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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 po

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.
    - tracker1 7y ago
      Couldn't you just use the server MB in an (e)ATX case, and use a different heatsink/fan?
      - Elv13 7y ago
        Those motherboards have nothing to do with ATX. The rackmountable "blades" are 19" wide and ~24" long. They use redundant custom "jet engine" PSU with custom connectors. Even their PCI-E isn't standard. They are custom built for each generation of servers and mass produced. Even higher end workstations like the various HP "Z" series and Proliant are custom. (disclaimer: I have my (large, ~120 Units) homelab/self_employed_datacenter on ATX Rackmount 4U cases with watercooling. I am used to buying servers for the CPU and RAM as others do in this thread. I use consumer gears too, but they die young under full C++/C embedded CI jobs 24/7. I use 4U cases because of the unbearable noise of the blades)
        mceachen 7y ago
        Can I ask what you're doing with that home lab, what your electric bill is, and how loud your racks are?
        Elv13 7y ago
        > what your electric bill is, I am in Quebec, power is cheap to the point of this being irrelevant. Heating is also required a large part of the year (including until yesterday because the weather has been horrible so far this "summer"...). Plus, well, tax credit for business expenses make that "less than free". > and how loud your racks are? Watercooling and passive PSUs makes it silent. I hate noise. > Can I ask what you're doing with that home lab Beside all the usual services for a small business (phone, email, storage, backup, routing, etc), it is mostly an oVirt (RedHat Enterprise Virtualization) private cloud running Docker VMs used by the CI to compile C/C++, build embedded device firmware images and run tests. The extra horse power (and least power efficient) nodes are woken up use wake-up-on-lan and boot a template using PXE from the GlusterFS distributed NAS. They are shut down when the load goes down. Only the big 7U case with the double1 140mm watercooling fans is open all the time. It is the "head" of the cloud cluster (but in theory is configured to auto migrate in case of hardware failure to the dual 120mm 4U case, but honestly I never tried the automatic migration). Not very pretty, but good enough. https://imgur.com/a/hnlInSz https://imgur.com/a/hnlInSz (yes, there is some overlap between those 2 pictures because I moved some units between taking them, some units have been traded for others too).
  - StillBored 7y ago
    My 26 core lenovo/xeon workstation is quieter than my T450s. The former is exactly the same noise level 100% of the time regardless of idle or compiling code. My thinkpad spins its fans up to a nice hum when compiling code. Some rackmount server hardware is fairly quite these days too. Variable speed fan profiles and a cool room do wonders to keep the fan speeds fairly low. Probably the noisiest think in my rack at home these days is the Ethernet switch.
- izzydata 7y ago
  I bought a house a few years back and quickly realized that leaving my computers on 24/7 was terrible for my electricity bill. Now I feel bad for doing this while living with my parents all those years.
  - Redoubts 7y ago
    Heh, as a kid I always wondered about this. My parents hated if someone left the lights on, but my computer has a 600w power supply... how many bulbs is that!
    - cr0sh 7y ago
      Unless you were cranking everything to the max 24/7 (like maxing out your GPU while reading/writing to a database while doing a bunch of floating point calcs for something?), it probably idled at around 100 watts. Not great, but not something I'd worry about.
      - cbsks 7y ago
        Like running SETI@home? https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ I certainly had that running 24/7 when I was in high school.
        organsnyder 7y ago
        If it makes you feel better, those older machines probably didn't have much in the way of power management to throttle back at idle.
        dillonmckay 7y ago
        What? Mine has a ‘Turbo’ button!
    - LeonM 7y ago
      That 600W is the maximum power it can supply. You'll only come close to this figure when the PC is under full load (like gaming). But while idle, a (modern) PC draws about 30-50 watts.
- ramraj07 7y ago
  How about you buy these machines and only run them in the winter? Heck, mine coins if you want! It's just going to heat the house!
  - frosted-flakes 7y ago
    Because if you normally heat your house through cheaper means (wood, natural gas, etc.) like most Americans, then it's still going to add a lot to your power bill.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - dylan604 7y ago
