The charm of buying old workstation hardware on the cheap
tedium.co
tedium.co
an older macbook pro (2012ish) gives 12,000 on the MT benchmark and only draws what, 85w?
the author briefly touches on this, but unless you get free electricity, this is a bigger issue than presented.
Not only is that a waste of money for power, it is horrible for the environment. These machines are obscenely inefficient power wise. It's likte folks who buy a r720 for $150 that comes with 32GB ECC ram and dual cpu's, but it pulls $75 per month in power. Even if you don't pay for electricity directly (you do in rent then), it's still terrible for the environment.
I use ThinkPads from Ebay - I get the high end model from 4-5 years ago. Coming off lease they can be in great condition often loaded with RAM and just need an SSD. The build quality is great, and they're cheap.
I found the real problem of a re-purposing server is not the noise, but rather that the motherboards are completely unsuitable for desktop work. And buying a new workstation motherboard that would take the Xeon(s) and ECC ram would make the build more expensive than just buying a new desktop machine with consumer grade hardware.
Even higher end workstations like the various HP "Z" series and Proliant are custom.
(disclaimer: I have my (large, ~120 Units) homelab/self_employed_datacenter on ATX Rackmount 4U cases with watercooling. I am used to buying servers for the CPU and RAM as others do in this thread. I use consumer gears too, but they die young under full C++/C embedded CI jobs 24/7. I use 4U cases because of the unbearable noise of the blades)
I am in Quebec, power is cheap to the point of this being irrelevant. Heating is also required a large part of the year (including until yesterday because the weather has been horrible so far this "summer"...). Plus, well, tax credit for business expenses make that "less than free".
> and how loud your racks are?
Watercooling and passive PSUs makes it silent. I hate noise.
> Can I ask what you're doing with that home lab
Beside all the usual services for a small business (phone, email, storage, backup, routing, etc), it is mostly an oVirt (RedHat Enterprise Virtualization) private cloud running Docker VMs used by the CI to compile C/C++, build embedded device firmware images and run tests. The extra horse power (and least power efficient) nodes are woken up use wake-up-on-lan and boot a template using PXE from the GlusterFS distributed NAS. They are shut down when the load goes down. Only the big 7U case with the double1 140mm watercooling fans is open all the time. It is the "head" of the cloud cluster (but in theory is configured to auto migrate in case of hardware failure to the dual 120mm 4U case, but honestly I never tried the automatic migration).
Not very pretty, but good enough. https://imgur.com/a/hnlInSz (yes, there is some overlap between those 2 pictures because I moved some units between taking them, some units have been traded for others too).
But apart from that, server boards sometimes don't have a storage controller, no audio, only a few USB2 port. Most have onboard VGA graphics that you can't turn off, or the BIOS won't support outputting video with a different graphics card.
And then there are usually few Windows drivers and you could get into heaps of issues with (the lack of) UEFI if you want to run a desktop version of Windows.
Server boards are custom build for datacenter application and just aren't suitable for workstation use.
Some rackmount server hardware is fairly quite these days too. Variable speed fan profiles and a cool room do wonders to keep the fan speeds fairly low. Probably the noisiest think in my rack at home these days is the Ethernet switch.
I certainly had that running 24/7 when I was in high school.
Mine has a ‘Turbo’ button!
You'll only come close to this figure when the PC is under full load (like gaming). But while idle, a (modern) PC draws about 30-50 watts.
I now get upset when someone goes back inside to turn off a 6w LED switched bulb. It’s not worth taking up a minute of 2 people’s time.
At $6 per year, it may not be worth turning off at all. Those seconds to turn it off add up.
But good luck arguing with someone that argues this specific wastefulness should trump all other wastes.
If you forget, it is ok.
Saving has big systemic benefits.
Then ran extension cords from all over his house into his garage to power the things, networked everything together, and played with it for 6 months, mostly over the winter.
He said he was able to break even (that is, mined enough coins - mainly other alt-coins, not bitcoin) to offset his costs in both electricity and what he spent on the hardware. Kept his garage closed and the door to his house open, and it heated things fairly well from what I recall.
In the end, though, he shut it down, because it was starting to go upside-down for him; I don't know what he did with the hardware (he ended up giving me one of the GPUs - so maybe he parted it out for friends to upgrade their systems?)...
Same way that if I go to a movie, I don't typically think about it as costing me the price of a ticket and 2 hours of wages (although technically I could, I guess). I calculate time cost for things that I don't want to do.
If anything I would use the time spent in the value calculation (I payed $13 for 2 hours of entertainment).
I also agree 100% with the time cost on something you're wanting to learn is a sunk cost. After all, it's an investment in yourself. Even if it fails, you now have that experience of what not to do if presented the chance again.
Learning to think about time spent on getting ready for work and commuting to and from work as a direct extension of my working hours changed the way I looked at jobs and approach salary negotiation. It's so easy for someone to ignore that cost if they haven't thought about it, and so hard once they have thought about it :)
If you can travel by public transport, part of the time of your commute is akin to leisure time. But I have big issues with failing to focus, especially if I gotta switch transport multiple times or run to make it or its crowded or...
My limit of commute is basically an hour, and if I don't get the costs reimbursed I simply do not take the job. It is bad enough that I lose that time as it is (as I argued above, it is hardly akin to leisure time).
