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.
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:
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.
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.
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.)
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.
$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.
>my 4k desktop consumes 1.6G vram and i'm not even running any game
What desktop is that? I ran Windows 11 desktop with youtube and bluray rips fine even while allocating only 512MB of VRAM, though the more you allocate it the more it will use, to cache and speed up various frequently used apps, but even with 512MB it still worked fine.
I want to add that I do thoroughly enjoy and appreciate my trusty old 2U Supermicro dualie from 2014-era Xeon parts.
Even if it does idle at 170w, the build was less than $2k, it has 50 cores, 384GB ram, tons of storage.. 1 year uptime, so sick! Has not let me down yet! Even if the mobo croaks, it's easy to source a cost-effective replacement from fleabay.
I've just measured it with wattmeter. Xeon E5-2697v2, 64GB ram, SSD + 2x HDD, GTX1080. Excluding monitor, that might add another 15W according to its "energy usage bar" which sits at about 25%.
110W "idle" with firefox running + few opengl programs.
160W at steam startup, then it jumps between 120W and 160W. It stabilizes at 110W in about 2 minutes.
130-230W when compiling emacs (takes about 30 seconds).
150W when loading Facebook in Firefox. Then stable at 110W again.
175W-180W running Prison Architect. Very safe to add another 220W when running GPU heavy game (thats not very relevant here, new GPUs consumes ~same or more power).
I'd say my "randomly guessed" 130W amortized is pretty OK.
And remember, this guess was for reference only, scale it to your needs.
Of course it can get higher when having a lot of things up and running, with a lot of active tabs in firefox.
My plan was upgrading my i5 4460 and get the best bang for my buck. Was eyeing an i7 4790K which would have cost 140€. Got a workstation with a xeon equivalent to the 4770, with a quadro K2200, an intel dc ssd (RSP new ~400$, a 2TB HD and 32GB RAM for 180€ instead.
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.
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.
A typical server tdp will vary a lot depending on the components buts it’s a safe bet to look at 1u being right around 1000w for a recent Xeon.
It’s also the opposite older equipment for servers. There are lower tdps for older equipment and for a haswell or broadwell it may use 20-30% less energy than a typical server sku. The compute per watt has increased, but the power draw of modern server cpus are probably much higher than you would expect.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wow, fifty years of oil company rhetoric has really gotten to people. Individual behavior change hasn’t worked at scale, nor should anyone expect it to. I’ll continue to use as much electricity as I’d like while advocating for nuclear and renewables.
I mean, on the scale of things, typical computer usage is just not that much energy, right? Compared to stuff like air conditioning and transportation.
My server, which is old and probably somewhat power-hungry, uses ~125W. A house-sized AC unit is in the kilowatts range, that's 10x more (of course, the AC is only on for parts of the day).
If I operate that 125W computer for a year, that's ~1,000 kWh. EVs use around 0.3 kWh/mi, so running that computer for a year is the equivalent of driving an EV 3,333 miles. (Most people drive 10,000 miles a year or more.)
And if your gas gar gets 34 MPG, then it gets (via MPGe) about 1 mile per kWh. So using the 125W computer for a year is like driving a gas car 1,000 miles - and that ignores, of course, that the gas car spews pollution, while electricity can be gotten from renewables or nuclear.
So it's not like the energy usage of computing doesn't matter, but it's somewhat insignificant. Like someone else said above, it costs energy to manufacture new chips and computers too, so you might be better off just staying on old ones.
Have you considered water cooling? The heat is, of course, still going to get dissipated, but the noise should become much less of an issue. As a bonus, idle temps should drop close to room temperature.
I don't like the idea of maintaining an open loop myself (changing the liquid every 6-12 months), but there are also half-measure options like all-in-one (AIO) coolers. Most of them aren't serviceable (can't refill them), but they should still last for five years or so. That mostly for CPUs, though, AIO GPUs are somewhat rare (but they do exist!).
Isn't liquid cooling much higher performance? I've seen some liquid cooled PCs with parts below 40 C under load and very quiet fans. I wonder if we could take it even further by placing the radiators out of the air conditioned room or even outside the house.