      But in the US, the time of year for heating your house with wood,natural gas, etc is the cheapest time for electricity.
      - frosted-flakes 7y ago
        Do electricity prices vary throughout the year? I don't remember that being the case when I lived in the US, and it's not the case in Ontario. We have time-of-use pricing that swaps the mid-peak and on-peak rates, but that doesn't affect the total charge very much.
        dylan604 7y ago
        Utility companies offer a product of supply and demand. During the middle of the day in the summer in Texas, demand is at its peak as everyone runs their A/C full tilt. That's the most expensive unit of electricity, so the pricing reflects that. Everyone knows that you don't run your laundry/dishes during that time. Winter time, most places are heating with gas, so electricity demand is just never as high so the prices are cheaper. Yes, some pricing options claim they are giving "free nights and weekends", or avg billing that "lowers" the summer rates while "raising" the winter months to keep it on average the same per month. That doesn't actually change the rate per KWh at the time. It's like buying car with the squeezing the balloon analogy, squeeze the price on one end the numbers bulge somewhere else.
- tjoff 7y ago
  It costs a lot yes, but bad for the environment? How much energy and pollution goes into producing new hardware? Not so sure buying new is at all better for the environment. That and that we have even more obsolete hardware to take care of in the future.
  - TaylorAlexander 7y ago
    I suppose the question is old desktop, old laptop, or old server. Depends on your compute needs.
  - gowld 7y ago
    In a competitive industry, dollar price is a good approximation of energy usage, which is an approximation of pollution.
    - micheljansen 7y ago
      Too bad pollution is externalized to future generations or foreign countries, so not included in the economic equation.
      - the_jeremy 7y ago
        OP is saying that there is pollution for both options, and the total cost of that pollution is proportional to the total cost of ownership of the product. He doesn't provide evidence, but it seems at least plausible.
        mikepurvis 7y ago
        A lot of it depends what's happening to that Xeon machine if you don't buy it. If it's otherwise going to the landfill then you using it a little longer to defer the creation of brand new hardware is absolutely the greener option. Same logic that applies to driving an older car— it may not be the most efficient, but especially if you're low usage, extending the life of something that already exists is almost certainly greener than using something new.
- runjake 7y ago
  While I agree with the premise, you're exaggerating far too much. If an R720 pulls anywhere near $75 a month [1], you got some sort of major problem. In reality, these things pulls closet to anywhere from 120 to 180 watts on the higher end. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/7r90l8/average_power_watt_consumption_on_a_dell_r710_2x/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/7r90l8/average_pow...
  - Retric 7y ago
    He said dual CPU’s using the worst case of 27.5 cents per kWH in Hawaii. 2 * .18 * 0.275 * 24 * 30.4 (days per month) = 72$ per month + whatever the rest of the machine uses. Though few people’s electric prices are that high, and it’s rare to sit at 100% CPU 24/7.
    - Leftb 7y ago
      > Though few people’s electric prices are that high, and it’s rare to sit at 100% CPU 24/7. While I agree a rate similar to that isn't all that uncommon in for instance Europe, from that perspective it's a relevant calculation. On the other hand the prices of old hardware tend to very between markets as well so that would still impact the break even point.
    - nisa 7y ago
      It's more like 25€/month for our R720 at work (with 128gb ddr3 memory and dual xeon e5-2690v1) - if you run with powersave governor in Linux and enable lower C-states in BIOS. I'm not joking the included iDrac7 reliable shows 110-130W. How course if you number crunching at 100% cpu are you more like using 300W.
- rarecoil 7y ago
  Power consumption is somewhat irrelevant if you live in a place where there is hydro or solar power - eWaste recycling is a huge environmental problem [1], and manufacturing has its own environmental footprint [2]. Buying used hardware is great, but really we should also be probably optimizing for performance-per-watt even with older hardware. IMO the real issue is that most people just don't need more grunt than a 5-year-old machine is giving them at this point. What they really need is a solid state disk in the old hardware, and for Office and Chromium you'd never notice a difference. I still use a SATA SSD daily and while I've had NVMe in my work-supplied machines, for 99% of my workload it's just not even necessary. [1] https://eridirect.com/blog/2015/06/how-does-e-waste-affect-the-environment/ https://eridirect.com/blog/2015/06/how-does-e-waste-affect-t... [2] http://www.electronicstakeback.com/toxics-in-electronics/wheres-the-harm-component/ http://www.electronicstakeback.com/toxics-in-electronics/whe...
