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-...
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).
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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 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).
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.