As for the topic at hand, I've spend a good amount of time and money on e.g. old UNIX hardware (such as SGI Indy/Indigo 2/Octane, Sun Ultra 10, and some DEC Alpha machines) back in the start of this millennium. It was costly and bad for my electricity bills, and it took me a lot of time to play around with old platforms. I had a lot of fun though. And I'm not sure you can benchmark "fun". Nowadays, with solar energy on the rise, it might actually matter less to have these machines running. Except for in the summer. The additional heat would kill me.
How much energy and pollution goes into producing new hardware? Not so sure buying new is at all better for the environment.
That and that we have even more obsolete hardware to take care of in the future.
He doesn't provide evidence, but it seems at least plausible.
Same logic that applies to driving an older car— it may not be the most efficient, but especially if you're low usage, extending the life of something that already exists is almost certainly greener than using something new.
And that's also only the manufacturing part. The energy used when operating a device is not usually incorporated in purchase price.
You would definitely not expect that a machine selling for $1000 would have used more than $1000 of energy in its manufacture. Even accounting for energy costs all the way down the chain (materials arguably don't have any other cost other than energy and attention involved in collecting/isolating/refining them), my uninformed guess would be that with something like a computer, it's something like a bit less than half, with the rest of it being amortized human attention at various stages plus some profit margin, though I'm sure there's more refined and accurate models available.
So, throw out $480 as an energy number for our $1000. That means old hardware that's less energy efficient to the tune of $40 a month will out-impact the manufacturing cost of the new machine in a year.
As an exercise, contrast this with older automobile. If you've got a well-functioning 10-20 year old vehicle, it's probably somewhere between 80% to 50% as energy efficient as the higher efficiency choices you can buy new off a lot today. But the sticker price of a vehicle will tell you that it probably $10-20k of energy to produce. Because that number is high, from today, it will probably take your used vehicle longer than its remaining lifetime to exceed energy use involved in making the new car (and most new vehicles won't get you where you're going any faster either).
This is a misconception. Energy is not a transportable, fungible quantity the way dollars are. It is entirely possible that the device one buys for $1000 would require more that $1000 of energy to make, if manufactured in a modern economy with high environmental standards.
The major forces in the global economy over the last 3 decades have been this imbalance in labor, energy, and environmental compliance costs. The $1000 retail price in the US does not contain the largely externalized costs that its place of manufacture may have permitted.
What the parent didn't enumerate is that the energy cost has to be calculated as the point of use. You can do this for say solar panels made in China. If you assume that 100% of the purchase price is translated into energy costs, zero physical resources used, etc. That 100% of what you pay, went into energy, used by the nastiest sources you can get an upper bound on energy costs to create an item are. In China, $/KwH is 2.5-5 cents US. Probably lower if you are in some direct use of coal scenario. Using the lower bound, say a $100 solar panel made in China consumes energy costing 2.5C/KwH. It could have used at most 4MWH of electricity.
You mean energy and dollars aren't both transmitted up/down wires or moved around with mass that represents stored potential?
> It is entirely possible that the device one buys for $1000 would require more that $1000 of energy to make
This.... doesn't sound like a business model that will last long. Can you give a concrete example?
If what you're saying is the actual energy expenditure may be what we're concerned about if we're speaking about environmental impacts and might be more properly modeled by something more complex, that's a worthwhile point. But it's going to be much less a matter of 1000J from a given mass of coal vs 1000 J of directly supplied electricity -- this factor will disappear behind whatever market allocations/optimizations are available -- and much more a matter of general industrial energy costs circa 1995 vs 2015, combined with the relative efficiency of manufacturing processes at both points in time.
What would we expect on those two fronts? Personally, I'd expect energy prices to rise with economic growth and occasionally fall with recessions, absent some large new source coming online or state-imposed costs for use. I'd also expect process efficiency to increase as well. Which would lead me to, again, see energy expended as reasonably estimated by some bounded factor of a final product price.
That seems like an obscenely high difference in monthly energy cost (if we're going for an apples-to-apples comparison, in contrast with the article's posed comparison of a desktop workstation v. a consumer laptop). For reference, I run multiple desktops, multiple laptops, a full-size fridge, lights, fans, and an Echo, all mostly 24/7, and per PG&E my total monthly power bill (near SF) is less than that (and most of my hardware is on the older side).
We're more realistically talking (from my experience, running a lot of the sorts of older desktops the article mentions) a difference closer to $4 than $40. Even $10 (which would still be a pretty high estimate) would extend your estimate to 4 years until break-even.
In New York, about 60-65% of your electricity is emmission-free, with most of the rest being gas. In Ohio or Kentucky, it's all coal and gas. You're probably emitting more in Kentucky with a laptop than you are in NY with a workstation.
The whole argument is tedious and obnoxious anyway, as the marginal negative impact of squeezing a couple of years out of an older device is overstated and minimal -- you'd be better off assuaging your guilt by taking a 5m shower.
Common and extreme cases are pollution of the type we see on Nigeria where global conglomerates are "allowed" to ignore safety standards by a corrupt government. Eg: https://www.bbc.com/news/10313107
See also:
Michael Woodiwiss Gangster Capitalism: The United States and the Globalization of Organized Crime
https://www.amazon.com/Gangster-Capitalism-United-Globalizat...
