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Why your next home computer should be an old Xeon workstation (2019)

155 points by vmoore 4y ago

polshaw 4y ago
Used chromebooks are another good case of the arbitrage that the article refers to.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
From an environmental efficiency perspective I cannot recommend. The power consumption of old server chips, even in idle, is pretty big compared to modern, more efficient 10-7nm desktop chips. If your energy bills are a rounding error in your monthly budget then go ahead, but then you can actually afford modern and more efficient chips. And then there's the extra heat and noise you'll have to deal with.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  Erm, reusing is more effective than building a new computer from scratch. New chips are not environmentally friendly to make, use large amount of pure water, etc... related article from a few years ago about the Z400: https://boilingsteam.com/gaming-on-a-cheap-xeon-the-hp-z400-workstation/ https://boilingsteam.com/gaming-on-a-cheap-xeon-the-hp-z400-...
  - iasay 4y ago
    Not when you’re paying the electricity bill it’s not. My old workstation cost me a 14” MacBook Pro in power in 5 years. Plus you can get new in box Lenovo mini PCs with 11th gen i5 in for less than the price of a second hand Xeon desktop that’s actually usable now. They pull average 30 watts.
    - iforgotpassword 4y ago
      Op specifically said environmental perspective, so it doesn't matter whether you pay 5ct or 90ct per kWh.
      - iasay 4y ago
        It does however depend on how much coal you shovel into it. The point is you can’t go “the environment” and throw half the concerns out of the window. It’s way more nuanced than that.
        iforgotpassword 4y ago
        That however is a fair point. I would be genuinely interested in the actual numbers. Gut feeling tells me buying a new computer has to be much much worse than running a ten year old machine even on coal, since a lot of these components come from all across the world, get produced in countries some of which have lax to no regulation regarding pollution, use of toxic substances, and so on. The hard thing is probably trying to break this down to one individual computer being made.
      - naniwaduni 4y ago
        It absolutely matters if those kWh are backed by environmental damage. Also if you can spend that money elsewhere to reduce environmental damage.
    - hexo 4y ago
      OK, let's calculate! Old PC amortized to 130W constantnly, 24/7, @ 20c per kWh = 0.624$ per day, that is 227.76 per year. New workstation today is like ~4000$. So that means you'd have to run it more than 17 years at that price of electricity to be on par with price of new computer, not counting electricity for new PC. I've actually was able to turn off all heaters during winter and heat my house using computers only! I'd say, "higher" TDP of older CPU was really an advantage here. And, let's be real, new high performance CPUs arent low-TDP either (270W for new AMDs), or GPUs (350W range for high end gaming card). So, I'd really say it's environmentally friendlier to use waste heat as house heating than using "space heaters" only. (I really do have to heat using electricity, as I don't have gas nor any other source.)
      - iasay 4y ago
        Where does your 20c/kWh come from? In summer what to you do with that excess heat? Far more nuanced than trite calculations chosen to back up your conclusion. Also you’re rebasing the argument on a new $4000 spend when you can spend $400 on a mini PC with the same performance as an old Xeon as suggested.
        hexo 4y ago
        20(euro)cents used to be average price in my country. I actually have much lower price (about one third of that) because I don't have other energy source. It does not really matter where that price came from, as it can nicely serve as reference point and you can easily scale it according to your price of electricity. Also, $400 mini PC have performance nowhere near workstation, since RAM only costs more, not even thinking about gaming GPU or price of decent SSDs and HDDs. What did I do with excess heat? Opened window and turned off POWER8 energy hog.
        iasay 4y ago
        $400 mini PC gets you an i5-11500T with NVME SSD that will take 128Gb of RAM. Some of them even pop up with NVidia T400 in them. New with Lenovo warranty on eBay. The i5-11500T has better single and multi thread performance. Sure you won’t get an RTX in it but that’s a 1% case really when we’re talking software engineering. That’s a hell of a lot better value proposition than a 5+ year old Xeon which is what we’re seeing suggested here.
    - scns 4y ago
      My plan was upgrading my i5 4460 and get the best bang for my buck. Was eyeing an i7 4790K which would have cost 140€. Got a workstation with a xeon equivalent to the 4770, with a quadro K2200, an intel dc ssd (RSP new ~400$, a 2TB HD and 32GB RAM for 180€ instead.
    - stigz 4y ago
      It's not about you, bud. Speaking at a global level it is more efficient.
      - iasay 4y ago
        Show me the calculation.
  - dtgriscom 4y ago
    Citation? There's a cost to generating/transmitting energy, there's a cost to building/shipping new computers. Any idea which is "worse" for the environment (for some definition of "worse")? I'm not being snippy; I honestly don't know. Personally, if I need a solution that's good for a number of years, I'd go for a new, efficient computer rather than reuse an old toaster.
    - johnfernow 4y ago
      No figures for a Xeon machine in particular, but some other figures for a general idea (from The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee, 2020 second edition, page 140): Manufacturing a computer: * 326 kg CO2e: 13-inch MacBook Pro, 128GB storage * 475 kg CO2e: 15-inch Dell Precision 5530, 256GB storage * 620 kg CO2e: 16-inch MacBook Pro, 1TB storage Using it: * 4g CO2e per hour on 13-inch MacBook Pro * 6g CO2e per hour on 16-inch MacBook Pro * 20g CO2e per hour on average-efficient laptop * 98g CO2e per hour on desktop computer with screen * 130g CO2e per hour on gaming PC with screen The figures for using it are based on the US grid's typical mix of coal, renewables, nuclear, etc. In places with a greener grid, such as the UK, the figures are different (there's a different edition of the book for the US and UK version, and possibly other regions as well.) So we don't have figures for the emissions for a Xeon machine, either in manufacturing or usage. And these figures are estimates, of course, not precise measurements. But they help us to get a good picture of the scale of the impact. Let's assume that you use your computer 12 hours a day, 365 days a year. On a standard gaming PC with a screen, that'd be 569400g CO2e per year, or 569kg. The big question then is how much more inefficient is a Xeon machine than a standard gaming PC. If the Xeon machine emits 1.33x more than a standard gaming PC, that'd put its yearly usage emissions at 757kg CO2e, so if you used your machine for 5 years, than the difference in emissions would be 940kg CO2e between the Xeon and standard gaming PC, which would probably be enough to justify buying a new machine. But if it's only 1.1x more inefficient, than that difference would be 285 kg, not nearly enough to justify a new machine (and probably still the case even if you use the machine for 10 years.) Ultimately, I'm not sure that we have the information necessary to definitively answer this, but all other things being equal, I'm skeptical that the CPU alone will make an enormous difference in power draw in day to day usage. A newer CPU will be more efficient when at 100% usage, but does it draw significantly less power when at idle? I don't know. But if anyone else has found any information that could help, I'd love to check it out. That said, there are plenty of second-hand machines that are more efficient than a Xeon machine. Once there are no second-hand efficient machines left, it'd be worthwhile to dig in deep on the emissions of old Xeon machines versus newer more efficient machines, but right now you can just buy used and refurbished efficient machines, so I'd probably just recommend that.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    In a world where we had a reasonable tax on carbon, environmental friendliness and individual economic rationality would be one and the same. But we don't live in that world. So they are not.
    - beachy 4y ago
      If ever there was a glove perfectly fitted for the invisible hand of the market, it's saving our planet by taxing carbon. Yet here we remain, whining about why it can never work.
    - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
      One would think economics would have been onboard with environmentalism a lot longer ago, but economics as a culture/institution is very much aligned with the ultra-rich. Economics, the leadership and prominent members of its social network, were all too willing to rubberstamp the whims of the "elites", future of the human race be damned. Economics the "science" is a lot like the police "union", the only acceptable union to the right because it keeps them in place, while economics the "science" is acceptable because it justifies their position and wealth.
  - wiseowise 4y ago
    They’re going to be made regardless of whether you buy them or not.
- Something1234 4y ago
  You're not wrong if your only calculation is my power usage rather than the roundtrip of making the new chips and the new computer. There's a reason it's reduce, reuse and recycle. Reduce the amount of junk. Reuse existing junk. If neither work, then dispose of.
  - iasay 4y ago
    At some point there’s an energy efficiency trade off which needs to be considered. It’s way more complicated and depends on where you get your energy from and the efficiency of the device. Using something until it dies is not always the best outcome.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  I would also not recommend because of overall support For example, does these support AVX? Newer software might require it, even if it works fine for 99% of the stuff you do elsewhere If you want to get used stuff then get some 2/3 yr old laptop.
  - api 4y ago
    I've never seen anything that actually requires AVX. SSE yes, but virtually all 64-bit x64 chips have SSE.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - nix23 4y ago
      Star citicen needs avx...z600 sadface here
  - Felger 4y ago
    AVX is supported since 1st gen Xeon E3 (Sandy Bridge), launched Q2 '11.
    - raverbashing 4y ago
      That's interesting, because I've seen some software complaining on older machines, but it might have been about AVX2
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  Reduce > Reuse > Recycle
- 35mm 4y ago
  Also they tend to be quite loud
- api 4y ago
  If you have unusually expensive energy then this is correct. Globally though this neglects embodied energy. A new machine with all new chips takes a ton of energy to produce. It's usually most efficient to reuse old stuff as long as it's useful rather than pitching it as e-waste and buying new. Also keep in mind that a desktop can usually be put to sleep or turned off when not in use. Doesn't need to run 24/7.
- pdpi 4y ago
  Even if you don't care about the environmental side, power consumption is still very important. When I'm playing games, the temperature at my desk is 2-3 degrees higher than the other end of the room, and the fans get pretty damn loud. I'm actively trying to figure out how to at least keep my current performance while getting that heat under control.
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    > Even if you don't care about the environmental side Why wouldn’t you?
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      Is there an IT equivalent of coal rolling?
      - iasay 4y ago
        I think this entire thread is about doing that. My MacBook I’m typing this on is sitting here at 9.2W (battery full, running off mains).
      - 2III7 4y ago
        Running all cores on turbo even when idle.
      - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        Crypto mining.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - elteto 4y ago
        Yes, programming in dynamic languages like Python.
    - pdpi 4y ago
      I thought that was a more polite than saying "even if you're a selfish asshole, there's still a reason to do it out of pure self-interest".
- icegreentea2 4y ago
