Why your next home computer should be an old Xeon workstation (2019)
tedium.co
tedium.co
Yes, it was a great advice in the 2010s -- I had such a Dell, too. It's well documented how IPC only has grown 20-25% from Sandy Bridge to Skylake and then the wait was long, long until a new uarch has emerged in 2021. But towards the end of the decade, Ryzen has disturbed the still waters and the number of cores have, well, risen sharply while keeping a competitive IPC and Intel eventually followed suit. Because of this, the equally long time rule of thumb where most apps don't really use multiple cores well so you don't need them on the desktop is also dead by now.
I wouldn't recommend a Haswell Xeon as this article does today.
Solid state components are generally very reliable anyway.
The Ryzen story is a joke if you are actually in the market for a workstation, meaning you want ECC that works. The only way to get it is to buy integrated OEM workstations with the TR Pro.
PS: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/lh3m42/demystifying_ry...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ggmyyg/an_overview_of_...
Ryzen CPUs without an iGPU _will_ support ECC UDIMM, _unless_ the mainboard specs specifically tell you that it won't support ECC, or simply omit mentioning ECC UDIMM at all.
Fwiw, I've enjoyed proper ECC on an ASRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming-ITX/ac with a Ryzen 5 3600 for more than two years now (using GNU/Linux; I am not sure how Windows would fare).
PS C:\> wmic CPU get Name
Name
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor
PS C:\> wmic Baseboard get Product,Manufacturer
Manufacturer Product
ASRock B450M Pro4
PS C:\> wmic MemoryChip get Manufacturer,PartNumber,BankLabel,Capacity,Speed
BankLabel Capacity Manufacturer PartNumber Speed
P0 CHANNEL A 17179869184 Kingston 9965745-002.A00G 2667
P0 CHANNEL A 17179869184 Kingston 9965745-002.A00G 2667
P0 CHANNEL B 17179869184 Kingston 9965745-002.A00G 2667
P0 CHANNEL B 17179869184 Kingston 9965745-002.A00G 2667
PS C:\> wmic MemPhysical get MemoryErrorCorrection
MemoryErrorCorrection
6 # "6" is Multi-bit ECCSearching for a simple answer to question: "does this CPU + chipset + this particular motherboard actually support ECC DRAM" is infuriating.
Thousands of words on the RGB lighting and the overclocking tweaks, silence on ECC support. It's insane.
Went through four rounds of ECC DRAM (that was on the manufacturer's supported config list) on a Gigabyte board, never got it to POST.
I finally gave up on that one. Bought an Asus X99 WS setup, with Xeon and RAM, from a vendor on eBay.
I can fix simple things, but debugging a configuration in this gamer-saturated market is beyond my current skill level. Once I have at least something working end-to-end, I can bootstrap up to a working machine. But the dead stare of failed POST was a tough one.
It's outdated if you need a high-performance workstation. As a regular desktop PC, it runs just fine. Would work quite well as a NAS CPU, with ECC support and downclocked to some lower P-state.
However, I don't think these were ever available for $50 as author suggests. It all really depends on the price point. At $50, I would buy 1 right now, just to have as a backup/guest PC in the living room.
It took me an obscene amount of time to get macos catalina running on it, however. The latest firmware and/or quadro k5000 just make it permahang.
I'd love for it to be plug and play.
If it doesn't boot, it's very likely that you actually bought registered memory, which is normal in servers, but _not_ supported at all by Ryzen processors, no matter the mainboard.
Certain boards (mostly ASRock) will boot with it, but AMD don't support it outside the Pro series, and you won't get full reporting.
I've been down this rabbit hole for a while with NAS builds, and it's simply not worth AMD if you need ECC currently for anything not too high end.
In 2017 buying old Xeons bought you pretty good performance for the buck, as Intel sold you quad cores with minor single core and multicore uplifts for a lot of money, while at the same time old Westmere or Sandy Bridge Xeons had a pretty good balance of many cores with decent enough clock speeds / single core performance. Even I/O options did not improve by a lot in those years.