Ed: and another example of problematic incetives is allowing power production for profit. We generally agree we need to use less energy, and yet have businesses that make more money when they can sell more energy... Sure, it might be a benefit to relatively sell more "green" energy - but really, the ideal energy company would make the most money when it got its customers to buy less energy....
Then there's the electricity cost. I own quite a few old workstations like this, and the power consumption ain't that much higher. Yeah, maybe compared to a laptop, but that's like comparing the feeding habits of a hummingbird v. an emu (and you can buy old laptops for relatively cheap, too).
I certainly agree that we need to factor in the impact of construction, though!
Most of those global cement emissions are surely in building sidewalks, highways, bridges, and skyscrapers? Seems weird to blame an otherwise pretty green electricity source for this carbon.
If you use an extra kW, the city doesn't get to sell the extra kW into the national grid. So the national grid needs an extra kW, which is most likely produced by gas!
In a nationally connected electricity grid, each extra kW you use, increases the usage of the next marginal kW of power on the network, which is most likely gas (unless you use the kW during off-peak, when it might be nuclear depending on your country).
The hypothetical user of the older hardware is not damaging anyone else by consuming "green" electrons. Their demand provides a market for green projects, and the fact that there is non-green supply still available is simply an opportunity for new green supply to supplant it.
If the demand for green electricity is there, supply will appear, as long as it is economic to do so.
So you increase your green electricity demand, and green power generation capacity is increased and more green electricity is made.
However the demand for black electricity hasn't decreased.
But you have created an arbitrage opportunity e.g. someone decreases their green electricity usage, and increases their black electricity usage.
Your fallacy is that you think it is possible to create two separate electricity markets (maybe separate grids, or strong regulation) for a good that is quite fungible.
It does indeed work as I describe. And, because the wind and solar providers are among the lowest-cost providers at this point, "black" energy is losing market share quite quickly.
I understand electricity markets quite well and live and work in one of the most dynamic ones in N. America. This is how it works.
It ain't guaranteed that the city would even be selling into the national grid in the first place.
If an R720 pulls anywhere near $75 a month [1], you got some sort of major problem. In reality, these things pulls closet to anywhere from 120 to 180 watts on the higher end.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/7r90l8/average_pow...
Though few people’s electric prices are that high, and it’s rare to sit at 100% CPU 24/7.
While I agree a rate similar to that isn't all that uncommon in for instance Europe, from that perspective it's a relevant calculation. On the other hand the prices of old hardware tend to very between markets as well so that would still impact the break even point.
Buying used hardware is great, but really we should also be probably optimizing for performance-per-watt even with older hardware.
IMO the real issue is that most people just don't need more grunt than a 5-year-old machine is giving them at this point. What they really need is a solid state disk in the old hardware, and for Office and Chromium you'd never notice a difference. I still use a SATA SSD daily and while I've had NVMe in my work-supplied machines, for 99% of my workload it's just not even necessary.
[1] https://eridirect.com/blog/2015/06/how-does-e-waste-affect-t...
[2] http://www.electronicstakeback.com/toxics-in-electronics/whe...
Granted it's faster and maybe less likely to break. http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-Duo-E8400-vs-Intel-Core-...
That’s enough to where you should make sure it’s worth it, and ask yourself if you’re better off with a higher end NUC or even raspberry pi, which use orders of magnitude less power.
(We have solar so I don’t really worry about the power consumption anymore)
with a 4 core i7 and 16 GB of ram, it is more than enough for home use.
for storage, it has a m.2 SATA ssd for the root partition. And 2x 2tb hard drives that are raided with zfs for the home and network share folders.
Perhaps if the person who buys these old enterprise server workstations also has renewable power source, then it would seem to be an over all win.
The amount of stuff we got in "for review", "for test", "preview", etc. was simply amazing. Even pre-production gear a lot of the times. I found a pair of Tesla cards just sitting in a box in an office I cleaned out one day... and I know we got a system with some Phi cards in it when they came out.
The most interesting thing I ran into was when cleaning out a facility after a move, we found a Dell Itanium-1 box that not only did Dell not want back, they wouldn't even admit to making it in the first place... It ended up going home with one of our devs...
Nice thing about being a sysadmin was that we would get "video cards and such from our developers who had just upgraded to the latest and greatest - and the stuff they were throwing out was only one or two years old.. so our own desktop workstations built with cast-off parts were pretty nice.
Us sysadmins just had to install/maintain it, and occasionally would "profit" when it was retired and the company/vendor didn't want it back.
Managed to build an entire multi-node NetApp cluster out of spare and retired parts one day when we were bored. Our NetApp rep said "I didn't see this, I don't know it's here, I don't know it exists, as far as I care it's a bunch of spare parts you just happened to put in a rack..." :D
These workstations can be put in sleep mode with Windows or Linux and they wake up pretty quick - saves you lot of power consumption by not needing to keep it always on. Wake on LAN is your friend.
Next everything is easily replaceable which is great for the environment as these have much longer lifespans than a glued-in laptop.
Lastly the performance is just much better than a thermally constrained laptop.
Of course, 28 cores and eight spinning hard drives is a different story.
Absolutely this.
I work from home and for around six years ran a company provided refurbished Dell Precision (a T5400 I think) workstation with dual Xeon CPU's, SAS Disks etc - this was around 2008. I think when purchased new this machine cost around GBP3K, we got it for around GBP1K. The thing was switched on for around ten to twelve hours a day and the power consumption was (I eventually realised) eyewatering.
