[HN Gopher] Why your next home computer should be an old Xeon wo...
___________________________________________________________________
Why your next home computer should be an old Xeon workstation
(2019)
Author : vmoore
Score : 128 points
Date : 2022-07-02 12:50 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tedium.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (tedium.co)
| green-salt wrote:
| Might be fun if you're not paying for the electricity or its
| cheap in your area. I have a Dell T410 and will likely get
| something a little newer, but it won't be powered on most of the
| time like I use my Ryzen desktop. They tend to be much louder
| too.
|
| 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.
| nonamenoslogan wrote:
| I completely agree on keeping old gear running but the tradeoffs
| in power consumption make it worth upgrading to current-gen after
| a certain amount of time.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| I <3 my refurbished Thinkstation P500. Solid well-designed case,
| 4 Xeon cores, nVidia Kepler, 2x SSD, and 64GB ECC RAM for less
| than the cost of new 64GB ECC. Not as fast or power-efficient as
| a new workstation, but nothing new had to be manufactured!
| secure wrote:
| I have been using an HP z440 for years as my work machine. It's
| fine, performance-wise, and definitely for running a browser,
| video conferencing, and terminal emulators.
|
| 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.
| libertybylaw wrote:
| I use an old 2013 Xeon Workstation as daily driver and have been
| very happy with it.
|
| 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.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I'm in the overclocked Xeon 1680v2 gang and loving it.
|
| It's quite capable with a more modern GPU and the X79
| motherboard also supports NVMe drives.
| hexo wrote:
| What motherboard, please? Can you also boot from NVMe? I was
| looking into this, have Asus P9X79 PRO.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Ha! I use the Asus X79 Deluxe and yes, I can boot from
| PCIe. I had a P9X79 Pro before but stupidly wanted TPM
| support so I replaced with an Asus X79 Deluxe from ebay
| which had bent CPU pins that I was able to fix.
|
| 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:
|
| https://a.co/d/2jaYUbM
| hexo wrote:
| Thanks a lot! I hoped i'd be able to boot from PCIe, but
| boot partition on a SATA drive is quite ok too.
| lmz wrote:
| Radiation Shielded RAM? Is that an even more expensive kind of
| ECC?
| LaputanMachine wrote:
| I think they're mistaking the RAM's heat spreaders for
| radiation shields.
|
| 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.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I have a few Dell R720 servers in my basement. One of them
| recently became a dedicated remote dev box due to a client
| project that had some hefty requirements. It's got 2 processors
| (24 cores total), 64GB of ECC memory, and 6 SAS drives in a RAID
| configuration. It'll build the linux kernel in 179 seconds, lol
| (I genuinely do not know if this is good or bad, but probably not
| great) Idle it consumes about 120-130 watts of power.
|
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Another neat aspect of this sort of setup is that you can even
| use locked down devices like iPads, as long as the device has
| an SSH client (which iPads do).
| kristianp wrote:
| I'm considering getting the oldest motherboard and i7 cpu that
| supports 64gb of RAM, as an upgrade for my i7-3770 desktop, which
| still feels fast enough, but only has 16gb.
|
| 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.
| chx wrote:
| I would consider this advice now outdated.
|
| 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.
| TimPC wrote:
| More important than the raw performance numbers my computer
| comes with a three year parts and service warrantee and I can
| even pay a small premium to cover accidents and spills. I'm
| basically guaranteed my computer works for three years or they
| replace it. What happens if my used workstation breaks down two
| weeks after I buy it? Why should I take that risk?
| kube-system wrote:
| A used workstation will have failure rates at the bottom of
| the bathtub curve when you buy it. A new PC is more likely to
| experience failures.
|
| Solid state components are generally very reliable anyway.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Haswell Xeon is way too outdated in 2022, but there are loads
| of newer ones. There's a fair inventory of Skylake and Cascade
| Lake Xeon on ebay, like HP Z4 G4 w/ 32GB and a GPU for ~$750.
| It's a pretty square deal considering. Since Ice Lake Xeon
| workstations are so thin on the ground, this is the most recent
| Xeon you can get second-hand.
|
| 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.
| juergbi wrote:
| Many retail AM4 motherboards support ECC with retail Ryzen
| CPUs. At least on Linux it works as expected. ECC UDIMMs can
| be difficult to find but it shouldn't be necessary to buy a
| TR Pro for ECC if memory capacity, I/O lanes and the
| performance of AM4 Ryzen CPUs suffice.
