
The charm of buying old workstation hardware on the cheap - artsandsci
https://tedium.co/2019/06/04/used-workstation-computer-buying-strategy/
======
fnord77
The power consumption of some of these old workstations is obscene. There's
probably some optimal intersection between cost of the computer and the cost
of power consumption.

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.

~~~
hak8or
Yes! I am shocked that almost no one seems to comment on power consumption for
these units. Sure, they cost $200 while being just as fast as $700 machines,
but they can easily pull $50 a month in power, assuming 25 cents per kwh.

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.

~~~
ramraj07
How about you buy these machines and only run them in the winter? Heck, mine
coins if you want! It's just going to heat the house!

~~~
frosted-flakes
Because if you normally heat your house through cheaper means (wood, natural
gas, etc.) like most Americans, then it's still going to add a lot to your
power bill.

~~~
dylan604
But in the US, the time of year for heating your house with wood,natural gas,
etc is the cheapest time for electricity.

~~~
frosted-flakes
Do electricity prices vary throughout the year? I don't remember that being
the case when I lived in the US, and it's not the case in Ontario. We have
time-of-use pricing that swaps the mid-peak and on-peak rates, but that
doesn't affect the total charge very much.

~~~
dylan604
Utility companies offer a product of supply and demand. During the middle of
the day in the summer in Texas, demand is at its peak as everyone runs their
A/C full tilt. That's the most expensive unit of electricity, so the pricing
reflects that. Everyone knows that you don't run your laundry/dishes during
that time. Winter time, most places are heating with gas, so electricity
demand is just never as high so the prices are cheaper. Yes, some pricing
options claim they are giving "free nights and weekends", or avg billing that
"lowers" the summer rates while "raising" the winter months to keep it on
average the same per month. That doesn't actually change the rate per KWh at
the time. It's like buying car with the squeezing the balloon analogy, squeeze
the price on one end the numbers bulge somewhere else.

------
adrianN
If you want a loud computer that consumes ten times as much electricity as it
should, then an old Xean Workstation might be for you. Personally I prefer
buying old Thinkpads. They're cheap, fast enough, and their electricity
consumption is decent.

~~~
noisy_boy
Coincidentally I'm considering buying a used Thinkpad X220 for fun projects
for me/kids because of the reliability, build quality and the awesome
keyboard. The best quote I have received so far is about $145 for i5/8gb
ram/no-drive (I already have a spare ssd). Hoping the machine is in a good
condition :)

~~~
vuln
Go for it. You will not regret it... I still have mine powered on and sits on
my desk with an external plugged in. I suggest doing the FullHD mode if you're
decent with a soldering iron. Here is a great resource for x220s. Enjoy!

[http://x220.mcdonnelltech.com/resources/](http://x220.mcdonnelltech.com/resources/)

~~~
noisy_boy
I have never touched a soldering iron and quite wary of h/w tinkering - thanks
for the link though. Even if I don't know how to work with h/w, I like to read
about other people doing it.

------
mbell
Meh, these old systems can be fun to tinker with but are _slow_.

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.

~~~
lhoff
It makes sense if you need much Ram. DDR3 RDIMMs used from ebay are really
Cheap.

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.

~~~
ianhowson
This.

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.

~~~
nickpsecurity
I just got a used Thinkpad with an i7. I was eyeballing cheaper stuff with i5.
The reason I upgraded is the security problems in CPU's require mitigations
that will probably keep slowing them down. I bought a faster core to mitigate
those slowdowns a bit. Plus, get security updates for a while longer.

~~~
ggg2
so you gave more money to company with the broken product? why not buy amd?

~~~
nickpsecurity
I recommend people buying AMD where they can. Vermaden on Lobsters is a BSD
expert. I asked them what hardware runs pretty much all BSD's. Vermaden
narrowed it down to a few Thinkpads. All of them on eBay from recyclers had
Intels. So, Intel just came with the box.