  Comparing system idle across large generations is somewhat tricky, but we can pull some ballpark comparisons. A ~2013 workstation Xeon has a system idle of ~75W (https://www.anandtech.com/show/7852/intel-xeon-e52697-v2-and-xeon-e52687w-v2-review-12-and-8-cores/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/7852/intel-xeon-e52697-v2-and...). This should be similar to the HP system from the start of the linked article. Modern system idles sit in the ~50W range (https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-12900k-alder-lake-12th-gen/20.html https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-12900k-alde...). Yeah, I know the components aren't matched... but that's what you get hunting for data. 25W isn't nothing, but it's not gigantic either. It's hard to get precise figures about the embodied energy of consumer electronics, but we have a range of 2000-6000MJ (https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Embodied_energy https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Embodied_energy). At 2000MJ, the payoff time for 25W of idle saving is quite large - on the order of 900 days. That's a lot of time to play with to try to design a hardware refresh approach to minimize total energy expenditure over your lifespan. And obviously from a $$$ standpoint, even taking some of the higher energy costs (~50cents/kWH), the cost delta over an entire year is pretty modest - $110 over a year. Once again, not insignificant, but given the discount factors involved (you can possibly get a $400 dollar used machine instead of a $1000 new), still quite possibly worth while. Obviously all of these are modified by what your actual system loading is, what your hardware refresh cycles look like, and local cost of electricity.
  - 60Vhipx7b4JL 4y ago
    A Dell T110-II with a quad core xeon and 4x4GB RAM and and a 3.5" HDD idles around 21W. It really depends on the systems.
    - Felger 4y ago
      Had almost the same setup and saw about 32W idle on mine. T110 II with Xeon E3 1220, 4 Gb RAM ECC, 1x 128 GB SATA SSD + 1x 6 To HDD IronWolf on a PERC H200 PCIe card. With a WD 10 GB external HDD, the UPS gives me a 50W load.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      People fail to grasp that a thing drawing power at idle is the memory, which doesn't have a useful idle state. It must be refreshed constantly. 16GB is pretty reasonable. 8GB would be more efficient if you can get away with it. If you lard up a workstation with tons of RAM you don't need, you pay for it on your power bill.
- bojangleslover 4y ago
  Who cares? Compared to heating and A/C (in the US and Japan), 10 Xeons probably aren't even a drop in the bucket.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  a refrigerator, ironing clothes, heating or AC consume at least 3-5 times as much (assuming they are latest generations, which usually are not, and the CPU is running full throttle all the time, which is not usually the case). I don't think that a Xeon is a real threat in the context of environmental damages. Switching to newer CPUs would save a few kWs per year, the difference is negligible in the grand scheme of things.
  - maccard 4y ago
    My fridge uses practically no energy for 23.5 hours a day, and for those 30 minutes it's active, it's a heat pump which tends to be incredibly efficient. Many parts of the world (huge parts of Europe for example) don't need or have AC, and for 9 months of the year I don't need heating in my home - despite living in a 130 year old stone building in Scotland. Short of the 3kw electric kettle I have, my workstation is the single most energy intense appliance in my house, and it's used for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 47 weeks a year.
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      on average a modern refrigerator consumes about 2kw/day most of them are 10 years old and are on 24 hours a day, everyday. and in many parts of the western World they use very big, very power hungry ones, coupled with an external freezer, for long term storage. > Many parts of the world (huge parts of Europe for example) I'm in Europe, in many parts of Europe we do need AC. Ice age has not returned... yet it's 30 degrees right now here, at 2 am. And I'm a thousand kms north from truly hot parts of my country. It was 31 degrees in Berlin today, and July has just started. > Short of the 3kw electric kettle I have, my workstation is the single most energy intense appliance Your workstation consumes around less than 1Kw/day (even a ten years ago CPU is less than 100 watts/hour idle, which is most of the job it usually does), 1kw it's one hour of ironing, less than an hour with the AC on (a small one, I hear in US they suck up to 3.5 kW/h, average houses are bigger) or of a washing machine (cold water) and 40 minutes of a dryer (a low power program. they can go up to more than 2kw/hour for home appliances and up to 6kw for industrial ones). on average 40-50% of the energy budget for a data center is spent on cooling. and they are very efficient at doing it at scale. maybe, just maybe, if energy efficiency is so important, we could start by reducing useless waste: crypto mining or videogames that need a 350 watts GPU to run.
voltagex_ 4y ago
I pay 34c/kWh and likely more in the future. No thanks.
- sam345 4y ago
  Wow, where is that?
  - ttyyzz 4y ago
    Germany. I know this because I pay the same.
    - Roritharr 4y ago
      Same here, it's actually one of the reasons I am looking to move to Canada now. Our country has been mismanaged in this regard to a point where I don't see this being solved in the next 20 years, also ideologically the majority does think low energy prices are bad now, so don't event want this fixed.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - OJFord 4y ago
        I'm surprised to see market efficiency/management as a reason to move to Canada - usually in such context it's protectionism, milk tokens, etc. being (negatively) discussed. Is the 'hydro' (as they call it) cheap there? I heard the opposite, but that from a Canadian, so perhaps it's just that it's gone up a lot (as everywhere) and they didn't appreciate their lower starting point. Edit: oh, very variable between provinces - https://www.energyhub.org/electricity-prices/ https://www.energyhub.org/electricity-prices/
        mrshadowgoose 4y ago
        Yep, highly variable based on the province. In Quebec it's so cheap that electric heat is common. But yeah, the corruption is pretty bad here (of course, relatively speaking in the context of first world countries). A few dozen large corporations basically own our government.
pcdoodle 4y ago
I'd go for a SFF workstation, You can get a CPU with a passmark above 8,000 to idle under 10w for the whole system. We decommissioned a dual xeon setup after realizing it was sucking over 200w while doing nothing. YMMV.
- immigrantheart 4y ago
  Can you give me an example of those CPUs? I am thinking of building a home server/NAS.
  - pcdoodle 4y ago
    My current setup is a HP EliteDesk G3 w/i7 6700 CPU. The PSU inside is 80+ rated and I've seen the externally measured power consumption as low as 9W idling Windows Server 2019. I have no spinning disks inside so add at least a few watts average for each. Another advantage to using Business Workstation SFF units is they're cheap and take up little space, you can have a backup unit ready to swap parts with.
  - InvaderFizz 4y ago
    i5-6500 Optiplex is under $100 shipped on eBay. Scores 5600 passmark. Step up to the $200 i5-8500 Optiplex and now you are looking at 9500 passmark. The 8500 is a great CPU. It is what runs my home Docker setup with Plex (hardware video transcode).
  - dervjd 4y ago
    Keep in mind that unless you're doing something like transcoding for a Plex server, you don't really need much in the way of CPU for a home NAS. I have a Synology DS1618+ that uses the Intel Atom C3538, and run a few other services on it (AdGuard/Sonarr/Radarr/Sabnzbd etc). Just looked at the performance history, and CPU utilization seems to sit around 5-10% with a few spikes to 40-50%.
thanatos519 4y ago
I <3 my refurbished Thinkstation P500. Solid well-designed case, 4 Xeon cores, nVidia Kepler, 2x SSD, and 64GB ECC RAM for less than the cost of new 64GB ECC. Not as fast or power-efficient as a new workstation, but nothing new had to be manufactured!
secure 4y ago
I have been using an HP z440 for years as my work machine. It’s fine, performance-wise, and definitely for running a browser, video conferencing, and terminal emulators. One downside of workstation machines is that everything seems to be custom, even mundane things like fan connectors. See https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2021-08-28-silent-hp-z440-workstation/ https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2021-08-28-silent-hp-z44... for my experience with swapping the fans against quieter models.
- pxmpxm 4y ago
  Was there perceptible difference after you replaced the front and rear fans?
libertybylaw 4y ago
I use an old 2013 Xeon Workstation as daily driver and have been very happy with it. It came with 32 Gigs of cosmic-radiation-shielded RAM, two 16 core processers (1.9 GHZ, granted), and all the peripheral ports I could need. I slapped an old 2016 Nvidia graphics card into it and its been able to do all that I can need and more. Considering I got it for free, it's a great deal. I would easily have paid $200 for this machine though - I can run a dedicated ubuntu VM with 8GB RAM alongside 100+ chrome browsers no problem. I equate it to semi-truck cab, as compared to sports-cars of the consumer desktop market. It's not that fast and it gets a bit lower gas mileage (electricity consumption), but it can haul 10 tons of cargo.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  I'm in the overclocked Xeon 1680v2 gang and loving it. It's quite capable with a more modern GPU and the X79 motherboard also supports NVMe drives.
  - hexo 4y ago
    What motherboard, please? Can you also boot from NVMe? I was looking into this, have Asus P9X79 PRO.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
      Ha! I use the Asus X79 Deluxe and yes, I can boot from PCIe. I had a P9X79 Pro before but stupidly wanted TPM support so I replaced with an Asus X79 Deluxe from ebay which had bent CPU pins that I was able to fix. The TPM support was a waste but I gained the ability to PCIe boot. Before that I was able to boot PCIe on the P9X79 Pro by putting the boot partition on a SATA SSD I believe. I use these for my drives: https://a.co/d/2jaYUbM https://a.co/d/2jaYUbM
      - hexo 4y ago
        Thanks a lot! I hoped i'd be able to boot from PCIe, but boot partition on a SATA drive is quite ok too.
pgrote 4y ago
We have done this for workstation refreshes (Windows 10) and it works marvelously. Reliability has been fantastic. We keep 2 machines as spares for parts and have experienced an issue with one power supply. PC Health Check reports it doesn't support secure boot, no TPM 2.0 and the CPU isn't supported. We haven't tried to install Windows 11. The model we went with was Z420s.
zhala 4y ago
I think most people would be better suited getting micro form factor PC's like the Dell 7050's or Lenovo M920q. Can be had for ~200 on eBay with a 6th or 7th gen i5/i7 and only draw 10-20w in use.
- dervjd 4y ago
  100% this. The Dell Optiplex Micro line is fantastic. Servethehome has a pretty good article comparing a bunch of different manufactures/models - https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/ https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...
readingnews 4y ago
And if it gets popular, the price of old Xeon workstations will go through the roof, just like old stereos did. Used to be able to get an old Marantz 2220B for $100 on the bay. Now they are unobtainium or $850, as an example. I think the same thing happened to old Sun workstations. We used to reuse them a LOT. Could get an ultra 2 decked out for like $200. Now, $800-$1000 with less CPU and ram than a few years back. Could be supply and demand, but it seems to happen a lot. People go "hey, that stuff was great, lets use it again" and the price skyrockets, then the people all go "hey, that old stuffs too expensive". :)
- fmajid 4y ago
  It may be companies needing to run legacy software on Solaris versions not supported on more recent hardware.
- danachow 4y ago