I was running my air cooled parts at 60oC without the complexity. If you use large fans it makes the same noise. And approximately the same energy is burned off.
Ultimately I moved to M1 because it did the same workload with less watts.
Either way you’re paying money for compute. Do you want to spend that on compute or heat as a side effect?
Or overall less noise, especially in smaller cases where you can't fit an extremely large (read: large fan) direct attached air cooler. Larger fans mean more cooling per dB.
Also, water coolers have a lot more thermal mass (because, water), which means that the fan noise that remains can be less annoying as it doesn't ramp up and down as fast with CPU usage, assuming you're driving your fan curve from water temp and not CPU temp.
So it's not fair to say they're just about "showing off" IMHO. There's actual quality of life benefits if you care about noise.
I’ve built several air cooled and water cooled PCs. The benefits are over spoken by a mile. You can run CPUs at far higher temperatures with no net noise increase. And it costs a lot less and has less maintenance.
The larger Be Quiet coolers are far quieter than the best water cooling solutions out there and the only maintenance is vacuuming out the crap once a year.
Edit: also as a friend found the air coolers don’t pee all over your RTX2060 and blow it and the power supply up.
Arguing over everyone’s favorite equipment without a particular application and set of goals in mind is silly. It’s like a formula one driver and a truck driver arguing over which vehicle is best. There’s no “benefits” to one over the other. They have different characteristics which make them suitable for different applications.
I have a PC on my desk with a GPU which already comes with the largest air cooler that will fit on it. I wanted to make to it quieter. Water cooling accomplished that.
I have servers in a closet where I don’t care about noise and I don’t want to maintain them. I use air coolers there.
Use the right tool to accomplish the goals you want to accomplish.
In this case, water cooling is not so much about cooling, but more about noise reduction.
One could go really fancy with glass panels, solid tubes, colored liquids and such - yeah, that's where you start showing off (or geeking out, it doesn't always have to be negative). But an open loop can be done in much simpler manner while still providing benefits of better performance and, consequentially, considerably lower noise levels.
Hide the loop in a good noise-oriented case. For instance, I like my Fractal Design Define C [0] with thick steel walls with additional layer of noise-dampening foam. Use soft tubing and some quick-disconnect fittings for the ease of maintenance. As a result you get relatively simple to maintain yet effective cooling setup.
I’ve built the same thing. Fractal Define case with Be Quiet Dark Rock, Be Quiet PSU and 120mm slow fans and it was inaudible under full load of a Ryzen 3700X.
Ryzen 3700x is only 65W, of course you wouldn't need to water cool it.
I have Dark Rock Pro 4 installed on top of a 120+ TDP CPU. The fans surely speed up under extensive load, and, although they are fairly quiet, I wouldn't call them inaudible. The post is about CPUs which could in fact utilize the efficiency water-cooled setups offer.
If you are near a window or other hole in the wall, you can duct your exhaust outside pretty easily. If you are near a lesser used room, you can shove your desktop on the other side of the wall and run the cables you need through.
Or you can combine these by putting the desktop in a closet and ducting the exhaust outside.
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). 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Northern California is not much different. It actually makes most plug in hybrids cheaper to run on gas than electric at around $3.50 a gallon and below.
The general rate cases for the next year-and-change are posted. The CPUC rubber stamps them, so we already know that there are upcoming rate hikes of around 16% within the next year.
> Soon your bill will be linked to how much you make. So if you're in the top half of income earners, then you'll be charged more.
That's already the case where I'm at (not California). The electric bill often comes with inserts explaining how I could save money if my income is below some threshold. Same goes for my other utility bills.
> Soon your bill will be linked to how much you make. So if you're in the top half of income earners, then you'll be charged more.
What if everything worked like this? Income would have no meaning anymore. If we thought this labor shortage is bad, I can't imagine how we'd get through the one that would cause.
I'm getting to the point, at 34 years old, that I think I should sell out and move to a low cost of living place that doesn't penalize me and retire. What happens to an economy if lots of other prime earning years people did the same thing?