If building from parts or doing non-BSD, I'd go with an AMD, POWER, or ARM
system.

~~~
avtar
> I asked them what hardware runs pretty much all BSD's. Vermaden narrowed it
> down to a few Thinkpads.

What were the recommended models?

~~~
nickpsecurity
Vermaden's comments on that were here:

[https://lobste.rs/s/szzgjl/cheap_bsd_friendly_notebook](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. :)

------
PascLeRasc
I've been doing this for years, "upgrading" every 6 months when I find a new
machine being thrown away. In the past year I did this with a 2006 Mac Pro and
a 2013 System76 desktop. Both of these machines were a delight to work on - I
was able to get 16gb of DDR2 ECC RAM and 2 quad-core Xeons for the Mac Pro for
around $28 total on ebay. The Mac Pro could be flashed up to a 2007 model and
ran El Capitan perfectly with a cheap no-name SSD off Amazon. It took a GTX
760 with some odd power adapters and it was a fantastic machine to do audio
editing and playing with tensorflow-gpu on.

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.

------
dashesyan
You're giving away my secrets! I've bought 3 of these types of HP workstations
over the years, starting with a Z210 with a Xeon E3-1240. I added a graphics
card to make it a super budget gaming PC.

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.

~~~
izzydata
Do these older CPUs have hardware level decoding for modern video formats such
as AV1?

~~~
chronogram
Does any modern chip have that yet then?

~~~
izzydata
Perhaps not. I might be thinking of VP9 if that is what YouTube has been
using.

~~~
chronogram
Ah yes that’s VP9, though you can also use an extension (or just a config
tweak in Firefox), or Edge to view h264, which is minimum Sandy Bridge.

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)

------
Yizahi
This will work if you are located in big western city. He bought his Z420 for
50$, and when I check ebay right now they are going for 150-300$ + 100-200$
shipping. And that with E5-1603 CPU, not the E5-2667 or similar. Lets say I
have 5 year old AMD FX-8350 due to upgrade this year. That Xeon is actually
slower, looking at some basic benchmarks (of course it may be faster in some,
but I don't have time for detailed investigation). So ~300$ total for a
sidegrade? And that not including hassle with shipping, maybe dealing with
scammer seller from ebay, then import tax 30% (and who knows how base price
will be calculated at customs). Etc. etc. Not worth it.

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.

~~~
fishtacos
That Xeon is faster, not slower than your Bulldozer chip.

Passmark for the E5-2667: Multithreaded: 10372 Single threaded 1609

Passmark for the FX-8350: Multithreaded 8951 Single threaded: 1510

~~~
Yizahi
I was comparing E5-1603 vs FX-8350. That was for ~300$ (of course including
case, psu, gpu and memory).

------
skunkworker
I would add another negative to the list from personal experience. About a
year ago I built a used server dual Xeon home server with e5-2680v2s. Now the
pass mark scores per chip are about 15,000 but the power draw overall can get
quite high. If you’re in an area with more expensive kwh I would recommend
looking into something like a threadripper or a more efficient and newer cpu.

~~~
cm2187
If it's a home server doing not much most of the time, an intel skull/hade
canyon can be a good choice. It can be really powerful when it needs to be, is
effectively a laptop cpu the rest of the time, so not drawing much power. The
only inconvenience is that it has no ipmi and it becomes really loud under
heavy load.

Also you can sort of get 10gbe through a thunderbolt adapter but I ran into
some compatibility issues with hyper-v.

------
ken
Every comment here so far is about power consumption, which is mentioned in
the article:

> 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.

~~~
thinkingemote
Why do the machines use so much power?

~~~
magduf
Back in those days, Intel simply did not care one iota about power
consumption. The P4 processors were absolute power hogs, and all Intel did was
brag about how great their memory bandwidth to the RAMBUS memory was.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
The last Pentium 4 was released in 2008; the Xeon E5-2667 v2 parts discussed
in the article were released in 2013, years after Intel abandoned their
Netburst approach.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Xeons are usually a generation behind on process and sometimes other
technology as well.

