it was pretty damned affordable for what I got. The kick in the jaw was that it took RDRAM. To put in 1.5 GB of RAM doubled the cost of the build, easily. Few years later when I was an FTE, and no longer in school, dropped a couple of grand USD to upgrade the RAM to 3 GB. That was circa 2005. Great workstation, but boy was that RDRAM expensive...

h9n 7y ago

Great article. It expresses ideas similar to Game & Watch and GameBoy creator Gunpei Yokoi's philosophy of Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology.[0] > Yokoi said, "The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply." > "Withered technology" in this context refers to a mature technology which is cheap and well understood. "Lateral thinking" refers to finding radical new ways of using such technology. When designing the GameBoy, Yokoi realised that the older, simpler Z80 processor would just as well serve the purpose of making fun handheld games as the more contemporary options would (and one might argue that the limitations of the machine forced game developers to be more creative than they might have otherwise). Likewise with the monochromatic display. The GameBoy was cheaper to manufacture and buy, more well-understood by developers, and crucially, much more power efficient than its several competitors. And it killed them. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_with_Withered_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_...

mandeepj 7y ago

Great idea. You can easily buy a Mac Pro quad-core (single or dual cpu) for anywhere between $300 to $900. It's going to work on par with today's expensive machines :-)