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.
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%.
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As much as love Z620's in particular, my experience of a used one wasn't that great.
In particular, watch for v1.0/v2.0 motherboard versions that prevent you from using the faster Xeons, and in general, the model seems to suffer from power supply problems.
Just as I got my dual-processor 64Gig Z620 working under macOS, the 2nd processor daughterboard quit.
Similar experience on my work Z620 at the time. Exact same failure.
Better just to reset and build the fastest thing you can afford. My fast box runs a Ryzen 9 5900x and is 4x faster than my 2019 Razer Blade 15" for building the software I work on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
"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"
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.
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.
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:
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
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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadIf 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.
related article from a few years ago about the Z400:
https://boilingsteam.com/gaming-on-a-cheap-xeon-the-hp-z400-...
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
GPU with 2GB of VRAM is not much today, my 4k desktop consumes 1.6G vram and i'm not even running any game.
Midrange machines <1000€ from Lenovo and HP make great workhorses at a fraction of the price.
What desktop is that? I ran Windows 11 desktop with youtube and bluray rips fine even while allocating only 512MB of VRAM, though the more you allocate it the more it will use, to cache and speed up various frequently used apps, but even with 512MB it still worked fine.
An average build is more likely in the range of $1250 +/- 250$
2018 and newer server chips may have better low-power idle mode support.
Even if it does idle at 170w, the build was less than $2k, it has 50 cores, 384GB ram, tons of storage.. 1 year uptime, so sick! Has not let me down yet! Even if the mobo croaks, it's easy to source a cost-effective replacement from fleabay.
110W "idle" with firefox running + few opengl programs.
160W at steam startup, then it jumps between 120W and 160W. It stabilizes at 110W in about 2 minutes.
130-230W when compiling emacs (takes about 30 seconds).
150W when loading Facebook in Firefox. Then stable at 110W again.
175W-180W running Prison Architect. Very safe to add another 220W when running GPU heavy game (thats not very relevant here, new GPUs consumes ~same or more power).
I'd say my "randomly guessed" 130W amortized is pretty OK. And remember, this guess was for reference only, scale it to your needs.
Of course it can get higher when having a lot of things up and running, with a lot of active tabs in firefox.
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.
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.
It’s also the opposite older equipment for servers. There are lower tdps for older equipment and for a haswell or broadwell it may use 20-30% less energy than a typical server sku. The compute per watt has increased, but the power draw of modern server cpus are probably much higher than you would expect.
But we don't live in that world. So they are not.
Yet here we remain, whining about why it can never work.
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.
Using something until it dies is not always the best outcome.
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.
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.
Why wouldn’t you?
My MacBook I’m typing this on is sitting here at 9.2W (battery full, running off mains).
My server, which is old and probably somewhat power-hungry, uses ~125W. A house-sized AC unit is in the kilowatts range, that's 10x more (of course, the AC is only on for parts of the day).
If I operate that 125W computer for a year, that's ~1,000 kWh. EVs use around 0.3 kWh/mi, so running that computer for a year is the equivalent of driving an EV 3,333 miles. (Most people drive 10,000 miles a year or more.)
And if your gas gar gets 34 MPG, then it gets (via MPGe) about 1 mile per kWh. So using the 125W computer for a year is like driving a gas car 1,000 miles - and that ignores, of course, that the gas car spews pollution, while electricity can be gotten from renewables or nuclear.
So it's not like the energy usage of computing doesn't matter, but it's somewhat insignificant. Like someone else said above, it costs energy to manufacture new chips and computers too, so you might be better off just staying on old ones.
I don't like the idea of maintaining an open loop myself (changing the liquid every 6-12 months), but there are also half-measure options like all-in-one (AIO) coolers. Most of them aren't serviceable (can't refill them), but they should still last for five years or so. That mostly for CPUs, though, AIO GPUs are somewhat rare (but they do exist!).
edit: confused open and closed loops
Bar some extreme cooling requirements liquid cooling is about showing off.
Ultimately I moved to M1 because it did the same workload with less watts.