~~~
ericd
Be that as it may, that Xeon is post Nehalem, it’s not at all related to
Netburst. Netburst was an evolutionary dead end.

------
deadfece
On a vastly more practical note, check out JDM_WAAAT's site
[https://www.serverbuilds.net/](https://www.serverbuilds.net/) . They're more
piecemeal parts list, but he has a very reasoned approach to select parts that
deliver value/performance at their price point, and are available at the
selected price in sufficient quantities.

------
cr0sh
I've looked into this kind of thing in the past, but there was always
something that made me shy away, despite the prices being relatively
favorable.

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).

~~~
user5994461
+1 on the PSU.

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.

------
galkk
I bought once Supermicro workstation (dual Xeon 2680), and it was LOUD. Even
when shut down, the fans were still making noise, so I've had a habit of
turning it off from power to make it silent.

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.

------
robbyt
Old xeons are hot, and power hungry.

My monthly electric bill decreased by nearly $10 after replacing my 2010
MacPro with a 2018 MacMini.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> _Old xeons are hot, and power hungry._

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.

~~~
Johnny555
Aren't most fans available as standard replacement parts? Or at least,
something close enough? I once zip-tied (well, tied in with wire) a
replacement CPU fan when the one I thought would fit didn't quite line up.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
Dell and HP are the two major workstation brands I'm familiar with and both of
them use custom fan assemblies. Search for "Dell Precision workstation fans"
on eBay if you'd like to see examples.

~~~
jandrese
On the other hand, ripping out the old case fan and replacing it with one held
in place by sheet metal screws or glue is an option. When you are buying old
hardware like this it's ok to bodge the repairs if necessary.

------
h9n
Great article. It expresses ideas similar to Game & Watch and GameBoy creator
Gunpei Yokoi's philosophy of Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology.[0]

> 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_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_with_Withered_Technology)

------
robohoe
Yeah, that's a no from me. Who would want another massive heat-generative,
power-hungry desktop/server humming along in their home office as their main
workstation?

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.

~~~
obenn
> 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.

------
hambursa
Used to run an older Xeon system I picked for free as home server/workstation.
Now you can pick up 8c16t Ryzens pretty cheap and they even support ECC on
cheap consumer motherboards, so unless you get used Xeon for literally next to
nothing, you may want to consider other alternatives. There's also the fact
that recently more and more vulnerabilities have been discovered in Intel
products, which makes Xeon much less attractive platform.

------
chapium
It may feel a bit anachronistic at times, but learning terminal based apps is
a good way to beat the cycle of upgrades. Many tasks are not all that complex,
and they don't need recent hardware to perform well.

------
Johnny555
I used to love upgrading my home desktop, I'd research specs, figure out the
best price/performance and upgrade components regularly (motherboard, CPU,
hard drive, etc).

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.

------
mNovak
I like to do this with laptops -- you can get a few years old maxed out Dell
Latitudes, Thinkpads etc on ebay for 80% off. These outperform a standard new
$800 laptop easily, though obviously you pay in sleekness/weight (mine is 90%
stationary so I don't much care).

------
heelix
Funny story. Back in when my Bride and I lived in a single bedroom
compartment, she looked at my small stack of computers and said "why don't you
get one big one"?

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.

------
elagost
The arguments about power consumption only apply to a specific set of old
workstation CPUs. You can buy old hardware that isn't super inefficient. I
bought an HP EliteDesk tower on the cheap ($150) last year that had a i7-4790
(an all-around great CPU) and is super quiet. With a lower-power GPU in it
(nvidia 1030) it's even decent for light games or video decoding. I've not
directly measured the power consumption, but it's not nearly the monster these
old Xeons can be.