In 2022 buying old Xeons means you get stuff from the era where Intel started heavily deprioritizing single core performance over having a lot of cores in Xeons. 14+ lowly clocked Haswell cores still do well in synthetic benchmarks, but I don't think they're worth it for any real world workstation loads. Low clocked Haswell cores are outperformed by such things as the Alder Lake efficiency cores (easily) and even modern Android phones. The latest Zen cores and the Alder Lake performance cores will be worth at least twice the per core performance of one of those individual Haswell cores. Even if you say compile code all day it's probably not worth buying into a 200W behemoth that runs Firefox slower than the Android phone in your pocket.
This blog was written in 2019 and was probably already not great advice then, but it is legit bad advice now.
Nowadays, old server processors have very poor single threaded performance compared to recent desktop grade hardware, and the much larger amount of cores fails to compensate for that in pretty much all workstation loads. Especially considering that you can get a lot of cores in desktop hardware nowadays too. The relative value of desktop hardware vs server hardware has gone up substantially in the past 5 years or so, since Intel started making server chips focused exclusively on the demands of large scale data centers and AMD started normalizing high core counts in desktop chips.
Because cheap second hand server chips are sourced from data centers, that inherently favor high core counts and only baseline single thread performance, I don't see a future where we have cheap server processors ever being a great choice for a workstation again. Quick-ish single thread server chips do exist (e.g. Epyc 72F3), but I think those are too niche to ever see them for a good deal on eBay.
I’m certainly a power user and suspect that additional cores may actually benefit me, but there are some very interesting points about clock speed from you and others.
I wish that was true. Lots of code I deal with bottlenecks on a single thread. Mozilla has abandoned Servo, and we are stuck with browsers poorly parallelizing parsing, painting, execution. Photoshop, aside from a few filters and functions, is also poorly parallelized. Not to mention smaller programs who understandably can’t justify the complexity of multithreading.
I’d trade single tread performance for cores any day.
According to pstree:
3*[Isolated Web Co───28*[{Isolated Web Co}]]
3*[Isolated Web Co───29*[{Isolated Web Co}]]
2*[Isolated Web Co───26*[{Isolated Web Co}]]
Isolated Web Co───27*[{Isolated Web Co}]
Privileged Cont───25*[{Privileged Cont}]
RDD Process───2*[{RDD Process}]
Socket Process───4*[{Socket Process}]
Utility Process───2*[{Utility Process}]
2*[Web Content───9*[{Web Content}]]
Web Content───10*[{Web Content}]
WebExtensions───28*[{WebExtensions}]
chrome-gnome-sh───2*[{chrome-gnome-sh}]
firefox-bin
129\*[{firefox-bin}]Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a huge leap forward to have a single webpage running in its own process, but there’s ample room for improvement.
That’s what GP is referring to.
Single core: 61.1
4 cores: 73.7
JetStream 2 is easier to multithread since it plays with Web Workers and other tricks, but still, results are depressing:
Single core: 54.4
4 cores: 82This said, there are some Xeons which run on moderate to somewhat litle power. You might get one or two used of them on ebay. I consider to do this for my home server some day.
Or not.
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.
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.
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...
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:
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.
....and promptly lose in performance benchmarks against a last generation minipc....which in turn are basically laptop class chips of the kind so low power you can passive cool them. [0] Not in the same price class sure, but that should give most people pause anyway.
Unless you have a specific need for ECC / out-of-band / server practice / TBs of RAM this a questionable proposition. Plus you need space, cheap electricity, noise tolerance and heat dissipation.
That said it is good to create awareness of it. More options is good.
I reckon there might be some really good opportunities coming up with Zen 2 AM4 second hand though - some of those configurations are (unofficially) ECC capable, plenty powerful and loads of gamers will be looking to dump their rigs shortly.
[0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2667+...
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+4700U&i...
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.
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
These days, I just run M1 Mac Minis. Cheap. Fast. Reliable.
Now my biggest noise generator is my keyboard (mechanical!) that is activated on demand -by me!- and my major heat generator is the sun, as should be!