The machine fortunately developed a fatal motherboard fault and I replaced it with a self build Core i5-4690K machine with SSDs and a modern graphics card. My electric bill halved and I got a way more powerful and energy efficient machine. It was quite a revelation.
These old machines may seem like bargains, but energy-wise they're just not economical to run (especially at UK domestic energy prices).
Heck, beasty Dell R710 2U servers appear to pull (in some cases, well) below 200 watts [1].
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/7r90l8/average_pow...
That said I have picked up "junk" computers with my neighbors kids, got the running and installed by with different operating systems. Fun stuff and you don't worry about breaking it.
I switched to laptops over a decade ago. Used 3-5 year old Zbooks are 1/10th of their original price, and still perform flawlessly (mind-blowing fact: Haswells can keep up with Skylakes, and even beat them with some overclocking+undervolting).
Keeping one in your house would be ridiculous and loud, though. Mine actually required two power cables! I ended up pawning it off to a friend for $20, who pawned it off to one of his friends for $20, and so forth. I wonder where it is now.
I was able to strike a deal with IT - they'd give me 2U of rack space in the Uni's datacenter and some subdomains in the Uni's .edu. In return, they got a forever grateful undergrad with too much time on his hands.
I never felt a need to measure how much my employer pays for electricity.
disable lid sleep (well, disable sleep entirely on osx 10+ because apple don't want to give you the option to disable lid sleep only) and it will never pass 4h.
the 6/8/10h some people claim is because they don't realize the computer is sleeping most of the time. I guess it is fine if it's just your facebook terminal...
Note the Z420 is a workstation not a server. Buying an old server is completely different.
I’d love to get an old one and stick an ssd in there for basic usage.
If you’re in a large(ish) city I’d expect you’d be able to find a similar company. I was able to pick up a x240 in great shape for $125, and test drive it in person before I paid.
Look at ZBook, Precision workstations for the best performance for your dollar.
My main objection to the Z4xx series is that the cases are so bulky. I prefer the Z2xx small form factor models, or even better the Z2 (fastest computer I own, but also one of the smallest).
One of the big advantages of a Xeon is that it will use ECC memory, and thus be more reliable.
The System76 machine was a little more modern, with a Haswell i7, and after a new aftermarket cooler, fresh thermal paste, and another no-name SSD it ran Manjaro silently, even with Bazel putting it under some serious load.
I'm moving soon, so I sold both machines for around $350 each. It's a fun challenge, since usually these computers don't see modifications or have as good documentation as enthusiast PC parts, so you'll find a tiny community in some obscure forum sharing supported CPU upgrades, how to change out the cooler, stuff like that. Highly recommend it.
E5-2667v2 vs i9-9900k the i9 is 60% faster single core, 44% faster multi-core (both are 8c16t). At lot of use cases, including the majority of development work for most people, is still dominated by single core performance so you're giving up a lot performance to save a couple bucks. The power draw on these server/workstation systems will likely also suck which will offset some of the $ savings.
the cost of the above xeon system (dual cpu + mb + RAM) is slightly more expensive than i9-9900k itself, but much cheaper than a i9-9900k + motherboard + RAM.
Your machine is slower than a macbook air for most of my workloads about half the speed of my desktop so I wouldn't be so confident.
I was curious how my home PC stacked against it.
Still ~33% slower than last gen ryzen.
I'm in the same boat, I have a 12 core/64GB xeon machine I picked up 4 years ago for $200 (130W compiling). Along the way I put 4 256G SSDs on the RAID5 controller. It likely gets totally thumped by the latest 12 core ryzens, but OTOH, my compile times are ~2 minutes for a fully clean build, on that machine. A similarly spec'ed thread ripper at work only pulls that down to 90 seconds or so. Logically I can't really justify the ~$1800 the new machine is going to cost by the time I get a raided SSD, MB and 64GB ram. I might do it anyway, but its definitely not logical.
Either way, your still missing the point, these machines cost a couple hundred dollars, and they might be a few percent slower, and 3x the power budget, but where I live that power is going to work out to $20 a year. Its going to take 50 years to make up the price difference in power, and in 5 years i'm going to buy the same machine someone paid $4k for $400 and that person is going to have to spend another $4k to get something better.
And the price difference for the whole system is huge if you buy used. I payed for my System with a Xeon 2680 V2 (10C20T) 128GB Ram just a little bit more then the asking price for the 9900k alone. But I bought it almost 2 years ago so the comparable Mainstream CPU at that time was the 4C8T 7700k.
As a student with a limited budget performance per € matters more then performance per watt.
I picked up a Dell T710 with 32 cores and 32GB of DDR3 ECC RAM for $400. I can throw more RAM in it for practically zero cost. It's amazing for batch workloads.
For interactive workloads, there's no need to get anything newer than a 4-series Core iX. The single-threaded performance has not improved much over the last five years. My daily driver is an i5-6500; motherboard and CPU, used, were $120.
If building from parts or doing non-BSD, I'd go with an AMD, POWER, or ARM system.
