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.
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.
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.
Using something until it dies is not always the best outcome.
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.
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.
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.