  > unobtainium or $850 In fairness the Marantz is being purchased for a collector’s aesthetic - not just for a “value” PC which is the whole point of the old Xeon - the price rise is limited by this elasticity in demand. And $850 I think is illustrative - that’s not unobtanium for middle class - it’s just happen to be a bit beyond what most people spend on a side hobby. Similarly old Sun hardware either you’re screwed with a backward compat issue or again collecting since they are now vintage. x86 doesn’t have the former effect for the most part.
  - readingnews 4y ago
    I mean ubobtainium in that at one point they were everywhere on ebay, and now its once in a blue moon. Much like some Xeons the poster is talking about. I remember when supermicro computers, outfitted, were everywhere and cheap. Now, not as prevalent as before. I get it with the Sun, but the same thing will eventually happen with Xeon for example. We will reach a point where those CPUs with that socket and SCSI / SAS connectors and drives are dang hard to find, or no one makes ram any longer, etc.
zwieback 4y ago
I work at hp where we get new PCs every few years but I also have two maxed-out z800 workstations, one for Linux, one for Windows. For the most part this works great but the one downside is that the ancient BIOS and older slots prevent some upgrades.
dervjd 4y ago
Take it from someone who has done this - it's a terrible idea. I bought a HP Z620 off of eBay for $500 in 2019. Spec'd with 2x Xeon E5-2680 @2.7GHZ & 96GB of RAM, and had a 1TB SSD. Bought a RX570 graphics card, and away I went. It's been an absolute pain in the ass: heavy, huge, tempermental, and sucks an enormous amount of power. Idles at 250-300watts just sitting at the login screen. My home office temperature goes up by several degrees when it's on. It's also noisy, but not from the fans. There's noticeable coil whine/high pitched sounds when the computer is not idling. You probably wouldn't hear it over the background noise in a normal office, but you definitely hear it at home. And of course it sounds like a rocket when the fans are going full blast, which I'll admit is kind of fun. Reliability has been a crapshoot - motherboard died and I had to source another from eBay. Pretty sure one of the RAM sticks is dying too - every few months it crashes hard (with an error screen mentioning a memory issue) but HP's hardware testing tools find nothing. Upside: very easy to take apart and replace the motherboard - everything is modular and slots out. Software wise - all kinds of weird driver issues, especially with power management. Sleep mode usually crashes the machine. Of course none of the drivers have been updated in years, and Windows 11 isn't officially supported. ESXi works well enough after some BIOS tinkering - could not get GPU passthrough to work, and some of the system sensors aren't detected. Bare metal Windows 11 install works after some minor registry changes, but not officially supported. The most irritating part of this tale is that I didn't buy this to be my daily driver. I've always had a home server, and thought it would be fun to have the extra CPU/RAM power on tap to spin up VMs with reckless abandon. Well after all the issues with the Z620, I ended up buying a Dell OptiPlex Micro with 32GB of RAM & an i5-10500T. It's the size of a book, cost about the same as the Z620, is silent, sips power, and has been dead reliable. Granted, it's not as powerful - the E5-2680 has a 12,500 passmark score (and there's two of them) versus the i5-10500T's 10,319 passmark score. However this has never actually been an issue for me. Tldr: There's a reason these dinosaurs are cheap. Power hogs, noisy, unreliable, and a giant hassle.
- fmajid 4y ago
  Gresham’s law at work. If a company is shedding half its workstations due to upgrades, the stable and reliable ones used by non-smokers are not going out first.
- 4y ago
Synaesthesia 4y ago
I had a Xeon workstation, 1st gen Core architecture, similar to the first Mac Pro. Yes I managed to buy it cheaply, but the noise was pretty loud. Especially during POST it would spin the fans at max for 30 seconds which sounded like a vacuum cleaner! Not great for nighttime use.
- virtuallynathan 4y ago
  I got a 3 or 4U chassis and hacked in Noctua fans, made it silent.
- fmajid 4y ago
  HP Z workstations are pretty good and have specified acoustic levels. In places like Germany I believe it’s a workplace safety requirement.
- landemva 4y ago
  After a few boot cycles, I usually change BIOS setting to skip the POST. It just takes too long and the results don't have much value on a stable machine - if it broke during last shutdown, I know anyways on startup. Have an older Xeon which I use as remote desktop. Is solid.
iasay 4y ago
CraigJPerry 4y ago
If you’re UK based, that famous auction site has had a glut of Dell T3610s for a while with 32Gb and a basic nvidia quadra for £140 delivered which i thought was alright. I took 4 of them and i can’t complain about the boxes - support both legacy bios and uefi (so netboot + gpt disks = easy rebuilding between os’s), they’re quiet (except when working hard obv). But… the power consumption! Each box is another £12/mo on the electricity bill. So i end up just having them on a smart plug and turned on only when i’m actually using them.
- rossmohax 4y ago
  which auction it is?
  - CraigJPerry 4y ago
    These ones, i see they've halfed in price, that's a steal IMO! https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=t3610%2032gb&_sacat=0&LH_Sold=1&LH_Complete=1&rt=nc&_udhi=150 https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=t3610%2032g...
whalesalad 4y ago
I have a few Dell R720 servers in my basement. One of them recently became a dedicated remote dev box due to a client project that had some hefty requirements. It's got 2 processors (24 cores total), 64GB of ECC memory, and 6 SAS drives in a RAID configuration. It'll build the linux kernel in 179 seconds, lol (I genuinely do not know if this is good or bad, but probably not great) Idle it consumes about 120-130 watts of power. This beast does all the heavy lifting, and then I use my other machines as thin clients to code. Lately my setup includes VS Code w/ the remote SSH extension for developing on the server. I have a love/hate relationship with VS Code. I don't use the built-in terminal, instead I will use iTerm connected via mosh or ssh to the server, where I use tmux to keep a long running session of all my crap. I usually have a few windows for a repl, various app processes, a psql shell open at all times, etc. It's very nice to be able to roam from my macbook on the couch to my mac mini in my office with zero interruption in flow. I have my own vpn and also run tailscale, so I can hack from anywhere with this setup. Locally, latency has been almost imperceptible. So this has worked out really great. The only real shortcoming is that the processors are kinda old and run hot, but for $200 I can get a matching pair of newer chips that are a lot quicker. Just haven't pulled the trigger, because I am trying to ascertain real-world benchmarks on just how much my life would improve. Part of me wants to build a monster Ryzen 5900X workstation to have under my desk, but I enjoy the fact that this server is in my basement where I cannot hear or see it. I don't need a new workstation, these servers are so great, but it would def be fun to have some lightning fast raid/nvme storage.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Another neat aspect of this sort of setup is that you can even use locked down devices like iPads, as long as the device has an SSH client (which iPads do).
kwatsonafter 4y ago
I love to see others sharing my enthusiasm for making old machines have a useful, "senior citizen" life. It really warms my heart.
- accrual 4y ago
  Installed XP on a K6-III+ 600MHz box this morning. It's indeed having a useful (if only for fun) "retirement". :)
jancsika 4y ago
> Or maybe there’s a quality issue that’s imperceptible to you but was enough to prevent that shirt from going to Neiman Marcus. Or maybe it's a line specifically manufactured for those stores to appear as if it were a decent buy and which is manufactured cheaply. So get a bunch of "deals" without noticing that you actually loaded up your burrito with mostly lettuce.
iforgotpassword 4y ago
I think the sweet spot is somewhere around 2018 for used stuff currently, when it comes to performance per money. Got an i5-8400 with 8GB a few months ago for 80€. Idle consumption is 10W with a spinning disk.
hexo 4y ago
It already is! I've swapped old i7-3820 @ 4.3GHz for E5-2697v2 few months ago. Bought another 32Gigs of RAM, and now I already have PCIe 3 (long overdue). I've also tried to overclock it via BCLK (100-110MHz) and gained ~300MHz. It happily compiles and runs windows in KVM with no problem (GPU over PCIe passthrough, and looking-glass yay!). Overall experience seems a lot smoother than i7, probably due to 30MB L3 and a lot more cores.
nix23 4y ago
My z600 is now ~12yo and still my main workstation, upgraded ram 47gb and a second cpu for pennys. I love that thing.
rybosworld 4y ago
"Today, these chips sell in used form for as little as $180 on eBay—a more than 90 percent price decrease, a price $100 less than the roughly comparable AMD Ryzen 7 2700X" A 2700x is ~30% faster and also uses less power. Regardless, you can find it for $210, not $280 as the author claims: https://www.newegg.com/amd-ryzen-7-2700x/p/19-113-499 https://www.newegg.com/amd-ryzen-7-2700x/p/19-113-499 A better comparison would be the 2700, which is actually a fair bit cheaper than the E5-2667 and still outperforms it. Benchmark: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-2700X-vs-Intel-Xeon-E5-2667-v2-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-2700/3238vs2154vs3240 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-2700X-vs-In... A 2700 available for $140: https://www.newegg.com/amd-ryzen-7-2700/p/19-113-498 https://www.newegg.com/amd-ryzen-7-2700/p/19-113-498
- gravypod 4y ago
  You can also buy TR1900x for ~$90 USD now that the platform is dead. In a few years upgrade to 2990wx https://www.ebay.com/itm/133925326383?hash=item1f2e924e2f:g:aRcAAOSwXw9iUUsr https://www.ebay.com/itm/133925326383?hash=item1f2e924e2f:g:...
- somat 4y ago
  You are comparing the the price of a cpu to the price of an entire entire system. Add a nice case ~150 a nice power supply ~150 a nice mother board ~150 some ram ~150 storage ~150 and a few nice fans because the fans that come with the case are always terrible ~40 for a fair comparison. The point is you might be able to build a decent computer for under 1000 USD or you could buy a surplus server for ~200.
  - rybosworld 4y ago
    What? The price of the Xeon is for the chip alone, not a full server...
cjbprime 4y ago
An advantage I didn't see specifically mentioned in the article -- some CPUs, especially multi-core, especially Threadripper PRO, aren't released to the individual market, so enterprise surplus can be the only way to get them.
unixhero 4y ago
Yup. E5-2697 v2 dual for the win! I have three of those machines on my household.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  I have a dual 2697 v3 and it's still remarkably capable. Single core perf is "not great" but for my use cases it works fantastically all things considered. Current specs: - 512GB ECC - x8 16TB spinning rust - x8 4TB NVMe - 1TB Intel P3600 for EFI boot and "misc" - Nvidia RTX 3090 (rare dual slot) - Dual 10gig ethernet + onboard 1gig ethernet It performs well with just about anything I throw at it - even concurrently. 512GB of RAM really helps. While this is more-or-less maxed out for my configuration I still couldn't imagine having three of them in my house!
  - unixhero 4y ago
    One for a casual gaming rig in the living room One for a homelab with Plex and other things One for a proper workstation I am a happy peep
admax88qqq 4y ago
I used a xeon workstation for a while. It was okay. I decided to go back to consumer parts. It's big and heavy, so no it can't go on my desk but under it. Complicates moving my desk uo and down to stand. It's loud, like real loud. I started it be concerned over what it was doing to my hearing 8 hours a day. Replacement parts take a while to arrive cause they're all via random ebay sellers. And there's some weird compatibility issues now and then. FreeBSD refuses to boot on the machine, no idea why, kernel just hangs during boot. A few Linux distros do include the driver for the SAS controllers by default, so I had to build and manage my own kernel across upgrades. Overall it was a cool experience but I'm more comfortable back on consumer parts. I built a quiet workstation, I can replace any part quickly from Amazon or by going to the local computer store. My machine is smaller, lighter quieter, easier to maintain and has better software compatibility
