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Ha, I bought one of those for $500 from Ebay. It's a dual Xeon Silver workstation with a Nvidia Quadro P400 8GB, 128GB RAM and 256G SSD. I threw in a 1TB SSD an
by vondur 10mo ago
Ha, I bought one of those for $500 from Ebay. It's a dual Xeon Silver workstation with a Nvidia Quadro P400 8GB, 128GB RAM and 256G SSD. I threw in a 1TB SSD and it's been working pretty well.
- Forgeties79 10mo agoWhat are the limitations of machines like these?
- MrVitaliy 10mo agoJust performance when compared to current generation hardware. Not significantly worse, but things like DDR4 ram and single thread performance show the signs of aging. Frankly for similar $$$ you can get a new hardware from beelink or equivalent.
- Forgeties79 10mo agoGot it so basically it's one of those things you do if 1) the project interests you and/or 2) you get one dirt cheap and don't have high expectations for certain tasks
- t0mas88 10mo agoPower usage is the main limitation of using these as a home server. They have a high idle power use.
- trollbridge 10mo agoOne of the reasons I use these is because it’s cold half the year and it’s not hard to basically use to supplement the heat.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- arprocter 10mo agoOn Dell you'll probably be stuck with the original mobo, and their SFFs don't take standard PSUs
- snerbles 10mo agoI too have a crippling dual CPU workstation hoarding habit. Single thread performance is usually worse than enthusiast consumer desktops, and gaming performance will suffer if the game isn't constrained to a single NUMA domain that also happens to have the GPU being used by that game. On the other hand, seeing >1TiB RAM in htop always makes my day happier.
- fooker 10mo agoAny pointers on how to buy one?
- snerbles 10mo agoPersonally I use eBay and find the most barebones system I can, then populate the CPU+RAM with components salvaged from e-wasted servers. There are risks with this, as I've had to return more than one badly-bent workstation that was packed poorly. --- So the Dell Precision T7920 runs dual Intel Scalable (Skylake) and has oodles of DIMM slots (24!), but you'll need to use a PCIe adapter to run an NVMe drive. FlexBays give you hot-swappable SATA, SAS too but only if you're lucky enough to find a system with an HBA (or add one yourself). But if you manage to salvage 24x 64GB DDR4 DIMMs, you'll have a system with a terabyte-and-a-half of ECC RAM - just expect to deal with a very long initial POST and a lot of blink codes when you encounter bad sticks. The power supply is proprietary, but can be swapped from the outside. The T7820 is the single-CPU version, and has only 6 DIMM slots. But it is more amenable to gaming (one NUMA domain), and I have gifted a couple to friends. If you're feeling cheap and are okay with the previous generation, the Haswell/Broadwell-based T7910 is also serviceable - but expect to rename the UEFI image to boot Linux from NVMe, and it's much less power efficient if you don't pick an E5 v4 revision CPU. I used a fully-loaded T7910 as a BYOD workstation at a previous job, worked great as a test environment. Lenovo ThinkStation P920 Tower has fewer DIMM slots (16) than the T7920, but has on-motherboard m.2 NVMe connectors and three full 5.25" bays. I loaded one with Linux Mint for my mother's business, she runs the last non-cloud version QuickBooks in a beefy network-isolated Windows VM and it works great for that. Another friend runs one of these with Proxmox as a homelab-in-a-box. The HP Z6 G4 is also a thing, though I personally haven't played with one yet. I do use a salvaged HP Z440 workstation with a modest 256GB RAM (don't forget the memory cooler!) and a 3090 as my ersatz kitchen table AI server.
- bri3d 10mo agoVery bad performance per watt and higher maintenance needs. Bad performance per watt generally means a larger formfactor and more noise as well.
- vondur 10mo agoThe CPU is far less powerful than a single Ryzen chip from now and the new system is far more power efficient. No super fast USB connections like a new system has.(It does have a USB-C 10GB connection though) Overall if you can live with a bit older machine, it's pretty decent.
- wittjeff 10mo agoI bought a Dell Precision 7910 2x Xeon E5-2687W v3 (10 cores, 20 threads each) with 32GB RAM and 512GB SSD for $425 including shipping. I found that Windows 11 Pro will recognize only 20 of the virtual cores/threads. I don't feel a need to upgrade to more expensive Microsoft OSs at this time, so I just run Ubuntu natively on that box, which recognizes all of it. Assuming used DDR4 RAM returns to more reasonable prices at some point, I intend to load that box up to the 768GB max.