What were the recommended models?
https://lobste.rs/s/szzgjl/cheap_bsd_friendly_notebook
All the ones I saw in good condition on eBay were Intel's. I got a T420 with Core i7 to mitigate potential slowdowns from future CPU vulnerabilities. I've occasionally had to restart it from suspend/resume issues. Otherwise, it's been great.
One more thing: the function key and control key are swapped compared to most laptops. I didn't like that because I'm used to control being far left. duclare told me about a BIOS setting that swaps them back. Everything's fine now. :)
Made a great server. But for a workstation it wasn't really that snappy and I just ended up using a 2016 MacBook Pro.
The xeon is the same price as a Ryzen 2700 or an intel 8400. They definitely beat it on power usage.
This all makes the argument really depend on how much utilization you think the xeon will have.
If you plan to run it 24/7 100% utilization (or as close as you can get), yes new hardware makes sense. (There's definitely a cost reason that these companies are ditching their old xeons for new ones, it saves them money and rack space).
If you're playing around for a few hours in the evening and on weekends (as suggested), it'll probably be a maximum of $10 per year in power costs.
So I think even with power costs, having run the numbers, these processors do make an attractive alternative to newer hardware. They are comparable and at a comparable price on the market, but if you can get a deal by bargain bin hunting, they can be a great value. It is unsurprising that the $/performance is very similar, that is how arbitrage markets are supposed to work.
There are some pitfalls here that are not mentioned, while the processor itself can be cheap, it is often the case that server grade motherboards are more expensive. This is particularly true with older Xeons, where people are trying to repair things that have broken. There's kind of a curve where demands drops up until a point and then the supply drops (people scrap things for the metal content rather than reselling)... so price starts to creep up again. This shouldn't be a problem.
The other issue is that you end up with hardware compatibility issues. Can I stick my new graphics card in the old xeon box? Probably(?) can I do something more exotic or new? maybe not? Again this shouldn't be an issue.
A cheap eight core processor sounds great until it turns out to be slower at everything than an even cheaper modern quad core. A quad core Ryzen 3 is under a hundred bucks, with a 45W TDP instead of 130W.
20-core Xeon E5-2698 V4 ($405 on eBay)
22-core Xeon E5-2699 v4 ($300 on eBay)
28-core Xeon QL1F 8176 ES Platinum ($488 on eBay)
They will all beat the 8-core i9 in almost any multicore test.
For $520 you can have a whole server with 40 cores (4x E7-4860) and 128GB RAM:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/292944891997
or 64GB RAM $100 cheaper:
My most recent one is an HP Z420 workstation with 128GB of ECC memory, an 8-core Xeon, and Win10 Pro installed for $620 delivered. Benchmarks of the CPU show its comparable to a Ryzen 1700X in single and multi core, but I really bought it for the RAM. It's a great machine for homelab-type virtualization.
Intel Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Whiskey Lake, Amber Lake, Apollo Lake and Gemini Lake CPU families, AMD Raven Ridge APU family, and Nvidia Maxwell GM206, Pascal, Volta & Turing GPU families have full fixed function VP9 hardware decoding for highest decoding performance and power efficiency. (Wiki)
I'm not saying that upgrading for cheap is bad of course, but getting stuff like described in the article is borderline lottery win in most of the countries. You can't depend on it or plan in advance.
Passmark for the E5-2667: Multithreaded: 10372 Single threaded 1609
Passmark for the FX-8350: Multithreaded 8951 Single threaded: 1510
I thought about going dual Xeon for my desktop, but found that I don't often need that much power (at home) to warrant excessive power draw you mention.
Also you can sort of get 10gbe through a thunderbolt adapter but I ran into some compatibility issues with hyper-v.
> And there are also considerations here from the perspective of power consumption. A big box that’s always plugged in will inevitably use more power than a tiny laptop, even if the big box can do a lot more.
[...]
> But if you can make the case for it, it might be worth your time. In my case, I was looking to have more of a desktop experience for times when I wanted slightly more horsepower than a laptop, and I also wanted a machine that could do virtualization when needed or desired.
I was honestly expecting more of a different there in both speed of the AMD and power consumption of the Xeon. If you get a workstation with two of them, you're talking about 260W max consumption. And of course that is max consumption, idle consumption is probably more important and is probably way, way lower.
One place where some of these machines really shine though is in memory availability. If you need a lot of RAM, it can be hard to get a new desktop that'll take more than 64GB, but workstation chipsets can often go to half a TB or more. Of course, that RAM uses a lot of power...
I have a Xeon E5-1650v3 6-core workstation in my office with 64GB of RAM, two 7200 RPM disks running constantly, two SATA SSDs, and a GeForce GTX Titan X GPU. According to UPS self-reporting, it is drawing ~80W when essentially idle. The powertop utility reports ~90% C6 idle state for the CPU cores and ~55% C6 idle state for the package.
I have an i3-8100 4-core PC at home with 16GB of RAM, two 5400 RPM disks which are set to spin down, one nvme SSD, and the iGPU. According to UPS self-reporting, it is drawing under 15W. The powertop utility reports ~97% C7 idle state for the CPU, ~99% RC6 for the iGPU, and doesn't report a package idle state.
I have an older i7-4700MQ 4-core Thinkpad with 16GB of RAM, one SATA SSD, and a discrete GeForce GT 730M GPU alongside the iGPU. It is drawing about 13W off the battery with screen active but at low brightness so I can query it locally and write this post. The powertop utility reports ~95% C7 idle state for the CPU, ~99% RC6 for the iGPU, and ~60% C2 plus ~23% C3 for the package.