- loeg 4y ago
  I ran a current gen (at the time) Xeon-D microATX for a while, for ECC support. Biggest downside was it didn’t have a soundcard. Now I use AMD for ECC and it has all the consumer niceties.
1970-01-01 4y ago
Data point: I have been doing exactly this with a X3430 45nm system for over a decade. Old Xenon systems are very power hungry compared to modern servers. Expect to pay tens of dollars per month if you want 24h uptime. I just checked the Kill-A-Watt behind the UPS and it's reading 170KWh for 2054 hours. I'll leave the exercise of determining if this is cheap or expensive to the reader.
- lproven 4y ago
  "Xenon" or "Xeon"?
green-salt 4y ago
Might be fun if you're not paying for the electricity or its cheap in your area. I have a Dell T410 and will likely get something a little newer, but it won't be powered on most of the time like I use my Ryzen desktop. They tend to be much louder too. Having ECC, a SAS backplane and HBA is really nice to host a file server with though. I have a couple 10/40 Gbit NICs that can all work at the same time because it has enough PCIe lanes.
chx 4y ago
I would consider this advice now outdated. Yes, it was a great advice in the 2010s -- I had such a Dell, too. It's well documented how IPC only has grown 20-25% from Sandy Bridge to Skylake and then the wait was long, long until a new uarch has emerged in 2021. But towards the end of the decade, Ryzen has disturbed the still waters and the number of cores have, well, risen sharply while keeping a competitive IPC and Intel eventually followed suit. Because of this, the equally long time rule of thumb where most apps don't really use multiple cores well so you don't need them on the desktop is also dead by now. I wouldn't recommend a Haswell Xeon as this article does today.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  It'll be interesting to see how much the Clouding of Everything affects this wave, but with a likely flood of startup failures coming, there may be cheap gently used servers entering the market in the not-too-distant future. Or not.
- mise_en_place 4y ago
  I have an Ice Lake Xeon W. It’s ok, compiles are pretty decent. Chromium takes a long time though, even with 24 cores/48 threads. If you want a lesson in how not to organize your source repo, the chromium project would be it. It’s kind of mind boggling how bloated browsers have become.
- TimPC 4y ago
  More important than the raw performance numbers my computer comes with a three year parts and service warrantee and I can even pay a small premium to cover accidents and spills. I’m basically guaranteed my computer works for three years or they replace it. What happens if my used workstation breaks down two weeks after I buy it? Why should I take that risk?
  - kube-system 4y ago
    A used workstation will have failure rates at the bottom of the bathtub curve when you buy it. A new PC is more likely to experience failures. Solid state components are generally very reliable anyway.
lvl102 4y ago
I ran a similar set up in the past. HP Proliant server. It was not reliable at all and the lengthy POST on reboot kills the whole experience to use it for home use not to mention that it’s actually pricy once you start adding parts. These days, I just run M1 Mac Minis. Cheap. Fast. Reliable.
- mamcx 4y ago
  Yeah, the M1 is a game changer. Now my biggest noise generator is my keyboard (mechanical!) that is activated on demand -by me!- and my major heat generator is the sun, as should be!
nine_k 4y ago
It could be a good peak load computer, which you turn on when you have a large number-crunching job, like compiling a large codebase. They are great at running at top speed, but not great at idling.
whalesalad 4y ago
Question for those who have a beefy box as a dev workstation: do you run a hypervisor and try and compartmentalize the way the machine is used, or do you just run/drive a bare OS install? I like that a VM can be started, stopped, moved around, snapshotted, rolled back, etc. Also, anyone daily drive Linux and then have a sidecar/utility VM for windows-related stuff like specific apps or gaming care to comment on that experience?
- blep_ 4y ago
  I just run bare Linux on mine. Sometimes containers on top of that, but only for specific things, not for general use. I was going to do the Windows VM thing but then the gaming laptop I sold when I did this got returned so I just use that instead.
- jasomill 4y ago
  I sort of do the opposite; my main Windows dev box is a dual-socket HP Z820 ESXi host with multiple GPUs, a large SAS SSD RAID 10 array, and an additional SSD and pair of large SATA hard drives for ESXi scratch/swap and local backups, respectively. While I don't actually use it for gaming, the main Windows dev VM, with 18 cores, 32GB RAM, a Quadro P1000 (read: underclocked GTX 1050 with a few extra driver features; ideal for my purposes, would use something beefier for a gaming box), and a physical USB 3.0 controller, runs games as well as any similarly-equipped hardware box, with the caveat that, if you play online multiplayer games (I don't), some anti-cheat software apparently detects and refuses to run under virtualization. Alongside this "always-on" main VM, I regularly run multiple Linux (both with and without AMD GPU), Windows, and FreeBSD VMs. This configuration works great for me, but it probably helps that my home office infrastructure includes a vCenter Server and mostly runs on two additional ESXi hosts, and that, on a semi-regular basis, I have applications that require connecting old Fibre Channel and even parallel SCSI hardware, so the workstation's extra PCIe slots and "tool-free" case design come in handy. While I wouldn't buy a Z820 today, I'm in no hurry to replace this one; ideally, I'll swap in a similarly-configured Z8 in 2–3 years.
Havoc 4y ago
>Xeon E5-2667 v2 ....and promptly lose in performance benchmarks against a last generation minipc....which in turn are basically laptop class chips of the kind so low power you can passive cool them. [0] Not in the same price class sure, but that should give most people pause anyway. Unless you have a specific need for ECC / out-of-band / server practice / TBs of RAM this a questionable proposition. Plus you need space, cheap electricity, noise tolerance and heat dissipation. That said it is good to create awareness of it. More options is good. I reckon there might be some really good opportunities coming up with Zen 2 AM4 second hand though - some of those configurations are (unofficially) ECC capable, plenty powerful and loads of gamers will be looking to dump their rigs shortly. [0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2667+v2+%40+3.30GHz&id=2154 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2667+... https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+4700U&id=3699 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+4700U&i...
pjmlp 4y ago
Full in sync with the advice, except for playing with modern graphics, my 2009 laptops are perfectly alright. It also helps that I don't do anything container related at home, and at work I am more a fashion victim than anything. So they are perfectly alright for home workloads.
coredog64 4y ago
I had an old Nehalem/Westmere PC kicking around and what kept biting me was the instruction set support. I couldn’t use PyTorch because some Python dependency had a C library that assumed AVX.
csdreamer7 4y ago
Reduce, reuse, recycle. But... with hardware mitigations slowing down pre-Skylake hardware and new ARM chips (M1 for now, hopefully others in the future). It really feels like anything older than Kabylake feels un-competitive and not worth the power draw for this generation. For years we only got low single digit increases each generation from Intel. Then AMD, and later Apple, disrupted this. With the IPC of the new M1s, I honestly wonder if it would use less energy for these server parts to be (barely) recycled and manufactured into M2s from Apple or whatever Qualcomm is brewing with those Apple CPU designers they hired.
hedgehog 4y ago
It's a hard sell with modern CPUs getting so much faster. At a previous company most of our office build & test machines were refurb HP Z620 or Z640s from a reseller called TekBoost (no relationship). Worked great back then. It might still make sense if RAM quantity is the main constraint on your workflow, you can get a >256GB machine for under $2000, but otherwise modern machines are going to be faster and less hassle.
accrual 4y ago
I have experience with this. My main PC is a Haswell Xeon (4C/8T 4GHz), 32GB ECC, 1080Ti, 1TB 860 SSD. I replaced the proprietary power supply with Seasonic and added a Noctua cooler. For an 8 year old chip, this box rocks and plays most games at 4K60.
nonamenoslogan 4y ago
I completely agree on keeping old gear running but the tradeoffs in power consumption make it worth upgrading to current-gen after a certain amount of time.
JustSomeNobody 4y ago
Still running my little TS140. Just chugs along…
gjvc 4y ago
hp Z240 SFF quad-core xeon w/ 64G RAM here, NVidia K1200 graphics. works great for Debian.
mmalachowski 4y ago
I went a little further in 2020 and started working on HP Server. They are even cheaper than Workstations but need some upgrades to be comfortably used at home (silent fans etc). I use 2x westmere cpu (x5670) as performance vs price is still excellent. DDR3 ram is dirt cheap. Combined with nvme drive it just really fast machine for any developer task I do, even some graphics. Power consumption is 140W at idle, up to 350W at full load. I use it few hours a day, so the electricity bill is not something to consider here. My conversion: https://www.instructables.com/Convert-HP-DL380-G6-to-Cheap-Gaming-PC/ https://www.instructables.com/Convert-HP-DL380-G6-to-Cheap-G...
wiseleo 4y ago
We have ewaste laptops with SSD, Core i7, and 16GB RAM on eBay for less than $100. They will cost less for electricity. I use them for everything.
kristianp 4y ago
I'm considering getting the oldest motherboard and i7 cpu that supports 64gb of RAM, as an upgrade for my i7-3770 desktop, which still feels fast enough, but only has 16gb. They're so cheap on ebay, and it would be a way to get avx-2 support too. The risk is that 2nd hand may have reliability problems of course.
ksaj 4y ago
Don't forget that in order to be secure, you have to turn off the features that make it so fast. I have an old Mac with Xeon CPU that has not had software updates since before Spectre and Meltdown, et al. I bought it for its performance and have my workflow finely enmeshed, so I don't plan on applying patches that intentionally slow it down. It sure is good at running Logic Audio. Don't need networking for that, so it is disabled. The CPU performance is more important than connectivity for its use and purposes. So it stays air gapped for the security, and unpatched for the performance.
ThinkBeat 4y ago
My experience is that it is heavy, noisy and uses a lot of power creating heat. Some are a real joy hardware wish to work on if your only other experience is with cheap consumer desktops. Well-engineered ways to replace harddrives, access RAM chips. switch out PCI cards. I was amazed with some of the first one I got my hands on. That was an AIX Workstation back a long time ago. Why dont they do this everywhere? I thought. Well price. Issues can be enteprisy expensive components and ports.
eternityforest 4y ago
A very quick glance at benchmarks seems to show these older machines are on par with some core i3 stuff. It's cheap for a reason. For a few hundred more I'm sure there's a used Surface or something with better specs and insanely less power. If you actually have a job that needs lots of CPU power, you can afford better, if you don't, you can probably get by with any cheap laptop.
jacknews 4y ago
These are great for sticking a ton of memory, and old disks in, but price/performance is probably questionable compared to new processors in 2022, especially if you include running costs. Another option are the 'remanufactured' mainboard bundles on the chinese sites. You can get an 8-core ivy bridge (intel's last great cpu imho) such as 2650v2, 16GB ECC ram and the mainboard for <$100 shipped.
water8 4y ago
Your electricity bill will be high if you leave it on all day

