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Comment by lucaspiller | Hacker News Reader

If the prices of one of these new are a bit out of your budget, but you still want a relatively powerful workstation, take a look at used machines from a few of generations ago.

Last year I picked up a Dell T3600 with a Xeon E5-2670 (V1 - 8C/16T) and 32GB ECC RAM for €400 delivered. It's not completely silent (maybe HP are better in that regard based on comments here?), but it doesn't make much noise - at least compared to what you'd expect from the power it gives.

I now work from home, and having previously primarily used laptops, this thing feels like a beast.

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> a Xeon E5-2670 (V1 - 8C/16T) and 32GB ECC RAM for €400 delivered.

that stuff was $150-200 delivered if you buy from taobao.com.

people also need to realize that dual e5-2670v1 has a cinebench score of 2,000, that is just slightly highly than a single ryzen 1800x.

Yes if you want something that needs the fastest CPU you probably don't want this machine, but in that case you are probably willing to spend a lot more. The laptop I upgraded from had a score of 250, so for me it's a big difference.

I checked prices for sourcing my own hardware on the same platform, but it would have been a lot more expensive. The problem here in Europe is there is less second hand enterprise hardware available (if I remember correctly, a compatible motherboard alone would have been ~€200, and the RAM was about the same) and importing something from outside Europe means you need to pay customs fees, which in my country adds ~30% to the price.

And last I checked there isn't a single Ryzen based workstation on the market, something I wouldn't expect to change anytime soon.

Same here, picked a z440 with a 8 core e5-1680v3 last year:

https://hardwareisboring.blogspot.com/2016/06/hp-z440.htm

And yes, completely silent. Only hear the GPU (upgraded to 1070gtx) when playing demanding games.

FYI your link doesn't work.

https://hardwareisboring.blogspot.com/2016/06/hp-z440.html

apologies, was fixing mobile link and removed trailing l by mistake. Can't edit original post anymore.

Lenovo's Thinkstations are even cheaper, the older stuff is pretty much IBM and is pretty good! Not sure about the new stuff but It's competitive.

Is there anywhere in particular you looked for used workstations, or is it just a matter of just finding the right deal at the right time?

ebay has bazillions of them.

Exactly. In Europe, the UK seems to be the biggest market for used enterprise hardware, so take a look at ebay.co.uk. Usually they will ship to the continent for not too much (~£20), and if you have a VAT number you can get that taken off (20%).

Have you considered connecting to a VM with your laptop? Now that you have the huge thing in your home the latency would be minimal and you can stash it in you garage.

I have it under my desk, it's quiet compared to desktops from a couple of generations ago, but loud compared to modern laptops (i.e. that are usually silent). I like the ability to run dual 4K displays which my laptop can't :)

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