- dillonmckay 7y ago
  What if the electricity is generated via hydroelectric or solar?
- pnutjam 7y ago
  I ran a core2 duo for years as a server, it was more efficient then any of the newer stuff I could find. I just upgrade to an I7, which costs more energy annually. Granted it's faster and maybe less likely to break. http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-Duo-E8400-vs-Intel-Core-i7-6500U http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-Duo-E8400-vs-Intel-Core-...
  - dgacmu 7y ago
    It's probably also more energy-proportional. newer CPUs and hardware in general do a much better job of scaling power use with demand. so if you're not running flat out 24x7, you're probably using less power in practice, even though your max may be higher now.
    - pnutjam 7y ago
      Good point, it certainly seems to run cooler.
- JaimeThompson 7y ago
  I have multiple r720's that idle at between 130 and 155 watts according to iDRAC. The system has 8+ SSDs, 10 gig fiber, infiniband, and 160GB of RAM. Under load it goes up but typically it uses less than 200 watts.
- albandread 7y ago
  And heat; I have some computers I just don't run for the hot three months of the year; and I live in a temperate climate. In the winter though; they are nice room warmers.
- icedchai 7y ago
  You are probably seriously over estimating the actual power requirements. I have several servers running, some are 5+ year old Xeon towers, and they aren't costing anywhere near that.
dev_dull 7y ago
It really depends. My home server uses about 120w idle (older series i7 with many disks). It comes out to about $25 a month in electricity. That’s enough to where you should make sure it’s worth it, and ask yourself if you’re better off with a higher end NUC or even raspberry pi, which use orders of magnitude less power. (We have solar so I don’t really worry about the power consumption anymore)
- chronogram 7y ago
  Wow what a difference! My laptop shows about 2-3 watt idle (brightness low of course). What a huge difference in power consumption over the years. Do you think that’s mostly the hard disks using the power?
- Max_aaa 7y ago
  My home server is basically my old laptop. It is a Dell Latitude e6540, just sips power when not under heavy load. with a 4 core i7 and 16 GB of ram, it is more than enough for home use. for storage, it has a m.2 SATA ssd for the root partition. And 2x 2tb hard drives that are raided with zfs for the home and network share folders.
Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
I agree, one of the reasons to even upgrade personal computers is to take advantage of the power efficiency. Also must do for anyone who is planet conscious. Perhaps if the person who buys these old enterprise server workstations also has renewable power source, then it would seem to be an over all win.
FerretFred 7y ago
Yes, and it can be a double-edged sword. My home office isn't heated (long story), so if I want some cheap heat in winter I'll fire up the old server and just batch convert some video. That's a pretty efficient room heater for 300 watts of power! Conversely I never convert video in summer...
- rutierut 7y ago
  It's funny how there is nothing really wrong with this. Maybe you could put it to work doing some valuable tasks, like protein folding etc? That'd be really cool!
  - MrMember 7y ago
    In the winter I let my PC search for Mersenne Primes when I'm not using it.
- vostrocity 7y ago
  I remember seeing a few years ago a startup that made a panel heater that was really a computer that would mine Bitcoin or something.
- ZeroFries 7y ago
  Do you know how it would compare to something like a space-heater in terms of something like $ per degree heated per cubic meter?
  - dboreham 7y ago
    Um, exactly the same? (By thermodynamics)
varelse 7y ago
In a desperate attempt to get me to take Xeon Phi seriously, Intel once sent me a free Xeon Phi server. I still have the thing, but because the boards were passively cooled, the server fans sounded like an F-14 (edited) trying to take off from an aircract carrier when I booted the thing up. I ended up extracting the Xeon Phis and using them in consumer cases with a much quieter fan blowing on them. It also weighs a ton, but I digress...
- myrandomcomment 7y ago
  To be pedantic a F-15 is an Air Force plane and not designed for a carrier. A F-14 is what you are looking for (think Top Gun).
  - varelse 7y ago
    Noted, edited... Time to buzz the server tower?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - dpe82 7y ago