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)

------
ahelwer
I was given an HP Z230 workstation when I started at Microsoft five years ago
and haven't upgraded since then, despite being well beyond eligible for a
hardware refresh. It has 32 GB of RAM and an (edit) 4-core 8-thread i7-4770,
plus an OS SSD with several data HDDs (integrated graphics, but meh).

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.

~~~
gruez
>CPU performance has been basically stagnant for the past half-decade

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-...](https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-
Core-i7-8700-vs-Intel-Core-i7-4770/3940vs1978)

~~~
eropple
The i7-8700 is heckin' fast, but if you look at it over time, the rate of
improvement has slowed down quite a bit. The 4770 is six years old. The Core 2
Duo E6600 is its price-comparable equivalent from six years before _that_. An
E6600 has a PassMark score of 1553. An i7-4770 has a PassMark score of 9780.
An i7-8700 has a score of 15155.

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.

------
Obsnold
Perhaps someone here can give me a bit of advice. I've been undecided on
whether to buy a refurbished workstation for a while now. I do a lot of aosp
builds for some of my clients and on my current setup it can take 3 or 4 hours
for a clean build. I've been looking at various builds on
[https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/](https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/) For
about £1500 to £2000. If anyone has any experience or advice it would be
greatly appreciated.

~~~
KaiserPro
My favourite setup is an HPz620 v2 with e5-xxxxv2 CPUs, and >= 64 gigs of ram.

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.

~~~
Obsnold
Thanks I've found it difficult to find any info on what I can expect for
certain hardware. It seems most people are either hobbyists who are on similar
hardware to me or people working for big companies who can afford massive
build servers.

------
w_s_l
For one I would love to have an SGI workstation, I still have CG magazines
from this era and its plastered everywhere in the ads, and I'm still amazed at
the graphic output (so smooth) and what we had in the 90s.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDxLa6P6exc](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.

------
mrbill
It's not just workstation hardware - I've recently bought a couple of Dell
T410s off eBay for $125 each (shipped!). Quad-core Xeon E5620s, 4G RAM, 6-bay
hotswap chassis, DVD-ROM, iDRAC 6 Enterprise, PERC 6i RAID card.

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...

~~~
magashna
>pallet of 24 for $80 each

at those prices I really do wonder about that cross section of
recycling/dumping and inefficient power consumption

~~~
mrbill
I'm amazed that they can sell them for $125 _including shipping_ (which has to
be at least $40-50) and still make a profit. Makes me wonder what THEY paid
for them..

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.

~~~
user5994461
They probably don't pay for it. The hardware is decommissioned after a few
years of usage.

------
aloer
In late 2017 I built myself a threadripper based workstation for ~5000$ with a
1950x, 64gb ECC (can fit up to 128), a single 1080 ti, single NVMe drive and
two 8tb HDDs. The system was designed to allow for more HDDs (case space and
thermal capacity, 8 should fit easily), 4 GPUs and durable enough so that I
can wrap it up and ship it around the world if needed (The whole thing weighs
~18kg with a single GPU. Whether shipping a PC is a good idea or not I have
yet to find 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)

------
gravypod
If a lot of HN users were interested it would be cool if someone could
organize group-buys of these types of hardware. Usually buying old hardware
(for super cheap) is limited by volume and most sellers aren't willing to ship
something. If someone removed those pains and hand-picked "worth it" (for the
home/small business server lab) items it would be something a few people might
be interested in.

------
whalesalad
This stuff is fun to do but it’s not s magic bullet. The title would be better
named “why your next home computer _could_ be an old Xeon workstation”

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.

------
glaurung_
My gaming desktop right now is actually an old Dell Precision tower with a
third gen i7 that I got for $140 off eBay. I swapped out the PSU, upped the
ram to 16gb, added an SSD I had laying around, and replaced the Quadro GPU
with a 1060. In all it cost me about $350 and comfortably runs every game I
own. Power draw isn't too much of a concern since it isn't used too often.

------
louwrentius
For what it's worth: I keep my computers / servers off all the time. When I
need them I use Wake-On-Lan to remotely turn them on when needed.

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.

------
hermitdev
Takes me back. I bought a used Dell workstation for a few hundred bucks. Was
pretty bare, basically case, power supply and motherboard. At the time, it was
the only motherboard I was aware of that supported dual socket CPUs and AGP
graphics. Even though I bought it used, Dell support was willing to help me
out debugging why it wouldn't boot (something to due with a mismatch between
the CPU power control units - I think that's what they were called- with a
dual P4 Xeon setup). For the workstation, it was pretty damned affordable for
what I got. The kick in the jaw was that it took RDRAM. To put in 1.5 GB of
RAM doubled the cost of the build, easily. Few years later when I was an FTE,
and no longer in school, dropped a couple of grand USD to upgrade the RAM to 3
GB. That was circa 2005. Great workstation, but boy was that RDRAM
expensive...

------
milesdyson_phd
Oh hey, I have an old z420 that I picked up off of ebay that I use as a
hypervisor. It had running for a few years and worked great for what I was
using it for. I replaced it earlier this year with a mini-itx ryzen based
system, because I didn't want the tower in my office anymore.