Either way you’re paying money for compute. Do you want to spend that on compute or heat as a side effect?
Also, water coolers have a lot more thermal mass (because, water), which means that the fan noise that remains can be less annoying as it doesn't ramp up and down as fast with CPU usage, assuming you're driving your fan curve from water temp and not CPU temp.
So it's not fair to say they're just about "showing off" IMHO. There's actual quality of life benefits if you care about noise.
The larger Be Quiet coolers are far quieter than the best water cooling solutions out there and the only maintenance is vacuuming out the crap once a year.
Edit: also as a friend found the air coolers don’t pee all over your RTX2060 and blow it and the power supply up.
I have a PC on my desk with a GPU which already comes with the largest air cooler that will fit on it. I wanted to make to it quieter. Water cooling accomplished that.
I have servers in a closet where I don’t care about noise and I don’t want to maintain them. I use air coolers there.
Use the right tool to accomplish the goals you want to accomplish.
One could go really fancy with glass panels, solid tubes, colored liquids and such - yeah, that's where you start showing off (or geeking out, it doesn't always have to be negative). But an open loop can be done in much simpler manner while still providing benefits of better performance and, consequentially, considerably lower noise levels.
Hide the loop in a good noise-oriented case. For instance, I like my Fractal Design Define C [0] with thick steel walls with additional layer of noise-dampening foam. Use soft tubing and some quick-disconnect fittings for the ease of maintenance. As a result you get relatively simple to maintain yet effective cooling setup.
[0] https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/define/define-...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Alphacool-Quick-Release-Connector-Kit...
Without water cooling.
I have Dark Rock Pro 4 installed on top of a 120+ TDP CPU. The fans surely speed up under extensive load, and, although they are fairly quiet, I wouldn't call them inaudible. The post is about CPUs which could in fact utilize the efficiency water-cooled setups offer.
Or you can combine these by putting the desktop in a closet and ducting the exhaust outside.
A ~2013 workstation Xeon has a system idle of ~75W (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-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). 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.
With a WD 10 GB external HDD, the UPS gives me a 50W load.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate-plan-o...
The general rate cases for the next year-and-change are posted. The CPUC rubber stamps them, so we already know that there are upcoming rate hikes of around 16% within the next year.
https://www.pge.com/en_US/about-pge/company-information/regu...
Soon your bill will be linked to how much you make. So if you're in the top half of income earners, then you'll be charged more.
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/merrian-borgeson/cas-energy-tra...
That's already the case where I'm at (not California). The electric bill often comes with inserts explaining how I could save money if my income is below some threshold. Same goes for my other utility bills.
What if everything worked like this? Income would have no meaning anymore. If we thought this labor shortage is bad, I can't imagine how we'd get through the one that would cause.
That way you are still incentivized to make more money.
- 2018: 16.75p/kWh + 5% VAT
- 2021: 20.9p/kWh + 5% VAT
- 2022: 27.99p/kWh + 5% VAT
And there seems to be no end in sight. To add insult to injury my energy supplier also bumped the "Standing charge" from 30.61p/day to 53.45p/day.
There isn't a lot of choice at the moment to try and reduce costs due to the idiotic state of the UK energy market right now.
We decommissioned a dual xeon setup after realizing it was sucking over 200w while doing nothing. YMMV.
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.
The 8500 is a great CPU. It is what runs my home Docker setup with Plex (hardware video transcode).
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%.
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-z44... for my experience with swapping the fans against quieter models.
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.
It's quite capable with a more modern GPU and the X79 motherboard also supports NVMe drives.
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
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.
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.
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".
:)
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.
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.
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.
Have an older Xeon which I use as remote desktop. Is solid.
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.
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.
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.
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
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-In...
A 2700 available for $140: https://www.newegg.com/amd-ryzen-7-2700/p/19-113-498
https://www.ebay.com/itm/133925326383?hash=item1f2e924e2f:g:...
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.
The price of the Xeon is for the chip alone, not a full server...
- 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!
One for a homelab with Plex and other things
One for a proper workstation
I am a happy peep
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