They are also pretending this is an environment vs performance argument, when their choice of old processors clearly shows it is rather environment vs costs. They could get far better performance with newer CPUs, both absolute as well as per Wh.
If used sanely, the power consumption cost is tiny compared to buying a new computer.
That depends entirely on how long you plan to use the system. 1 year vs 5 years is a huge difference.
https://www.wattdoesituse.com/hp-z220-workstation
This says 8 hours a day would be $23 a year.
Not a single one.
Power consumption should be measured as 8-10 hours at 50% load, and 14-16 hours at idle.
That easily doubles your estimates, I think. Not to mention the places where power is more expensive than $0.12/KWh
Most of the time, I think it was a worry of "if the power supply dies" - because usually, these workstations have a very proprietary PSU, which can sometimes be difficult to source, and when you find one, the price can be nothing short of insane.
Then there was RAM - most of the time, you needed ECC RAM, and that stuff could be expensive if you wanted to push the system to its maximum config. Of course, this was years ago, maybe things have changed in the market?
Last was the potential noise and heat factors. I once had a Core2Duo that I dropped in a 8800 GTX (or something like that) - and while the noise wasn't bothersome, the heat output was something else. But I do know what a server fan system sounds like, and I'd worry about a workstation having that same kind of jet-engine experience.
So I never pulled the trigger, so to speak.
Today, I've been almost going the direct opposite direction.
I've got on my "list of things to repair/build" a TRS-80 Model 100 (portable), an old Toughbook C29 to refresh, and I'm contemplating building a custom "cyberdeck", using a variety of different parts and components (probably an ESP-32 coupled to an Arduino Nano, with the Nano acting as a keyboard interface, because the keyboard isn't off-the-shelf, it's from a toy computer, the ESP will probably drive some kind of GLCD, then custom firmware, etc for everything else - not really a practical system, but probably more fun).
Having attempted to replace power supplies on both Dell and HP workstations, that's just not possible. It doesn't boot without a one from the manufacturer.
Surprised that none of the comments mention it.
While the idea looked appealing at the beginning (dual CPU, 64GB RAM, great cable management), at the end I've decided that it doesn't justify the cost and hassle. Plus sometimes there were very funny issues - for example to run Rocksmith you needed to manually set affinity on windows to run it on only one CPU. After upgrading to last gen Thinkpad extreme it feels that Thinkpad even does 4k rendering faster.
My monthly electric bill decreased by nearly $10 after replacing my 2010 MacPro with a 2018 MacMini.
EDIT - FWIW my home office daily drive are dual 6 core Xeon 3104s at 1.7ghz from the Dell refurb site. Although it's my desktop system I also do a lot of parallel stuff on it
You spend $6000 a year on electricity? Are you running an aluminium smelter in your back yard?
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214157X1...
[1] https://www.buildnative.com/portfolio/peak-ridge/?portfolioC...
My house is not huge, but it is nearly 70 years old and doesn't even have insulation in half the walls. My electric bill rarely gets above $200/month even when the high temp is 100 most days. My a/c is not particularly new either, I think it's approaching ~20 years.
I have a solar powered attic ventilator on my must-buy list but I'm worried about puncturing the brand new roof's membrane.
Copyedited
It can be pulling up cooled air from within the house into the attic, and then pumping it out of the house. No wonder your bills are enormous.
In cases like yours, retrofitting insulation should more than pay for itself in just a couple of years.
In my experience, the spray does a very good job of sealing the joints where applicable. That's probably not the right type for an attic, but more insulation would generally be better than less.
That's not a particularly scientific approach, but when we're talking about old houses, you're almost never going to be able to do everything the way you want 100%.
The best way to plan or inspect an insulation job is to use an infrared camera to observe temperature gradients. You can see hot or cold spots where heat is conducting or convecting through the structure.
Thank you for the practical suggestions on moving forward. Email me in profile if you're in Largo or Sarasota FL sometime and I'll buy you a brewski or coffee or something.
The previous owners ruled out trees by planting hundreds of sq ft of concrete topped with crumbling fragile coolcrete. But for the lack of soil what I'd really wish for are trellises covered moonflowers, passion flowers, and all sorts of fast growing beautiful vines. Maybe I still could do this with long rows of planters. Thank you for the excellent suggestions. You also get a brewski/coffee if you're every by Largo/Sarasota FL, email in profile.
Yeah, some trellises sound like a great idea, I've always wanted one of those over a patio, covered in vines.
The other thing I'd worry about on a old, heavily used workstation is wear on the fan bearings. I've seen ones that got pretty loud after 5-6 years and replacement parts generally aren't available at that point.
No parts? It's a bloody fan, ffs
> Yokoi said, "The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply."
> "Withered technology" in this context refers to a mature technology which is cheap and well understood. "Lateral thinking" refers to finding radical new ways of using such technology.
When designing the GameBoy, Yokoi realised that the older, simpler Z80 processor would just as well serve the purpose of making fun handheld games as the more contemporary options would (and one might argue that the limitations of the machine forced game developers to be more creative than they might have otherwise). Likewise with the monochromatic display.
The GameBoy was cheaper to manufacture and buy, more well-understood by developers, and crucially, much more power efficient than its several competitors. And it killed them.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_...