    To be more pedantic, he said "trying to take off". I think an F-15 pilot who somehow found himself on a carrier deck and had to (try to) take off wouldn't hold anything back in the power/noise department. :)
    - myrandomcomment 7y ago
      In the case of being extra extra pedantic, how did the F-15 without arresting gear get on the carrier in the first place? Okay, enough fun.
      - lloeki 7y ago
        Theoretically it could be carried by an aerial crane heli, like a Mil V-12 (20-25T), an empty F15 being in the 15T range.
LeSaucy 7y ago
Also consider that many xeon workstation/server boards have limited sleep state support. Any newer i3/i5/i7 will enter S5 sleep and barely sip 1w, with instant on wake. The time you save sitting waiting for the machine to start up (workstation/server boards are also insanely slow to post) will be worth the investment in a newer setup.
- KaiserPro 7y ago
  both HP and dell workstations fully support S5.
blinkingled 7y ago
A few things in their defense though - newer workstations like z230 from HP generate much less heat noise and have lower power consumption. They are not $200 cheap but they cost a lot less than a loaded MBP for sure - even more so when bought refurbished or on eBay. These workstations can be put in sleep mode with Windows or Linux and they wake up pretty quick - saves you lot of power consumption by not needing to keep it always on. Wake on LAN is your friend. Next everything is easily replaceable which is great for the environment as these have much longer lifespans than a glued-in laptop. Lastly the performance is just much better than a thermally constrained laptop.
- fabioborellini 7y ago
  Yeah. There are workstations and workstations. Why would the original poster's single Haswell- or Skylake-based Core i7 CPU in his workstation waste more energy than a single Skylake-based Core i7 CPU on a new gaming machine? Also, his storage and GPU seemed quite modest, so I don't think his HP is more wasteful than a new gaming PC. Of course, 28 cores and eight spinning hard drives is a different story.
teh_klev 7y ago
> The power consumption of some of these old workstations is obscene Absolutely this. I work from home and for around six years ran a company provided refurbished Dell Precision (a T5400 I think) workstation with dual Xeon CPU's, SAS Disks etc - this was around 2008. I think when purchased new this machine cost around GBP3K, we got it for around GBP1K. The thing was switched on for around ten to twelve hours a day and the power consumption was (I eventually realised) eyewatering. The machine fortunately developed a fatal motherboard fault and I replaced it with a self build Core i5-4690K machine with SSDs and a modern graphics card. My electric bill halved and I got a way more powerful and energy efficient machine. It was quite a revelation. These old machines may seem like bargains, but energy-wise they're just not economical to run (especially at UK domestic energy prices).
runjake 7y ago
Reddit people with Kill-a-watt units indicate loads well below 200 watts for these workstations. Heck, beasty Dell R710 2U servers appear to pull (in some cases, well) below 200 watts [1]. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/7r90l8/average_power_watt_consumption_on_a_dell_r710_2x/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/7r90l8/average_pow...
ChuckMcM 7y ago
Pretty much. I had to stop running my VAXen 24/7 because they use a lot of power and my lab would get too warm. That said I have picked up "junk" computers with my neighbors kids, got the running and installed by with different operating systems. Fun stuff and you don't worry about breaking it.
jotm 7y ago
Why is everyone here focused on the desktop workstations? I switched to laptops over a decade ago. Used 3-5 year old Zbooks are 1/10th of their original price, and still perform flawlessly (mind-blowing fact: Haswells can keep up with Skylakes, and even beat them with some overclocking+undervolting).
xiii1408 7y ago
Yes, this 100%. It was fun (and kind of hilarious) to have an old Dell PowerEdge Server in your dorm room back in college, when power was free. (And, in my case, mostly generated by dams, so not that bad for the environment.) Keeping one in your house would be ridiculous and loud, though. Mine actually required two power cables! I ended up pawning it off to a friend for $20, who pawned it off to one of his friends for $20, and so forth. I wonder where it is now.
- dymk 7y ago
  Mine went to Goodwill after I graduated from my university. It was a beast in terms of how loud it was. I was able to strike a deal with IT - they'd give me 2U of rack space in the Uni's datacenter and some subdomains in the Uni's .edu. In return, they got a forever grateful undergrad with too much time on his hands.

