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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 min
by 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 agoOp specifically said environmental perspective, so it doesn't matter whether you pay 5ct or 90ct per kWh.
- iasay 4y agoIt 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 agoThat 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 agoIt absolutely matters if those kWh are backed by environmental damage. Also if you can spend that money elsewhere to reduce environmental damage.
- hexo 4y agoOK, 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 agoWhere 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 ago20(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$400 mini PC gets you an i5-11500T with NVME SSD that will take 128Gb of RAM. Some of them even pop up with NVidia T400 in them. New with Lenovo warranty on eBay. The i5-11500T has better single and multi thread performance. Sure you won’t get an RTX in it but that’s a 1% case really when we’re talking software engineering. That’s a hell of a lot better value proposition than a 5+ year old Xeon which is what we’re seeing suggested here.
- scns 4y agoMy plan was upgrading my i5 4460 and get the best bang for my buck. Was eyeing an i7 4790K which would have cost 140€. Got a workstation with a xeon equivalent to the 4770, with a quadro K2200, an intel dc ssd (RSP new ~400$, a 2TB HD and 32GB RAM for 180€ instead.
- stigz 4y agoIt's not about you, bud. Speaking at a global level it is more efficient.
- iasay 4y agoShow me the calculation.