~~~
Someone1234
How is the heat management in your Mini-ITX Ryzen system?

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.

~~~
jcastro
Works fine with the stock heatsink ootb, even with a mild overclock.

They even have smaller than ITX systems now, though not quite as small as a
NUC: [https://www.asrock.com/nettop/](https://www.asrock.com/nettop/)

I have one of these and it runs great.

------
yardie
I don't find any of these workstations really interesting. They are all the
same x86_64 architecture so just getting the latest and greatest puts you
leagues ahead.

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.

------
cptnapalm
The family machine is a 2009 Mac Pro with dual hex core processors, 48 gigs of
RAM and 2 low watt video cards running Ubuntu. It does multiseat like a champ:
one side was playing Hitman (2016) while the other was doing Tomb Raider
(2013). I had been wanting to do multiseat for about a decade. In addition to
using it remotely with ssh, I have guacamole on it, connecting to GDM so I can
if I need to get to my desktop through a web browser. Total cost was about
$600. I'm very much enjoying it.

------
alkonaut
We’re in a 5-10 year plateau where buying yesterday’s machines dorsn’t cost
much performance, at least for CPUs.

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.

------
dade_
If the noise factor isn't a concern. For me it is, so I'll stick to Intel NUCs
(until a good AMD alternative comes along).

~~~
Theodores
Join the club - and you can get refurbished NUCs.

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.

------
keeptrying
I dont know what it is but I love looking through junk to see if I can find
something valuable.

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!

------
mandeepj
Great idea. You can easily buy a Mac Pro quad-core (single or dual cpu) for
anywhere between $300 to $900. It's going to work on par with today's
expensive machines :-)

------
s09dfhks
Currently using a Dell r710 I got from a recycler for $75 as a freenas box

It's not THAT loud and serves my needs pretty well. Came with a single 2.1gHz
xenon and has room for a second

------
meerita
I always wanted to buy a SGI station, and use the old OS. I hope someday find
one example that it's pristine.

------
dillonmckay
This article is a bit verbose, not very succinct.

I was trying to find the actual specs on his purchase.

Is it using ECC RAM?

------
nurettin
Power consumption and fan sounds on those things were insane.

------
pschmot
The Xeon workstations I have and can easily access, are all 32bit

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.?

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Completely depends on your use-case. Writing/building/running Java, JS,
Python, or anything else architecture-independent? Data processing? You're
set. Building release binaries for a native-code application? Yeah, no. But it
totally depends what you're doing.

------
unixhero
I do this. HP Z620 is a phenomenal workstation.

------
dis-sys
old Xeon are not all E6-2680v2 kind of junk, you can buy a pair of used Xeon
Platinum 8175M + a decent brand new dual socket motherboard for less than
$2,500 USD.

------
supernova87a
What a useless article that just talks about intangible social reasons to buy
something used.

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.