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.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    Couldn't you just use the server MB in an (e)ATX case, and use a different heatsink/fan?
    - Elv13 7y ago
      Those motherboards have nothing to do with ATX. The rackmountable "blades" are 19" wide and ~24" long. They use redundant custom "jet engine" PSU with custom connectors. Even their PCI-E isn't standard. They are custom built for each generation of servers and mass produced. Even higher end workstations like the various HP "Z" series and Proliant are custom. (disclaimer: I have my (large, ~120 Units) homelab/self_employed_datacenter on ATX Rackmount 4U cases with watercooling. I am used to buying servers for the CPU and RAM as others do in this thread. I use consumer gears too, but they die young under full C++/C embedded CI jobs 24/7. I use 4U cases because of the unbearable noise of the blades)
      - mceachen 7y ago
        Can I ask what you're doing with that home lab, what your electric bill is, and how loud your racks are?
        Elv13 7y ago
        > what your electric bill is, I am in Quebec, power is cheap to the point of this being irrelevant. Heating is also required a large part of the year (including until yesterday because the weather has been horrible so far this "summer"...). Plus, well, tax credit for business expenses make that "less than free". > and how loud your racks are? Watercooling and passive PSUs makes it silent. I hate noise. > Can I ask what you're doing with that home lab Beside all the usual services for a small business (phone, email, storage, backup, routing, etc), it is mostly an oVirt (RedHat Enterprise Virtualization) private cloud running Docker VMs used by the CI to compile C/C++, build embedded device firmware images and run tests. The extra horse power (and least power efficient) nodes are woken up use wake-up-on-lan and boot a template using PXE from the GlusterFS distributed NAS. They are shut down when the load goes down. Only the big 7U case with the double1 140mm watercooling fans is open all the time. It is the "head" of the cloud cluster (but in theory is configured to auto migrate in case of hardware failure to the dual 120mm 4U case, but honestly I never tried the automatic migration). Not very pretty, but good enough. https://imgur.com/a/hnlInSz https://imgur.com/a/hnlInSz (yes, there is some overlap between those 2 pictures because I moved some units between taking them, some units have been traded for others too).
- StillBored 7y ago
  My 26 core lenovo/xeon workstation is quieter than my T450s. The former is exactly the same noise level 100% of the time regardless of idle or compiling code. My thinkpad spins its fans up to a nice hum when compiling code. Some rackmount server hardware is fairly quite these days too. Variable speed fan profiles and a cool room do wonders to keep the fan speeds fairly low. Probably the noisiest think in my rack at home these days is the Ethernet switch.
izzydata 7y ago
I bought a house a few years back and quickly realized that leaving my computers on 24/7 was terrible for my electricity bill. Now I feel bad for doing this while living with my parents all those years.
- Redoubts 7y ago
  Heh, as a kid I always wondered about this. My parents hated if someone left the lights on, but my computer has a 600w power supply... how many bulbs is that!
  - cr0sh 7y ago
    Unless you were cranking everything to the max 24/7 (like maxing out your GPU while reading/writing to a database while doing a bunch of floating point calcs for something?), it probably idled at around 100 watts. Not great, but not something I'd worry about.
    - cbsks 7y ago
      Like running SETI@home? https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ I certainly had that running 24/7 when I was in high school.
      - organsnyder 7y ago
        If it makes you feel better, those older machines probably didn't have much in the way of power management to throttle back at idle.
        dillonmckay 7y ago
        What? Mine has a ‘Turbo’ button!
  - LeonM 7y ago
    That 600W is the maximum power it can supply. You'll only come close to this figure when the PC is under full load (like gaming). But while idle, a (modern) PC draws about 30-50 watts.
ramraj07 7y ago
How about you buy these machines and only run them in the winter? Heck, mine coins if you want! It's just going to heat the house!
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  Because if you normally heat your house through cheaper means (wood, natural gas, etc.) like most Americans, then it's still going to add a lot to your power bill.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dylan604 7y ago
    But in the US, the time of year for heating your house with wood,natural gas, etc is the cheapest time for electricity.
    - frosted-flakes 7y ago
      Do electricity prices vary throughout the year? I don't remember that being the case when I lived in the US, and it's not the case in Ontario. We have time-of-use pricing that swaps the mid-peak and on-peak rates, but that doesn't affect the total charge very much.
      - dylan604 7y ago
        Utility companies offer a product of supply and demand. During the middle of the day in the summer in Texas, demand is at its peak as everyone runs their A/C full tilt. That's the most expensive unit of electricity, so the pricing reflects that. Everyone knows that you don't run your laundry/dishes during that time. Winter time, most places are heating with gas, so electricity demand is just never as high so the prices are cheaper. Yes, some pricing options claim they are giving "free nights and weekends", or avg billing that "lowers" the summer rates while "raising" the winter months to keep it on average the same per month. That doesn't actually change the rate per KWh at the time. It's like buying car with the squeezing the balloon analogy, squeeze the price on one end the numbers bulge somewhere else.
