> 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 refurbi

> 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).