Now if I were to build a home lab, heck yeah I would jump on board. A couple of those systems would make a real nice private cloud.
+1. I host an R710, R410 and 2 R610s in my basement and its a lovely cluster. I would never have them on any other floor.
But now that most of my computer time is spent in a web browser (most of my coding is done at work so I rarely even run an IDE at home), I'm happy with my 5 year old laptop.
I built a nice 8 core Xeon desktop about 4 years ago, but haven't powered it on at all in at least the past 2 years, I moved a year ago and haven't even taken it out of the box, it's still sitting beside the computer desk.
Later that month, I was shopping at the Lockheed Martin outlet/surplus store, and spied a lovely Sun 3/280 in a 8', 19" rackmount for $25. I could not resist, much to her dismay as the refrigerator sized chassis got home. The original hardware hosting a threadripper in the case of theseus.
The main point, from what I gather, is that you can buy older hardware that's just as powerful as something you'd buy today, but you get the benefit of better repairability, cheap replacement parts, and saving a bunch of plastic from the trash. I don't see the need for buying brand-new hardware when the old stuff works just fine. (My main machine is a 6-year-old Thinkpad)
CPU performance has been basically stagnant for the past half-decade. Even on my home PC (purchased around the same time) the only thing I've changed is the graphics card - and that was to sell it for a less-powerful one, then buy back the original card years later for cheap! Maybe if you want to play games on the cutting edge of VR then constant upgrades are necessary, but five-year-old desktop hardware should be fine for nearly anyone.
[0] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/search.html?_cha...
what? comparing an i7-4770 to an i7-8700 (current gen, similar launch price), the latter is 25%-86% faster, depending on your workloads.
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-8700-vs-...
And we shouldn't miss that that's way faster! But the slope of that curve is a lot shallower than it has been historically, and a 2x improvement probably doesn't move the needle in the way that a 6x improvement does.
We're spoiled, in that we can say such an improvement no longer moves the needle. But it also means that hardware stays viable for much, much longer.
Throwing more cores at a problem has never been difficult. The whole point of the article is that you can buy a manycore workstation for peanuts. If manycores solves your workload, you're going to have a good time. If, like most power users, you need more single-thread performance, CPU performance has been stagnant.
The one note I'd add about CPUs is that they've gotten a lot wider over the last couple years. IPC has changed iteratively (AMD's has changed a lot though, particularly for Zen 2) but parallelism really has improved many workloads over time. Ryzen made it a lot easier to throw 8 cores/16 threads at a problem and for a lot of stuff folks around here are likely to care about that matters a good bit. And Ryzen 2 makes it downright affordable to throw 12c/24t at a problem. (He said, getting ready to throw down on a 3900X for video encoding...)
Basically any workstation with 2 Intel Xeon E5-2650 V2, or the L variant (lower power) will do.
for example:
1 x HP Z620 Grade A - 800W - V2
2 x Intel Xeon E5-2650 V2 - 8-Core 2.60Ghz (20MB Cache, 8.00GTs, 95W)
1 x HP Z420, Z620 - Heatsink
1 x HP Z620 2nd CPU Riser Board, Fan & Heatsink
8 x 8GB - DDR3L 1333MHz (PC3L-10600R, 2RX4, ECC REG)
1 x 2TB - SATA (7.2K, 3G) HDD - Major Brand
You'll need a new graphics card and an SSD, but that is £750 inc vat. this means you can spend £500 on an nvidia RTX, and get a 6k monitor.
If you don't mind - what kind of job are you in that you can do AOSP professionally? I always saw that as a pure-hobbyist thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDxLa6P6exc
I'd imagine something like this would've been used to make Crash Bandicoot and likes. It'd be really interesting to play games built on this thing.
Upgrades: $25 for 120G SSD (boot drive, goes in the empty second 5.25" bay), $27 for 16G RAM, $20ish for an E5670 6-core CPU, $35 for an LSI HBA in IT-mode (supports >2T drives), $10 for a set of SFF-8087 cables to go from the HBA to the existing hotswap backplane. 30-45 minutes to upgrade all the firmware for the DRAC, lifecycle controller, BIOS, etc.
Grand total of around $250 for a really nice server with full remote management, and for the cost of another E5670 and a Dell heatsink I can upgrade to dual-CPU (12 cores/24 threads).
They're so cheap that I've gotten two systems to upgrade as described, and this morning ordered a third (yet again $125) to have for spare parts.
The eBay vendor emailed me and offered to sell me a pallet of 24 for $80 each, but I don't have that kind of need or money lying around...
As for laptops, I tend to get refurb/off-lease Thinkpads from arrowdirect.com (coupon code ARROW gives 15% off), then max out the (cheap DDR3) RAM and throw a SSD in where the HD was. I've built up a T420s and an X230 like this for when I need a decent portable machine but don't want to take my expensive Macbook Pro somewhere. For the T420s I even got a $50 adapter board from a guy in China that let me put a FHD IPS screen in, instead of the 1440x900 TN LCD that it came with...
E5670 holds up surprisingly well, similar total performance – 1/2 single thread execution speed 2x threads – in a similar power envelope for half the cost.