tjoff 7y ago
It costs a lot yes, but bad for the environment? How much energy and pollution goes into producing new hardware? Not so sure buying new is at all better for the environment. That and that we have even more obsolete hardware to take care of in the future.
- TaylorAlexander 7y ago
  I suppose the question is old desktop, old laptop, or old server. Depends on your compute needs.
- gowld 7y ago
  In a competitive industry, dollar price is a good approximation of energy usage, which is an approximation of pollution.
  - micheljansen 7y ago
    Too bad pollution is externalized to future generations or foreign countries, so not included in the economic equation.
    - the_jeremy 7y ago
      OP is saying that there is pollution for both options, and the total cost of that pollution is proportional to the total cost of ownership of the product. He doesn't provide evidence, but it seems at least plausible.
      - mikepurvis 7y ago
        A lot of it depends what's happening to that Xeon machine if you don't buy it. If it's otherwise going to the landfill then you using it a little longer to defer the creation of brand new hardware is absolutely the greener option. Same logic that applies to driving an older car— it may not be the most efficient, but especially if you're low usage, extending the life of something that already exists is almost certainly greener than using something new.
runjake 7y ago
While I agree with the premise, you're exaggerating far too much. If an R720 pulls anywhere near $75 a month [1], you got some sort of major problem. In reality, these things pulls closet to anywhere from 120 to 180 watts on the higher end. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/7r90l8/average_power_watt_consumption_on_a_dell_r710_2x/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/7r90l8/average_pow...
- Retric 7y ago
  He said dual CPU’s using the worst case of 27.5 cents per kWH in Hawaii. 2 * .18 * 0.275 * 24 * 30.4 (days per month) = 72$ per month + whatever the rest of the machine uses. Though few people’s electric prices are that high, and it’s rare to sit at 100% CPU 24/7.
  - Leftb 7y ago
    > Though few people’s electric prices are that high, and it’s rare to sit at 100% CPU 24/7. While I agree a rate similar to that isn't all that uncommon in for instance Europe, from that perspective it's a relevant calculation. On the other hand the prices of old hardware tend to very between markets as well so that would still impact the break even point.
  - nisa 7y ago
    It's more like 25€/month for our R720 at work (with 128gb ddr3 memory and dual xeon e5-2690v1) - if you run with powersave governor in Linux and enable lower C-states in BIOS. I'm not joking the included iDrac7 reliable shows 110-130W. How course if you number crunching at 100% cpu are you more like using 300W.
rarecoil 7y ago
Power consumption is somewhat irrelevant if you live in a place where there is hydro or solar power - eWaste recycling is a huge environmental problem [1], and manufacturing has its own environmental footprint [2]. Buying used hardware is great, but really we should also be probably optimizing for performance-per-watt even with older hardware. IMO the real issue is that most people just don't need more grunt than a 5-year-old machine is giving them at this point. What they really need is a solid state disk in the old hardware, and for Office and Chromium you'd never notice a difference. I still use a SATA SSD daily and while I've had NVMe in my work-supplied machines, for 99% of my workload it's just not even necessary. [1] https://eridirect.com/blog/2015/06/how-does-e-waste-affect-the-environment/ https://eridirect.com/blog/2015/06/how-does-e-waste-affect-t... [2] http://www.electronicstakeback.com/toxics-in-electronics/wheres-the-harm-component/ http://www.electronicstakeback.com/toxics-in-electronics/whe...
dillonmckay 7y ago
What if the electricity is generated via hydroelectric or solar?
pnutjam 7y ago
I ran a core2 duo for years as a server, it was more efficient then any of the newer stuff I could find. I just upgrade to an I7, which costs more energy annually. Granted it's faster and maybe less likely to break. http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-Duo-E8400-vs-Intel-Core-i7-6500U http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-Duo-E8400-vs-Intel-Core-...
- dgacmu 7y ago
  It's probably also more energy-proportional. newer CPUs and hardware in general do a much better job of scaling power use with demand. so if you're not running flat out 24x7, you're probably using less power in practice, even though your max may be higher now.
  - pnutjam 7y ago
    Good point, it certainly seems to run cooler.
JaimeThompson 7y ago
I have multiple r720's that idle at between 130 and 155 watts according to iDRAC. The system has 8+ SSDs, 10 gig fiber, infiniband, and 160GB of RAM. Under load it goes up but typically it uses less than 200 watts.
albandread 7y ago
And heat; I have some computers I just don't run for the hot three months of the year; and I live in a temperate climate. In the winter though; they are nice room warmers.
icedchai 7y ago
You are probably seriously over estimating the actual power requirements. I have several servers running, some are 5+ year old Xeon towers, and they aren't costing anywhere near that.

