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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 process

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.
lmz 4y ago
Radiation Shielded RAM? Is that an even more expensive kind of ECC?
- LaputanMachine 4y ago
  I think they're mistaking the RAM's heat spreaders for radiation shields. Heat spreaders were common for DDR2 and DDR3 ECC RAM. Some models, like the KVR667D2D4F5/2G, have temperature warning labels, indicating that it's not a radiation shield. Such a thin layer of aluminium isn't able stop a significant proportion of gamma radiation.

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.

lmz 4y ago

Radiation Shielded RAM? Is that an even more expensive kind of ECC?

LaputanMachine 4y ago
I think they're mistaking the RAM's heat spreaders for radiation shields. Heat spreaders were common for DDR2 and DDR3 ECC RAM. Some models, like the KVR667D2D4F5/2G, have temperature warning labels, indicating that it's not a radiation shield. Such a thin layer of aluminium isn't able stop a significant proportion of gamma radiation.