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.
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.
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.
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.
For an 8 year old chip, this box rocks and plays most games at 4K60.
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%.
Have an older Xeon which I use as remote desktop. Is solid.
I use 2x westmere cpu (x5670) as performance vs price is still excellent. DDR3 ram is dirt cheap. Combined with nvme drive it just really fast machine for any developer task I do, even some graphics.
Power consumption is 140W at idle, up to 350W at full load. I use it few hours a day, so the electricity bill is not something to consider here.
My conversion: https://www.instructables.com/Convert-HP-DL380-G6-to-Cheap-G...
Having ECC, a SAS backplane and HBA is really nice to host a file server with though. I have a couple 10/40 Gbit NICs that can all work at the same time because it has enough PCIe lanes.
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.
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.
It also helps that I don't do anything container related at home, and at work I am more a fashion victim than anything.
So they are perfectly alright for home workloads.
But... with hardware mitigations slowing down pre-Skylake hardware and new ARM chips (M1 for now, hopefully others in the future). It really feels like anything older than Kabylake feels un-competitive and not worth the power draw for this generation. For years we only got low single digit increases each generation from Intel. Then AMD, and later Apple, disrupted this.
With the IPC of the new M1s, I honestly wonder if it would use less energy for these server parts to be (barely) recycled and manufactured into M2s from Apple or whatever Qualcomm is brewing with those Apple CPU designers they hired.
I have an old Mac with Xeon CPU that has not had software updates since before Spectre and Meltdown, et al. I bought it for its performance and have my workflow finely enmeshed, so I don't plan on applying patches that intentionally slow it down.
It sure is good at running Logic Audio. Don't need networking for that, so it is disabled. The CPU performance is more important than connectivity for its use and purposes. So it stays air gapped for the security, and unpatched for the performance.
They are great at running at top speed, but not great at idling.
Some are a real joy hardware wish to work on if your only other experience is with cheap consumer desktops.
Well-engineered ways to replace harddrives, access RAM chips. switch out PCI cards.
I was amazed with some of the first one I got my hands on. That was an AIX Workstation back a long time ago. Why dont they do this everywhere? I thought. Well price.
Issues can be enteprisy expensive components and ports.
Also, anyone daily drive Linux and then have a sidecar/utility VM for windows-related stuff like specific apps or gaming care to comment on that experience?
I was going to do the Windows VM thing but then the gaming laptop I sold when I did this got returned so I just use that instead.
While I don't actually use it for gaming, the main Windows dev VM, with 18 cores, 32GB RAM, a Quadro P1000 (read: underclocked GTX 1050 with a few extra driver features; ideal for my purposes, would use something beefier for a gaming box), and a physical USB 3.0 controller, runs games as well as any similarly-equipped hardware box, with the caveat that, if you play online multiplayer games (I don't), some anti-cheat software apparently detects and refuses to run under virtualization.
Alongside this "always-on" main VM, I regularly run multiple Linux (both with and without AMD GPU), Windows, and FreeBSD VMs.
This configuration works great for me, but it probably helps that my home office infrastructure includes a vCenter Server and mostly runs on two additional ESXi hosts, and that, on a semi-regular basis, I have applications that require connecting old Fibre Channel and even parallel SCSI hardware, so the workstation's extra PCIe slots and "tool-free" case design come in handy.
While I wouldn't buy a Z820 today, I'm in no hurry to replace this one; ideally, I'll swap in a similarly-configured Z8 in 2–3 years.
Another option are the 'remanufactured' mainboard bundles on the chinese sites. You can get an 8-core ivy bridge (intel's last great cpu imho) such as 2650v2, 16GB ECC ram and the mainboard for <$100 shipped.
It's cheap for a reason. For a few hundred more I'm sure there's a used Surface or something with better specs and insanely less power.
If you actually have a job that needs lots of CPU power, you can afford better, if you don't, you can probably get by with any cheap laptop.
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.
They're so cheap on ebay, and it would be a way to get avx-2 support too. The risk is that 2nd hand may have reliability problems of course.
- 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