dev_dull 7y ago

It really depends. My home server uses about 120w idle (older series i7 with many disks). It comes out to about $25 a month in electricity. That’s enough to where you should make sure it’s worth it, and ask yourself if you’re better off with a higher end NUC or even raspberry pi, which use orders of magnitude less power. (We have solar so I don’t really worry about the power consumption anymore)

chronogram 7y ago
Wow what a difference! My laptop shows about 2-3 watt idle (brightness low of course). What a huge difference in power consumption over the years. Do you think that’s mostly the hard disks using the power?
Max_aaa 7y ago
My home server is basically my old laptop. It is a Dell Latitude e6540, just sips power when not under heavy load. with a 4 core i7 and 16 GB of ram, it is more than enough for home use. for storage, it has a m.2 SATA ssd for the root partition. And 2x 2tb hard drives that are raided with zfs for the home and network share folders.

Abishek_Muthian 7y ago

I agree, one of the reasons to even upgrade personal computers is to take advantage of the power efficiency. Also must do for anyone who is planet conscious. Perhaps if the person who buys these old enterprise server workstations also has renewable power source, then it would seem to be an over all win.

FerretFred 7y ago

Yes, and it can be a double-edged sword. My home office isn't heated (long story), so if I want some cheap heat in winter I'll fire up the old server and just batch convert some video. That's a pretty efficient room heater for 300 watts of power! Conversely I never convert video in summer...

rutierut 7y ago
It's funny how there is nothing really wrong with this. Maybe you could put it to work doing some valuable tasks, like protein folding etc? That'd be really cool!
- MrMember 7y ago
  In the winter I let my PC search for Mersenne Primes when I'm not using it.
vostrocity 7y ago
I remember seeing a few years ago a startup that made a panel heater that was really a computer that would mine Bitcoin or something.
ZeroFries 7y ago
Do you know how it would compare to something like a space-heater in terms of something like $ per degree heated per cubic meter?
- dboreham 7y ago
  Um, exactly the same? (By thermodynamics)

varelse 7y ago

In a desperate attempt to get me to take Xeon Phi seriously, Intel once sent me a free Xeon Phi server. I still have the thing, but because the boards were passively cooled, the server fans sounded like an F-14 (edited) trying to take off from an aircract carrier when I booted the thing up. I ended up extracting the Xeon Phis and using them in consumer cases with a much quieter fan blowing on them. It also weighs a ton, but I digress...

myrandomcomment 7y ago
To be pedantic a F-15 is an Air Force plane and not designed for a carrier. A F-14 is what you are looking for (think Top Gun).
- varelse 7y ago
  Noted, edited... Time to buzz the server tower?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- dpe82 7y ago
  To be more pedantic, he said "trying to take off". I think an F-15 pilot who somehow found himself on a carrier deck and had to (try to) take off wouldn't hold anything back in the power/noise department. :)
  - myrandomcomment 7y ago
    In the case of being extra extra pedantic, how did the F-15 without arresting gear get on the carrier in the first place? Okay, enough fun.
    - lloeki 7y ago
      Theoretically it could be carried by an aerial crane heli, like a Mil V-12 (20-25T), an empty F15 being in the 15T range.