155 points by vmoore 4y ago

Used chromebooks are another good case of the arbitrage that the article refers to.

From an environmental efficiency perspective I cannot recommend. The power consumption of old server chips, even in idle, is pretty big compared to modern, more efficient 10-7nm desktop chips. If your energy bills are a rounding error in your monthly budget then go ahead, but then you can actually afford modern and more efficient chips. And then there's the extra heat and noise you'll have to deal with.

ekianjo 4y ago
Erm, reusing is more effective than building a new computer from scratch. New chips are not environmentally friendly to make, use large amount of pure water, etc... related article from a few years ago about the Z400: https://boilingsteam.com/gaming-on-a-cheap-xeon-the-hp-z400-workstation/ https://boilingsteam.com/gaming-on-a-cheap-xeon-the-hp-z400-...
- iasay 4y ago
  Not when you’re paying the electricity bill it’s not. My old workstation cost me a 14” MacBook Pro in power in 5 years. Plus you can get new in box Lenovo mini PCs with 11th gen i5 in for less than the price of a second hand Xeon desktop that’s actually usable now. They pull average 30 watts.
  - iforgotpassword 4y ago
    Op specifically said environmental perspective, so it doesn't matter whether you pay 5ct or 90ct per kWh.
    - iasay 4y ago
      It does however depend on how much coal you shovel into it. The point is you can’t go “the environment” and throw half the concerns out of the window. It’s way more nuanced than that.
      - iforgotpassword 4y ago
        That however is a fair point. I would be genuinely interested in the actual numbers. Gut feeling tells me buying a new computer has to be much much worse than running a ten year old machine even on coal, since a lot of these components come from all across the world, get produced in countries some of which have lax to no regulation regarding pollution, use of toxic substances, and so on. The hard thing is probably trying to break this down to one individual computer being made.
    - naniwaduni 4y ago
      It absolutely matters if those kWh are backed by environmental damage. Also if you can spend that money elsewhere to reduce environmental damage.
  - hexo 4y ago
    OK, let's calculate! Old PC amortized to 130W constantnly, 24/7, @ 20c per kWh = 0.624$ per day, that is 227.76 per year. New workstation today is like ~4000$. So that means you'd have to run it more than 17 years at that price of electricity to be on par with price of new computer, not counting electricity for new PC. I've actually was able to turn off all heaters during winter and heat my house using computers only! I'd say, "higher" TDP of older CPU was really an advantage here. And, let's be real, new high performance CPUs arent low-TDP either (270W for new AMDs), or GPUs (350W range for high end gaming card). So, I'd really say it's environmentally friendlier to use waste heat as house heating than using "space heaters" only. (I really do have to heat using electricity, as I don't have gas nor any other source.)
    - iasay 4y ago
      Where does your 20c/kWh come from? In summer what to you do with that excess heat? Far more nuanced than trite calculations chosen to back up your conclusion. Also you’re rebasing the argument on a new $4000 spend when you can spend $400 on a mini PC with the same performance as an old Xeon as suggested.
      - hexo 4y ago
        20(euro)cents used to be average price in my country. I actually have much lower price (about one third of that) because I don't have other energy source. It does not really matter where that price came from, as it can nicely serve as reference point and you can easily scale it according to your price of electricity. Also, $400 mini PC have performance nowhere near workstation, since RAM only costs more, not even thinking about gaming GPU or price of decent SSDs and HDDs. What did I do with excess heat? Opened window and turned off POWER8 energy hog.
        iasay 4y ago
        $400 mini PC gets you an i5-11500T with NVME SSD that will take 128Gb of RAM. Some of them even pop up with NVidia T400 in them. New with Lenovo warranty on eBay. The i5-11500T has better single and multi thread performance. Sure you won’t get an RTX in it but that’s a 1% case really when we’re talking software engineering. That’s a hell of a lot better value proposition than a 5+ year old Xeon which is what we’re seeing suggested here.
  - scns 4y ago
    My plan was upgrading my i5 4460 and get the best bang for my buck. Was eyeing an i7 4790K which would have cost 140€. Got a workstation with a xeon equivalent to the 4770, with a quadro K2200, an intel dc ssd (RSP new ~400$, a 2TB HD and 32GB RAM for 180€ instead.
  - stigz 4y ago
    It's not about you, bud. Speaking at a global level it is more efficient.
    - iasay 4y ago
      Show me the calculation.
- dtgriscom 4y ago
  Citation? There's a cost to generating/transmitting energy, there's a cost to building/shipping new computers. Any idea which is "worse" for the environment (for some definition of "worse")? I'm not being snippy; I honestly don't know. Personally, if I need a solution that's good for a number of years, I'd go for a new, efficient computer rather than reuse an old toaster.
  - johnfernow 4y ago
    No figures for a Xeon machine in particular, but some other figures for a general idea (from The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee, 2020 second edition, page 140): Manufacturing a computer: * 326 kg CO2e: 13-inch MacBook Pro, 128GB storage * 475 kg CO2e: 15-inch Dell Precision 5530, 256GB storage * 620 kg CO2e: 16-inch MacBook Pro, 1TB storage Using it: * 4g CO2e per hour on 13-inch MacBook Pro * 6g CO2e per hour on 16-inch MacBook Pro * 20g CO2e per hour on average-efficient laptop * 98g CO2e per hour on desktop computer with screen * 130g CO2e per hour on gaming PC with screen The figures for using it are based on the US grid's typical mix of coal, renewables, nuclear, etc. In places with a greener grid, such as the UK, the figures are different (there's a different edition of the book for the US and UK version, and possibly other regions as well.) So we don't have figures for the emissions for a Xeon machine, either in manufacturing or usage. And these figures are estimates, of course, not precise measurements. But they help us to get a good picture of the scale of the impact. Let's assume that you use your computer 12 hours a day, 365 days a year. On a standard gaming PC with a screen, that'd be 569400g CO2e per year, or 569kg. The big question then is how much more inefficient is a Xeon machine than a standard gaming PC. If the Xeon machine emits 1.33x more than a standard gaming PC, that'd put its yearly usage emissions at 757kg CO2e, so if you used your machine for 5 years, than the difference in emissions would be 940kg CO2e between the Xeon and standard gaming PC, which would probably be enough to justify buying a new machine. But if it's only 1.1x more inefficient, than that difference would be 285 kg, not nearly enough to justify a new machine (and probably still the case even if you use the machine for 10 years.) Ultimately, I'm not sure that we have the information necessary to definitively answer this, but all other things being equal, I'm skeptical that the CPU alone will make an enormous difference in power draw in day to day usage. A newer CPU will be more efficient when at 100% usage, but does it draw significantly less power when at idle? I don't know. But if anyone else has found any information that could help, I'd love to check it out. That said, there are plenty of second-hand machines that are more efficient than a Xeon machine. Once there are no second-hand efficient machines left, it'd be worthwhile to dig in deep on the emissions of old Xeon machines versus newer more efficient machines, but right now you can just buy used and refurbished efficient machines, so I'd probably just recommend that.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  In a world where we had a reasonable tax on carbon, environmental friendliness and individual economic rationality would be one and the same. But we don't live in that world. So they are not.
  - beachy 4y ago
    If ever there was a glove perfectly fitted for the invisible hand of the market, it's saving our planet by taxing carbon. Yet here we remain, whining about why it can never work.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    One would think economics would have been onboard with environmentalism a lot longer ago, but economics as a culture/institution is very much aligned with the ultra-rich. Economics, the leadership and prominent members of its social network, were all too willing to rubberstamp the whims of the "elites", future of the human race be damned. Economics the "science" is a lot like the police "union", the only acceptable union to the right because it keeps them in place, while economics the "science" is acceptable because it justifies their position and wealth.
- wiseowise 4y ago
  They’re going to be made regardless of whether you buy them or not.
Something1234 4y ago
You're not wrong if your only calculation is my power usage rather than the roundtrip of making the new chips and the new computer. There's a reason it's reduce, reuse and recycle. Reduce the amount of junk. Reuse existing junk. If neither work, then dispose of.
- iasay 4y ago
  At some point there’s an energy efficiency trade off which needs to be considered. It’s way more complicated and depends on where you get your energy from and the efficiency of the device. Using something until it dies is not always the best outcome.
raverbashing 4y ago
I would also not recommend because of overall support For example, does these support AVX? Newer software might require it, even if it works fine for 99% of the stuff you do elsewhere If you want to get used stuff then get some 2/3 yr old laptop.
- api 4y ago
  I've never seen anything that actually requires AVX. SSE yes, but virtually all 64-bit x64 chips have SSE.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - nix23 4y ago
    Star citicen needs avx...z600 sadface here
- Felger 4y ago
  AVX is supported since 1st gen Xeon E3 (Sandy Bridge), launched Q2 '11.
  - raverbashing 4y ago
    That's interesting, because I've seen some software complaining on older machines, but it might have been about AVX2
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Reduce > Reuse > Recycle
35mm 4y ago
Also they tend to be quite loud
api 4y ago
If you have unusually expensive energy then this is correct. Globally though this neglects embodied energy. A new machine with all new chips takes a ton of energy to produce. It's usually most efficient to reuse old stuff as long as it's useful rather than pitching it as e-waste and buying new. Also keep in mind that a desktop can usually be put to sleep or turned off when not in use. Doesn't need to run 24/7.
pdpi 4y ago
Even if you don't care about the environmental side, power consumption is still very important. When I'm playing games, the temperature at my desk is 2-3 degrees higher than the other end of the room, and the fans get pretty damn loud. I'm actively trying to figure out how to at least keep my current performance while getting that heat under control.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  > Even if you don't care about the environmental side Why wouldn’t you?
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    Is there an IT equivalent of coal rolling?
    - iasay 4y ago
      I think this entire thread is about doing that. My MacBook I’m typing this on is sitting here at 9.2W (battery full, running off mains).
    - 2III7 4y ago
      Running all cores on turbo even when idle.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      Crypto mining.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - elteto 4y ago
      Yes, programming in dynamic languages like Python.
  - pdpi 4y ago
    I thought that was a more polite than saying "even if you're a selfish asshole, there's still a reason to do it out of pure self-interest".
icegreentea2 4y ago
Comparing system idle across large generations is somewhat tricky, but we can pull some ballpark comparisons. A ~2013 workstation Xeon has a system idle of ~75W (https://www.anandtech.com/show/7852/intel-xeon-e52697-v2-and-xeon-e52687w-v2-review-12-and-8-cores/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/7852/intel-xeon-e52697-v2-and...). This should be similar to the HP system from the start of the linked article. Modern system idles sit in the ~50W range (https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-12900k-alder-lake-12th-gen/20.html https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-12900k-alde...). Yeah, I know the components aren't matched... but that's what you get hunting for data. 25W isn't nothing, but it's not gigantic either. It's hard to get precise figures about the embodied energy of consumer electronics, but we have a range of 2000-6000MJ (https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Embodied_energy https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Embodied_energy). At 2000MJ, the payoff time for 25W of idle saving is quite large - on the order of 900 days. That's a lot of time to play with to try to design a hardware refresh approach to minimize total energy expenditure over your lifespan. And obviously from a $$$ standpoint, even taking some of the higher energy costs (~50cents/kWH), the cost delta over an entire year is pretty modest - $110 over a year. Once again, not insignificant, but given the discount factors involved (you can possibly get a $400 dollar used machine instead of a $1000 new), still quite possibly worth while. Obviously all of these are modified by what your actual system loading is, what your hardware refresh cycles look like, and local cost of electricity.
- 60Vhipx7b4JL 4y ago
  A Dell T110-II with a quad core xeon and 4x4GB RAM and and a 3.5" HDD idles around 21W. It really depends on the systems.
  - Felger 4y ago
    Had almost the same setup and saw about 32W idle on mine. T110 II with Xeon E3 1220, 4 Gb RAM ECC, 1x 128 GB SATA SSD + 1x 6 To HDD IronWolf on a PERC H200 PCIe card. With a WD 10 GB external HDD, the UPS gives me a 50W load.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    People fail to grasp that a thing drawing power at idle is the memory, which doesn't have a useful idle state. It must be refreshed constantly. 16GB is pretty reasonable. 8GB would be more efficient if you can get away with it. If you lard up a workstation with tons of RAM you don't need, you pay for it on your power bill.
bojangleslover 4y ago
Who cares? Compared to heating and A/C (in the US and Japan), 10 Xeons probably aren't even a drop in the bucket.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
a refrigerator, ironing clothes, heating or AC consume at least 3-5 times as much (assuming they are latest generations, which usually are not, and the CPU is running full throttle all the time, which is not usually the case). I don't think that a Xeon is a real threat in the context of environmental damages. Switching to newer CPUs would save a few kWs per year, the difference is negligible in the grand scheme of things.
- maccard 4y ago
  My fridge uses practically no energy for 23.5 hours a day, and for those 30 minutes it's active, it's a heat pump which tends to be incredibly efficient. Many parts of the world (huge parts of Europe for example) don't need or have AC, and for 9 months of the year I don't need heating in my home - despite living in a 130 year old stone building in Scotland. Short of the 3kw electric kettle I have, my workstation is the single most energy intense appliance in my house, and it's used for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 47 weeks a year.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    on average a modern refrigerator consumes about 2kw/day most of them are 10 years old and are on 24 hours a day, everyday. and in many parts of the western World they use very big, very power hungry ones, coupled with an external freezer, for long term storage. > Many parts of the world (huge parts of Europe for example) I'm in Europe, in many parts of Europe we do need AC. Ice age has not returned... yet it's 30 degrees right now here, at 2 am. And I'm a thousand kms north from truly hot parts of my country. It was 31 degrees in Berlin today, and July has just started. > Short of the 3kw electric kettle I have, my workstation is the single most energy intense appliance Your workstation consumes around less than 1Kw/day (even a ten years ago CPU is less than 100 watts/hour idle, which is most of the job it usually does), 1kw it's one hour of ironing, less than an hour with the AC on (a small one, I hear in US they suck up to 3.5 kW/h, average houses are bigger) or of a washing machine (cold water) and 40 minutes of a dryer (a low power program. they can go up to more than 2kw/hour for home appliances and up to 6kw for industrial ones). on average 40-50% of the energy budget for a data center is spent on cooling. and they are very efficient at doing it at scale. maybe, just maybe, if energy efficiency is so important, we could start by reducing useless waste: crypto mining or videogames that need a 350 watts GPU to run.

