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Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

The funniest thing about this is probably that RAM prices have went up in the last 2-3 years. I built my current computer in 2016 and if I had to buy the same RAM that it has today, I'd have to pay more. So for the same money, "newer" means in fact worse. Noting that prices have went down from their peak increase since, but it's still more than the lowest historic price.

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More important than price is trust.

The Core 2 Duo/Quad on LGA775 is the last revision of the Intel Management Engine (ME) that can be completely removed. The me_cleaner script recently added the ability to clean this platform.

A Q9650 quad-core CPU is the best performance that can be reached on this board. I have two and I have run me_cleaner on both. I do my finances on the one that runs OpenBSD.

I bow to your paranoia. Although I have often wondered if retro computers will become more valuable in the future as the final bastion of electronic privacy.

If your tinfoil hat isn't too thick, you can take a modern computer and set it up behind a hardware firewall, or connect over serial...

And then monitor the tons of weird ass encrypted traffic coming in and out of it, hoping that those requests to AWS are some program getting updates and not the contents of your L2.

Firewalls are great, and you should have one, but you have to constantly watch and understand everything coming in and out of it. Works ok as a full time job, terrible when you have other things to do.

If this is too much trouble, you can connect over serial, like 25+ years ago. Transfer files with zmodem from an internet-connected host. A Raspberry Pi with a serial port would be perfect for this.

I have a rack full of machines like this. Dual sockets with 8GB ram each. Any affordable upgrade would be a downgrade. I'm looking at at least $200 per U to upgrade from hardware that is essentially worthless. I literally got the CPUs for $2 each. There's something really funny going on with prices after core 2.

How much is your power bill?

Kindof a lot, but I tell myself that servers are an efficient winter heat source.

Don't forget the tinfoil in your bunker.

Can your board take an X9770?

These are the boards that I patched:

https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/issues/233

Thank you for this information, this is going to be my next project.

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