LeSaucy 7y ago

Also consider that many xeon workstation/server boards have limited sleep state support. Any newer i3/i5/i7 will enter S5 sleep and barely sip 1w, with instant on wake. The time you save sitting waiting for the machine to start up (workstation/server boards are also insanely slow to post) will be worth the investment in a newer setup.

KaiserPro 7y ago
both HP and dell workstations fully support S5.

blinkingled 7y ago

A few things in their defense though - newer workstations like z230 from HP generate much less heat noise and have lower power consumption. They are not $200 cheap but they cost a lot less than a loaded MBP for sure - even more so when bought refurbished or on eBay. These workstations can be put in sleep mode with Windows or Linux and they wake up pretty quick - saves you lot of power consumption by not needing to keep it always on. Wake on LAN is your friend. Next everything is easily replaceable which is great for the environment as these have much longer lifespans than a glued-in laptop. Lastly the performance is just much better than a thermally constrained laptop.

fabioborellini 7y ago
Yeah. There are workstations and workstations. Why would the original poster's single Haswell- or Skylake-based Core i7 CPU in his workstation waste more energy than a single Skylake-based Core i7 CPU on a new gaming machine? Also, his storage and GPU seemed quite modest, so I don't think his HP is more wasteful than a new gaming PC. Of course, 28 cores and eight spinning hard drives is a different story.

teh_klev 7y ago

> The power consumption of some of these old workstations is obscene Absolutely this. I work from home and for around six years ran a company provided refurbished Dell Precision (a T5400 I think) workstation with dual Xeon CPU's, SAS Disks etc - this was around 2008. I think when purchased new this machine cost around GBP3K, we got it for around GBP1K. The thing was switched on for around ten to twelve hours a day and the power consumption was (I eventually realised) eyewatering. The machine fortunately developed a fatal motherboard fault and I replaced it with a self build Core i5-4690K machine with SSDs and a modern graphics card. My electric bill halved and I got a way more powerful and energy efficient machine. It was quite a revelation. These old machines may seem like bargains, but energy-wise they're just not economical to run (especially at UK domestic energy prices).

runjake 7y ago

Reddit people with Kill-a-watt units indicate loads well below 200 watts for these workstations. Heck, beasty Dell R710 2U servers appear to pull (in some cases, well) below 200 watts [1]. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/7r90l8/average_power_watt_consumption_on_a_dell_r710_2x/ https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/7r90l8/average_pow...

ChuckMcM 7y ago

Pretty much. I had to stop running my VAXen 24/7 because they use a lot of power and my lab would get too warm. That said I have picked up "junk" computers with my neighbors kids, got the running and installed by with different operating systems. Fun stuff and you don't worry about breaking it.

jotm 7y ago

Why is everyone here focused on the desktop workstations? I switched to laptops over a decade ago. Used 3-5 year old Zbooks are 1/10th of their original price, and still perform flawlessly (mind-blowing fact: Haswells can keep up with Skylakes, and even beat them with some overclocking+undervolting).

xiii1408 7y ago

Yes, this 100%. It was fun (and kind of hilarious) to have an old Dell PowerEdge Server in your dorm room back in college, when power was free. (And, in my case, mostly generated by dams, so not that bad for the environment.) Keeping one in your house would be ridiculous and loud, though. Mine actually required two power cables! I ended up pawning it off to a friend for $20, who pawned it off to one of his friends for $20, and so forth. I wonder where it is now.

dymk 7y ago
Mine went to Goodwill after I graduated from my university. It was a beast in terms of how loud it was. I was able to strike a deal with IT - they'd give me 2U of rack space in the Uni's datacenter and some subdomains in the Uni's .edu. In return, they got a forever grateful undergrad with too much time on his hands.