voltagex_ 4y ago

I pay 34c/kWh and likely more in the future. No thanks.

sam345 4y ago
Wow, where is that?
- ttyyzz 4y ago
  Germany. I know this because I pay the same.
  - Roritharr 4y ago
    Same here, it's actually one of the reasons I am looking to move to Canada now. Our country has been mismanaged in this regard to a point where I don't see this being solved in the next 20 years, also ideologically the majority does think low energy prices are bad now, so don't event want this fixed.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - OJFord 4y ago
      I'm surprised to see market efficiency/management as a reason to move to Canada - usually in such context it's protectionism, milk tokens, etc. being (negatively) discussed. Is the 'hydro' (as they call it) cheap there? I heard the opposite, but that from a Canadian, so perhaps it's just that it's gone up a lot (as everywhere) and they didn't appreciate their lower starting point. Edit: oh, very variable between provinces - https://www.energyhub.org/electricity-prices/ https://www.energyhub.org/electricity-prices/
      - mrshadowgoose 4y ago
        Yep, highly variable based on the province. In Quebec it's so cheap that electric heat is common. But yeah, the corruption is pretty bad here (of course, relatively speaking in the context of first world countries). A few dozen large corporations basically own our government.

pcdoodle 4y ago

I'd go for a SFF workstation, You can get a CPU with a passmark above 8,000 to idle under 10w for the whole system. We decommissioned a dual xeon setup after realizing it was sucking over 200w while doing nothing. YMMV.

immigrantheart 4y ago
Can you give me an example of those CPUs? I am thinking of building a home server/NAS.
- pcdoodle 4y ago
  My current setup is a HP EliteDesk G3 w/i7 6700 CPU. The PSU inside is 80+ rated and I've seen the externally measured power consumption as low as 9W idling Windows Server 2019. I have no spinning disks inside so add at least a few watts average for each. Another advantage to using Business Workstation SFF units is they're cheap and take up little space, you can have a backup unit ready to swap parts with.
- InvaderFizz 4y ago
  i5-6500 Optiplex is under $100 shipped on eBay. Scores 5600 passmark. Step up to the $200 i5-8500 Optiplex and now you are looking at 9500 passmark. The 8500 is a great CPU. It is what runs my home Docker setup with Plex (hardware video transcode).
- dervjd 4y ago
  Keep in mind that unless you're doing something like transcoding for a Plex server, you don't really need much in the way of CPU for a home NAS. I have a Synology DS1618+ that uses the Intel Atom C3538, and run a few other services on it (AdGuard/Sonarr/Radarr/Sabnzbd etc). Just looked at the performance history, and CPU utilization seems to sit around 5-10% with a few spikes to 40-50%.

thanatos519 4y ago

I <3 my refurbished Thinkstation P500. Solid well-designed case, 4 Xeon cores, nVidia Kepler, 2x SSD, and 64GB ECC RAM for less than the cost of new 64GB ECC. Not as fast or power-efficient as a new workstation, but nothing new had to be manufactured!

secure 4y ago

I have been using an HP z440 for years as my work machine. It’s fine, performance-wise, and definitely for running a browser, video conferencing, and terminal emulators. One downside of workstation machines is that everything seems to be custom, even mundane things like fan connectors. See https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2021-08-28-silent-hp-z440-workstation/ https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2021-08-28-silent-hp-z44... for my experience with swapping the fans against quieter models.

pxmpxm 4y ago
Was there perceptible difference after you replaced the front and rear fans?

libertybylaw 4y ago

I use an old 2013 Xeon Workstation as daily driver and have been very happy with it. It came with 32 Gigs of cosmic-radiation-shielded RAM, two 16 core processers (1.9 GHZ, granted), and all the peripheral ports I could need. I slapped an old 2016 Nvidia graphics card into it and its been able to do all that I can need and more. Considering I got it for free, it's a great deal. I would easily have paid $200 for this machine though - I can run a dedicated ubuntu VM with 8GB RAM alongside 100+ chrome browsers no problem. I equate it to semi-truck cab, as compared to sports-cars of the consumer desktop market. It's not that fast and it gets a bit lower gas mileage (electricity consumption), but it can haul 10 tons of cargo.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
I'm in the overclocked Xeon 1680v2 gang and loving it. It's quite capable with a more modern GPU and the X79 motherboard also supports NVMe drives.
- hexo 4y ago
  What motherboard, please? Can you also boot from NVMe? I was looking into this, have Asus P9X79 PRO.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    Ha! I use the Asus X79 Deluxe and yes, I can boot from PCIe. I had a P9X79 Pro before but stupidly wanted TPM support so I replaced with an Asus X79 Deluxe from ebay which had bent CPU pins that I was able to fix. The TPM support was a waste but I gained the ability to PCIe boot. Before that I was able to boot PCIe on the P9X79 Pro by putting the boot partition on a SATA SSD I believe. I use these for my drives: https://a.co/d/2jaYUbM https://a.co/d/2jaYUbM
    - hexo 4y ago
      Thanks a lot! I hoped i'd be able to boot from PCIe, but boot partition on a SATA drive is quite ok too.

pgrote 4y ago

We have done this for workstation refreshes (Windows 10) and it works marvelously. Reliability has been fantastic. We keep 2 machines as spares for parts and have experienced an issue with one power supply. PC Health Check reports it doesn't support secure boot, no TPM 2.0 and the CPU isn't supported. We haven't tried to install Windows 11. The model we went with was Z420s.

zhala 4y ago

I think most people would be better suited getting micro form factor PC's like the Dell 7050's or Lenovo M920q. Can be had for ~200 on eBay with a 6th or 7th gen i5/i7 and only draw 10-20w in use.

dervjd 4y ago
100% this. The Dell Optiplex Micro line is fantastic. Servethehome has a pretty good article comparing a bunch of different manufactures/models - https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/ https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...

readingnews 4y ago

And if it gets popular, the price of old Xeon workstations will go through the roof, just like old stereos did. Used to be able to get an old Marantz 2220B for $100 on the bay. Now they are unobtainium or $850, as an example. I think the same thing happened to old Sun workstations. We used to reuse them a LOT. Could get an ultra 2 decked out for like $200. Now, $800-$1000 with less CPU and ram than a few years back. Could be supply and demand, but it seems to happen a lot. People go "hey, that stuff was great, lets use it again" and the price skyrockets, then the people all go "hey, that old stuffs too expensive". :)

fmajid 4y ago
It may be companies needing to run legacy software on Solaris versions not supported on more recent hardware.
danachow 4y ago
> unobtainium or $850 In fairness the Marantz is being purchased for a collector’s aesthetic - not just for a “value” PC which is the whole point of the old Xeon - the price rise is limited by this elasticity in demand. And $850 I think is illustrative - that’s not unobtanium for middle class - it’s just happen to be a bit beyond what most people spend on a side hobby. Similarly old Sun hardware either you’re screwed with a backward compat issue or again collecting since they are now vintage. x86 doesn’t have the former effect for the most part.
- readingnews 4y ago
  I mean ubobtainium in that at one point they were everywhere on ebay, and now its once in a blue moon. Much like some Xeons the poster is talking about. I remember when supermicro computers, outfitted, were everywhere and cheap. Now, not as prevalent as before. I get it with the Sun, but the same thing will eventually happen with Xeon for example. We will reach a point where those CPUs with that socket and SCSI / SAS connectors and drives are dang hard to find, or no one makes ram any longer, etc.