The value in those used workstations is mostly in the case and that is hard to replicate in these days of style-driven (wtf?) computer hardware where everything has LEDs and is generally targeted to excite 12-year-olds.
at those prices I really do wonder about that cross section of recycling/dumping and inefficient power consumption
Vendor said they had more than 100 still available, and both of the units I've gotten so far are the original config as shipped from Dell according to a service tag lookup.
I's a quite capable machine. I needed it to learning about NUMA archs and test my software.
However there is no sleep mode. The boot time is not that bad for a server so I start it with IPMI bounced from a SBC.
I made it quiet the hard way, mainly for fun and learning about embedded control loops: water cooling with a passive motorbike radiator and a Arduino to control pumps and monitor temperatures while feeding fake hall sensor data to the original BMC so it doesn't freak out.
Threadripper was still 1000$ + motherboard for 300$. And RAM was at all time high with 750$ for 64gb ECC.
Because of this price tag I considered getting a used xeon, but looking at the total I probably would have only saved less than 1000$, or 20%, perhaps 100-200$ more due to used RAM for a total of 24%. That percentage saving is much lower than expected.
Other factors:
The cpu mentioned in the article has 40 PCIe lanes vs. 60 in threadripper and I figured more lanes is better should I ever put in all 4 GPUs. This seems to more or less not matter though. Something learned since then.
Better energy efficiency (newer processor and better PSU), more control over heat and noise (assumption, I have 6 quiet fans in there), more lanes (although near useless for GPUs apparently), more room for storage (8-12 drives possible), GPUs (4 possible) and simply all parts new with warranty for 20-24% more
This is very use case specific of course and there might be better used systems available as well but I would probably do it again. The savings were less than I initially thought and that was at an all time high for RAM prices and the first generation of threadrippers, should be even less now. What I should have done differently is use it more often, but that's a different story.
-> The expensive parts are storage, GPU and high quality case/PSU/fans. If you want to build your first workstation, storage and GPUs should be bought separately anyways. But if you don't need them or already have those from a different system, a used xeon sounds interesting. You still probably save less than expected though, over the years with less warranty, more power draw and more work necessary (which can be fun! not denying that)
(Yes the linked article is about home computer, not workstation. This is a different scenario. I figured it's nonetheless relevant for some)
These older machines use way more power. Modern stuff is far more quiet and can do a lot more with less heat and sound.
I have a dual Xeon 2U here at home w/ 48Gb Of Ram, redundant power supplies etc... it’s awesome. But it’s not even remotely close to being as performant as my new MacBook Pro.
Even my power hungry 71TB NAS is off 99% of the time and only turned on when needed. Saving me 150-200 Watt idle power usage.
If you don't need your stuff to be on 24/7 you can buy older more power-hungry stuff as long as you turn it off when done.
I've read that Ryzen can generate a good amount of heat. I'd worry that Mini-ITX due to the formfactor may struggle more.
They even have smaller than ITX systems now, though not quite as small as a NUC: https://www.asrock.com/nettop/
I have one of these and it runs great.
I find the really old workstations to be way more interesting. You rarely see a MIPS, Sparc, PA-RISC anymore. Once the CPU wars were over (Intel won, btw) you could get old SGI supercomputers, DEC Alphas, Sun Sparcstations, and NeXT Turbo Cubes for almost nothing. My very first website was run from an Alpha workstation on NetBSD under my dorm room bed.
They were power hungry, not state of the art, and sometimes quirky to use (Irix Motif comes to mind) but they were a blast.
If you bought a 5 year old computer in 2011 you’d be buying last gen stuff. But in 2019 even the sandy bridge (2012) intel processors aren’t that bad. Obviously you are paying with power because you’ll buy a 2 or 4 way system to compensate, but if you use it just a few hours per day it’s a steal.
Mine is running silently right now and I reckon it is using a quarter of the 65W power available to it.
The HP Z220 has a 400W power supply and I reckon it is probably using 200W right now.
Silence is priceless.
But, what if you can't afford silence?
If the Z220 can be found in a skip then it comes for free. If you keep it for three years then it eats that much electricity (assuming daily usage) that it costs as much as a NUC.
There are a lot of variables here, but I think that the Intel NUC option is just as good value as the Z220 if electricity is factored in and the Z220 is assumed to be free. It all comes down to whether you want to pay up front and save money on the electricity bills or have no up-front costs and pay extra electricity bills over time.
In three years time, what would you prefer?
I think the Z220 would be hard to rehome. The Intel NUC? I think it would make a nice set top box or hand-me-down for many people. If there were no takers and it had to be eBayed then the postage would be affordable to the buyer. I am not so sure the same could be said for the Z220.
There is one final benefit to the NUC - a cleaner conscience when leaving it on. You know that you are not being overly greedy with one's carbon footprint.
I rarely find anything useful but I just love going through junk of any sort.
I'm guessing my ancestors were some sort of scavangers or something?? I've never understood why it gives me so much pleasure!
It's not THAT loud and serves my needs pretty well. Came with a single 2.1gHz xenon and has room for a second
I was trying to find the actual specs on his purchase.
Is it using ECC RAM?
What good will one let alone several 32bit machines will do for me now a days.
I can use Ubuntu, or chain them, but how would you do anything with virtualization and advanced computing.?
I would've expected some kind of cost analysis for how much compute power $500 buys you on a few years old workstation versus something new, and that you get more for your money used. Nothing.