zwieback 4y ago

I work at hp where we get new PCs every few years but I also have two maxed-out z800 workstations, one for Linux, one for Windows. For the most part this works great but the one downside is that the ancient BIOS and older slots prevent some upgrades.

dervjd 4y ago

Take it from someone who has done this - it's a terrible idea. I bought a HP Z620 off of eBay for $500 in 2019. Spec'd with 2x Xeon E5-2680 @2.7GHZ & 96GB of RAM, and had a 1TB SSD. Bought a RX570 graphics card, and away I went. It's been an absolute pain in the ass: heavy, huge, tempermental, and sucks an enormous amount of power. Idles at 250-300watts just sitting at the login screen. My home office temperature goes up by several degrees when it's on. It's also noisy, but not from the fans. There's noticeable coil whine/high pitched sounds when the computer is not idling. You probably wouldn't hear it over the background noise in a normal office, but you definitely hear it at home. And of course it sounds like a rocket when the fans are going full blast, which I'll admit is kind of fun. Reliability has been a crapshoot - motherboard died and I had to source another from eBay. Pretty sure one of the RAM sticks is dying too - every few months it crashes hard (with an error screen mentioning a memory issue) but HP's hardware testing tools find nothing. Upside: very easy to take apart and replace the motherboard - everything is modular and slots out. Software wise - all kinds of weird driver issues, especially with power management. Sleep mode usually crashes the machine. Of course none of the drivers have been updated in years, and Windows 11 isn't officially supported. ESXi works well enough after some BIOS tinkering - could not get GPU passthrough to work, and some of the system sensors aren't detected. Bare metal Windows 11 install works after some minor registry changes, but not officially supported. The most irritating part of this tale is that I didn't buy this to be my daily driver. I've always had a home server, and thought it would be fun to have the extra CPU/RAM power on tap to spin up VMs with reckless abandon. Well after all the issues with the Z620, I ended up buying a Dell OptiPlex Micro with 32GB of RAM & an i5-10500T. It's the size of a book, cost about the same as the Z620, is silent, sips power, and has been dead reliable. Granted, it's not as powerful - the E5-2680 has a 12,500 passmark score (and there's two of them) versus the i5-10500T's 10,319 passmark score. However this has never actually been an issue for me. Tldr: There's a reason these dinosaurs are cheap. Power hogs, noisy, unreliable, and a giant hassle.

fmajid 4y ago
Gresham’s law at work. If a company is shedding half its workstations due to upgrades, the stable and reliable ones used by non-smokers are not going out first.
4y ago

Synaesthesia 4y ago

I had a Xeon workstation, 1st gen Core architecture, similar to the first Mac Pro. Yes I managed to buy it cheaply, but the noise was pretty loud. Especially during POST it would spin the fans at max for 30 seconds which sounded like a vacuum cleaner! Not great for nighttime use.

virtuallynathan 4y ago
I got a 3 or 4U chassis and hacked in Noctua fans, made it silent.
fmajid 4y ago
HP Z workstations are pretty good and have specified acoustic levels. In places like Germany I believe it’s a workplace safety requirement.
landemva 4y ago
After a few boot cycles, I usually change BIOS setting to skip the POST. It just takes too long and the results don't have much value on a stable machine - if it broke during last shutdown, I know anyways on startup. Have an older Xeon which I use as remote desktop. Is solid.

iasay 4y ago

CraigJPerry 4y ago

If you’re UK based, that famous auction site has had a glut of Dell T3610s for a while with 32Gb and a basic nvidia quadra for £140 delivered which i thought was alright. I took 4 of them and i can’t complain about the boxes - support both legacy bios and uefi (so netboot + gpt disks = easy rebuilding between os’s), they’re quiet (except when working hard obv). But… the power consumption! Each box is another £12/mo on the electricity bill. So i end up just having them on a smart plug and turned on only when i’m actually using them.

rossmohax 4y ago
which auction it is?
- CraigJPerry 4y ago
  These ones, i see they've halfed in price, that's a steal IMO! https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=t3610%2032gb&_sacat=0&LH_Sold=1&LH_Complete=1&rt=nc&_udhi=150 https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=t3610%2032g...

whalesalad 4y ago

I have a few Dell R720 servers in my basement. One of them recently became a dedicated remote dev box due to a client project that had some hefty requirements. It's got 2 processors (24 cores total), 64GB of ECC memory, and 6 SAS drives in a RAID configuration. It'll build the linux kernel in 179 seconds, lol (I genuinely do not know if this is good or bad, but probably not great) Idle it consumes about 120-130 watts of power. This beast does all the heavy lifting, and then I use my other machines as thin clients to code. Lately my setup includes VS Code w/ the remote SSH extension for developing on the server. I have a love/hate relationship with VS Code. I don't use the built-in terminal, instead I will use iTerm connected via mosh or ssh to the server, where I use tmux to keep a long running session of all my crap. I usually have a few windows for a repl, various app processes, a psql shell open at all times, etc. It's very nice to be able to roam from my macbook on the couch to my mac mini in my office with zero interruption in flow. I have my own vpn and also run tailscale, so I can hack from anywhere with this setup. Locally, latency has been almost imperceptible. So this has worked out really great. The only real shortcoming is that the processors are kinda old and run hot, but for $200 I can get a matching pair of newer chips that are a lot quicker. Just haven't pulled the trigger, because I am trying to ascertain real-world benchmarks on just how much my life would improve. Part of me wants to build a monster Ryzen 5900X workstation to have under my desk, but I enjoy the fact that this server is in my basement where I cannot hear or see it. I don't need a new workstation, these servers are so great, but it would def be fun to have some lightning fast raid/nvme storage.

bee_rider 4y ago
Another neat aspect of this sort of setup is that you can even use locked down devices like iPads, as long as the device has an SSH client (which iPads do).

kwatsonafter 4y ago

I love to see others sharing my enthusiasm for making old machines have a useful, "senior citizen" life. It really warms my heart.

accrual 4y ago
Installed XP on a K6-III+ 600MHz box this morning. It's indeed having a useful (if only for fun) "retirement". :)

jancsika 4y ago

> Or maybe there’s a quality issue that’s imperceptible to you but was enough to prevent that shirt from going to Neiman Marcus. Or maybe it's a line specifically manufactured for those stores to appear as if it were a decent buy and which is manufactured cheaply. So get a bunch of "deals" without noticing that you actually loaded up your burrito with mostly lettuce.

iforgotpassword 4y ago

I think the sweet spot is somewhere around 2018 for used stuff currently, when it comes to performance per money. Got an i5-8400 with 8GB a few months ago for 80€. Idle consumption is 10W with a spinning disk.

hexo 4y ago

It already is! I've swapped old i7-3820 @ 4.3GHz for E5-2697v2 few months ago. Bought another 32Gigs of RAM, and now I already have PCIe 3 (long overdue). I've also tried to overclock it via BCLK (100-110MHz) and gained ~300MHz. It happily compiles and runs windows in KVM with no problem (GPU over PCIe passthrough, and looking-glass yay!). Overall experience seems a lot smoother than i7, probably due to 30MB L3 and a lot more cores.

nix23 4y ago

My z600 is now ~12yo and still my main workstation, upgraded ram 47gb and a second cpu for pennys. I love that thing.

rybosworld 4y ago

"Today, these chips sell in used form for as little as $180 on eBay—a more than 90 percent price decrease, a price $100 less than the roughly comparable AMD Ryzen 7 2700X" A 2700x is ~30% faster and also uses less power. Regardless, you can find it for $210, not $280 as the author claims: https://www.newegg.com/amd-ryzen-7-2700x/p/19-113-499 https://www.newegg.com/amd-ryzen-7-2700x/p/19-113-499 A better comparison would be the 2700, which is actually a fair bit cheaper than the E5-2667 and still outperforms it. Benchmark: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-2700X-vs-Intel-Xeon-E5-2667-v2-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-2700/3238vs2154vs3240 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-2700X-vs-In... A 2700 available for $140: https://www.newegg.com/amd-ryzen-7-2700/p/19-113-498 https://www.newegg.com/amd-ryzen-7-2700/p/19-113-498

gravypod 4y ago
You can also buy TR1900x for ~$90 USD now that the platform is dead. In a few years upgrade to 2990wx https://www.ebay.com/itm/133925326383?hash=item1f2e924e2f:g:aRcAAOSwXw9iUUsr https://www.ebay.com/itm/133925326383?hash=item1f2e924e2f:g:...
somat 4y ago
You are comparing the the price of a cpu to the price of an entire entire system. Add a nice case ~150 a nice power supply ~150 a nice mother board ~150 some ram ~150 storage ~150 and a few nice fans because the fans that come with the case are always terrible ~40 for a fair comparison. The point is you might be able to build a decent computer for under 1000 USD or you could buy a surplus server for ~200.
- rybosworld 4y ago
  What? The price of the Xeon is for the chip alone, not a full server...

cjbprime 4y ago

An advantage I didn't see specifically mentioned in the article -- some CPUs, especially multi-core, especially Threadripper PRO, aren't released to the individual market, so enterprise surplus can be the only way to get them.

unixhero 4y ago

Yup. E5-2697 v2 dual for the win! I have three of those machines on my household.

kkielhofner 4y ago
I have a dual 2697 v3 and it's still remarkably capable. Single core perf is "not great" but for my use cases it works fantastically all things considered. Current specs: - 512GB ECC - x8 16TB spinning rust - x8 4TB NVMe - 1TB Intel P3600 for EFI boot and "misc" - Nvidia RTX 3090 (rare dual slot) - Dual 10gig ethernet + onboard 1gig ethernet It performs well with just about anything I throw at it - even concurrently. 512GB of RAM really helps. While this is more-or-less maxed out for my configuration I still couldn't imagine having three of them in my house!
- unixhero 4y ago
  One for a casual gaming rig in the living room One for a homelab with Plex and other things One for a proper workstation I am a happy peep

admax88qqq 4y ago

I used a xeon workstation for a while. It was okay. I decided to go back to consumer parts. It's big and heavy, so no it can't go on my desk but under it. Complicates moving my desk uo and down to stand. It's loud, like real loud. I started it be concerned over what it was doing to my hearing 8 hours a day. Replacement parts take a while to arrive cause they're all via random ebay sellers. And there's some weird compatibility issues now and then. FreeBSD refuses to boot on the machine, no idea why, kernel just hangs during boot. A few Linux distros do include the driver for the SAS controllers by default, so I had to build and manage my own kernel across upgrades. Overall it was a cool experience but I'm more comfortable back on consumer parts. I built a quiet workstation, I can replace any part quickly from Amazon or by going to the local computer store. My machine is smaller, lighter quieter, easier to maintain and has better software compatibility

loeg 4y ago
I ran a current gen (at the time) Xeon-D microATX for a while, for ECC support. Biggest downside was it didn’t have a soundcard. Now I use AMD for ECC and it has all the consumer niceties.

1970-01-01 4y ago

Data point: I have been doing exactly this with a X3430 45nm system for over a decade. Old Xenon systems are very power hungry compared to modern servers. Expect to pay tens of dollars per month if you want 24h uptime. I just checked the Kill-A-Watt behind the UPS and it's reading 170KWh for 2054 hours. I'll leave the exercise of determining if this is cheap or expensive to the reader.

lproven 4y ago
"Xenon" or "Xeon"?

green-salt 4y ago

Might be fun if you're not paying for the electricity or its cheap in your area. I have a Dell T410 and will likely get something a little newer, but it won't be powered on most of the time like I use my Ryzen desktop. They tend to be much louder too. Having ECC, a SAS backplane and HBA is really nice to host a file server with though. I have a couple 10/40 Gbit NICs that can all work at the same time because it has enough PCIe lanes.

chx 4y ago

I would consider this advice now outdated. Yes, it was a great advice in the 2010s -- I had such a Dell, too. It's well documented how IPC only has grown 20-25% from Sandy Bridge to Skylake and then the wait was long, long until a new uarch has emerged in 2021. But towards the end of the decade, Ryzen has disturbed the still waters and the number of cores have, well, risen sharply while keeping a competitive IPC and Intel eventually followed suit. Because of this, the equally long time rule of thumb where most apps don't really use multiple cores well so you don't need them on the desktop is also dead by now. I wouldn't recommend a Haswell Xeon as this article does today.

dredmorbius 4y ago
It'll be interesting to see how much the Clouding of Everything affects this wave, but with a likely flood of startup failures coming, there may be cheap gently used servers entering the market in the not-too-distant future. Or not.
mise_en_place 4y ago
I have an Ice Lake Xeon W. It’s ok, compiles are pretty decent. Chromium takes a long time though, even with 24 cores/48 threads. If you want a lesson in how not to organize your source repo, the chromium project would be it. It’s kind of mind boggling how bloated browsers have become.
TimPC 4y ago
More important than the raw performance numbers my computer comes with a three year parts and service warrantee and I can even pay a small premium to cover accidents and spills. I’m basically guaranteed my computer works for three years or they replace it. What happens if my used workstation breaks down two weeks after I buy it? Why should I take that risk?
- kube-system 4y ago
  A used workstation will have failure rates at the bottom of the bathtub curve when you buy it. A new PC is more likely to experience failures. Solid state components are generally very reliable anyway.

lvl102 4y ago

I ran a similar set up in the past. HP Proliant server. It was not reliable at all and the lengthy POST on reboot kills the whole experience to use it for home use not to mention that it’s actually pricy once you start adding parts. These days, I just run M1 Mac Minis. Cheap. Fast. Reliable.

mamcx 4y ago
Yeah, the M1 is a game changer. Now my biggest noise generator is my keyboard (mechanical!) that is activated on demand -by me!- and my major heat generator is the sun, as should be!

nine_k 4y ago

It could be a good peak load computer, which you turn on when you have a large number-crunching job, like compiling a large codebase. They are great at running at top speed, but not great at idling.

whalesalad 4y ago

Question for those who have a beefy box as a dev workstation: do you run a hypervisor and try and compartmentalize the way the machine is used, or do you just run/drive a bare OS install? I like that a VM can be started, stopped, moved around, snapshotted, rolled back, etc. Also, anyone daily drive Linux and then have a sidecar/utility VM for windows-related stuff like specific apps or gaming care to comment on that experience?

blep_ 4y ago
I just run bare Linux on mine. Sometimes containers on top of that, but only for specific things, not for general use. I was going to do the Windows VM thing but then the gaming laptop I sold when I did this got returned so I just use that instead.
jasomill 4y ago
I sort of do the opposite; my main Windows dev box is a dual-socket HP Z820 ESXi host with multiple GPUs, a large SAS SSD RAID 10 array, and an additional SSD and pair of large SATA hard drives for ESXi scratch/swap and local backups, respectively. While I don't actually use it for gaming, the main Windows dev VM, with 18 cores, 32GB RAM, a Quadro P1000 (read: underclocked GTX 1050 with a few extra driver features; ideal for my purposes, would use something beefier for a gaming box), and a physical USB 3.0 controller, runs games as well as any similarly-equipped hardware box, with the caveat that, if you play online multiplayer games (I don't), some anti-cheat software apparently detects and refuses to run under virtualization. Alongside this "always-on" main VM, I regularly run multiple Linux (both with and without AMD GPU), Windows, and FreeBSD VMs. This configuration works great for me, but it probably helps that my home office infrastructure includes a vCenter Server and mostly runs on two additional ESXi hosts, and that, on a semi-regular basis, I have applications that require connecting old Fibre Channel and even parallel SCSI hardware, so the workstation's extra PCIe slots and "tool-free" case design come in handy. While I wouldn't buy a Z820 today, I'm in no hurry to replace this one; ideally, I'll swap in a similarly-configured Z8 in 2–3 years.

Havoc 4y ago

>Xeon E5-2667 v2 ....and promptly lose in performance benchmarks against a last generation minipc....which in turn are basically laptop class chips of the kind so low power you can passive cool them. [0] Not in the same price class sure, but that should give most people pause anyway. Unless you have a specific need for ECC / out-of-band / server practice / TBs of RAM this a questionable proposition. Plus you need space, cheap electricity, noise tolerance and heat dissipation. That said it is good to create awareness of it. More options is good. I reckon there might be some really good opportunities coming up with Zen 2 AM4 second hand though - some of those configurations are (unofficially) ECC capable, plenty powerful and loads of gamers will be looking to dump their rigs shortly. [0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2667+v2+%40+3.30GHz&id=2154 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2667+... https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+4700U&id=3699 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+4700U&i...

pjmlp 4y ago

Full in sync with the advice, except for playing with modern graphics, my 2009 laptops are perfectly alright. It also helps that I don't do anything container related at home, and at work I am more a fashion victim than anything. So they are perfectly alright for home workloads.

coredog64 4y ago

I had an old Nehalem/Westmere PC kicking around and what kept biting me was the instruction set support. I couldn’t use PyTorch because some Python dependency had a C library that assumed AVX.

csdreamer7 4y ago

Reduce, reuse, recycle. But... with hardware mitigations slowing down pre-Skylake hardware and new ARM chips (M1 for now, hopefully others in the future). It really feels like anything older than Kabylake feels un-competitive and not worth the power draw for this generation. For years we only got low single digit increases each generation from Intel. Then AMD, and later Apple, disrupted this. With the IPC of the new M1s, I honestly wonder if it would use less energy for these server parts to be (barely) recycled and manufactured into M2s from Apple or whatever Qualcomm is brewing with those Apple CPU designers they hired.

hedgehog 4y ago

It's a hard sell with modern CPUs getting so much faster. At a previous company most of our office build & test machines were refurb HP Z620 or Z640s from a reseller called TekBoost (no relationship). Worked great back then. It might still make sense if RAM quantity is the main constraint on your workflow, you can get a >256GB machine for under $2000, but otherwise modern machines are going to be faster and less hassle.

accrual 4y ago

I have experience with this. My main PC is a Haswell Xeon (4C/8T 4GHz), 32GB ECC, 1080Ti, 1TB 860 SSD. I replaced the proprietary power supply with Seasonic and added a Noctua cooler. For an 8 year old chip, this box rocks and plays most games at 4K60.

nonamenoslogan 4y ago

I completely agree on keeping old gear running but the tradeoffs in power consumption make it worth upgrading to current-gen after a certain amount of time.

JustSomeNobody 4y ago

Still running my little TS140. Just chugs along…

gjvc 4y ago

hp Z240 SFF quad-core xeon w/ 64G RAM here, NVidia K1200 graphics. works great for Debian.

mmalachowski 4y ago

I went a little further in 2020 and started working on HP Server. They are even cheaper than Workstations but need some upgrades to be comfortably used at home (silent fans etc). I use 2x westmere cpu (x5670) as performance vs price is still excellent. DDR3 ram is dirt cheap. Combined with nvme drive it just really fast machine for any developer task I do, even some graphics. Power consumption is 140W at idle, up to 350W at full load. I use it few hours a day, so the electricity bill is not something to consider here. My conversion: https://www.instructables.com/Convert-HP-DL380-G6-to-Cheap-Gaming-PC/ https://www.instructables.com/Convert-HP-DL380-G6-to-Cheap-G...

wiseleo 4y ago

We have ewaste laptops with SSD, Core i7, and 16GB RAM on eBay for less than $100. They will cost less for electricity. I use them for everything.

kristianp 4y ago

I'm considering getting the oldest motherboard and i7 cpu that supports 64gb of RAM, as an upgrade for my i7-3770 desktop, which still feels fast enough, but only has 16gb. They're so cheap on ebay, and it would be a way to get avx-2 support too. The risk is that 2nd hand may have reliability problems of course.

ksaj 4y ago

Don't forget that in order to be secure, you have to turn off the features that make it so fast. I have an old Mac with Xeon CPU that has not had software updates since before Spectre and Meltdown, et al. I bought it for its performance and have my workflow finely enmeshed, so I don't plan on applying patches that intentionally slow it down. It sure is good at running Logic Audio. Don't need networking for that, so it is disabled. The CPU performance is more important than connectivity for its use and purposes. So it stays air gapped for the security, and unpatched for the performance.

ThinkBeat 4y ago

My experience is that it is heavy, noisy and uses a lot of power creating heat. Some are a real joy hardware wish to work on if your only other experience is with cheap consumer desktops. Well-engineered ways to replace harddrives, access RAM chips. switch out PCI cards. I was amazed with some of the first one I got my hands on. That was an AIX Workstation back a long time ago. Why dont they do this everywhere? I thought. Well price. Issues can be enteprisy expensive components and ports.

eternityforest 4y ago

A very quick glance at benchmarks seems to show these older machines are on par with some core i3 stuff. It's cheap for a reason. For a few hundred more I'm sure there's a used Surface or something with better specs and insanely less power. If you actually have a job that needs lots of CPU power, you can afford better, if you don't, you can probably get by with any cheap laptop.

jacknews 4y ago

These are great for sticking a ton of memory, and old disks in, but price/performance is probably questionable compared to new processors in 2022, especially if you include running costs. Another option are the 'remanufactured' mainboard bundles on the chinese sites. You can get an 8-core ivy bridge (intel's last great cpu imho) such as 2650v2, 16GB ECC ram and the mainboard for <$100 shipped.

water8 4y ago

Your electricity bill will be high if you leave it on all day