| oso2k wrote:
| I haven't looked into deeply but I've heard stories from
| others with Ryzen boxes that ECC features of the RAM are
| turned off with Ryzen CPUs installed. Supposedly you can
| see this in Linux w/dmidecode or other tools. I'd
| appreciate good links if anybody has them.
|
| PS: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/lh3m42/demystifyi
| ng_ry...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ggmyyg/an_overview_of
| _...
| c0l0 wrote:
| Ryzen APUs (i.e., Socket AM4 CPUs with with integrated
| AMD graphics) do _not_ support ECC UDIMM, _unless_ they
| carry a "Pro" in their name.
|
| 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).
| antisthenes wrote:
| > Haswell Xeon is way too outdated in 2022
|
| 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.
| theevilsharpie wrote:
| ECC is working just fine on my Ryzen-based machine.
| 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 ECC
| jeffbee wrote:
| ASRock has universally working implementations. I should
| not have said "the only way" when I meant "the only
| reliable way that does not require you to carefully parse
| thousands of forum comments to figure out which Asus or
| Gigabyte motherboard does or does not support ECC".
| the_only_law wrote:
| Yeah I looked at old Xeon workstations a while back because
| they were dirt cheap for what seemed like a ton of compute, but
| they were incomparable to just getting a good Ryzen or
| something. Newer Xeons might be better but I'm not paying for
| that.
| johnebgd wrote:
| Ryzen supporting ECC memory really does make the old Xeon
| argument futile.
| Teever wrote:
| Does Ryzen actually support ECC though? I bought a first
| gen Ryzen and couldn't get ECC ram to boot on it, and the
| reviews I read periodically of new Ryzen CPUs and mobos
| seem to indicate that it's still hit and miss.
|
| I'd love for it to be plug and play.
| tpolzer wrote:
| Depending on board support you might get actual error
| correction or not.
|
| 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.
| DCKing wrote:
| It is really outdated.
|
| 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.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Would you say the same about brand new server processors if
| click speed was prioritised?
| tambourine_man wrote:
| >... 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 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.
| mgbmtl wrote:
| I don't know if I'm using anything fancy, but Firefox
| currently is running 20 processes on my computer.
|
| 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}]
| znpy wrote:
| Those single processes are still mostly single threaded.
|
| 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.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Yeah, my personal Skylake Xeon (W-2140B) iMac Pro is by no
| means _bad_ , but it's not amazing either. The company M1 Pro
| MBP is notably faster in both single-threaded and multithreaded
| tasks while sipping a fraction of the power. If the iMac Pro
| weren't mostly silent (which I would guess, most used Xeon
| workstations are very much _not_ ) thanks to an oversized
| heatsink I would've traded it in for something better already.
| mise_en_place wrote:
| I have an Ice Lake Xeon W. It's ok, compiles are pretty decent.
| Chromium takes a long time though, even with 24 cores/48
| threads. If you want a lesson in how not to organize your
| source repo, the chromium project would be it. It's kind of
| mind boggling how bloated browsers have become.
| ksaj wrote:
| Don't forget that in order to be secure, you have to turn off the
| features that make it so fast.
|
| 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.
| kwatsonafter wrote:
| I love to see others sharing my enthusiasm for making old
| machines have a useful, "senior citizen" life. It really warms my
| heart.
| accrual wrote:
| Installed XP on a K6-III+ 600MHz box this morning. It's indeed
| having a useful (if only for fun) "retirement". :)
| pgrote wrote:
| We have done this for workstation refreshes (Windows 10) and it
| works marvelously.
|
| 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.
| hedgehog wrote:
| It's a hard sell with modern CPUs getting so much faster. At a
| previous company most of our office build & test machines were
| refurb HP Z620 or Z640s from a reseller called TekBoost (no
| relationship). Worked great back then. It might still make sense
| if RAM quantity is the main constraint on your workflow, you can
| get a >256GB machine for under $2000, but otherwise modern
| machines are going to be faster and less hassle.
| zhala wrote:
| I think most people would be better suited getting micro form
| factor PC's like the Dell 7050's or Lenovo M920q. Can be had for
| ~200 on eBay with a 6th or 7th gen i5/i7 and only draw 10-20w in
| use.
| dervjd wrote:
| 100% this. The Dell Optiplex Micro line is fantastic.
| Servethehome has a pretty good article comparing a bunch of
| different manufactures/models -
| https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic...
| rybosworld wrote:
| "Today, these chips sell in used form for as little as $180 on
| eBay--a more than 90 percent price decrease, a price $100 less
| than the roughly comparable AMD Ryzen 7 2700X"
|
| 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
| gravypod wrote:
| You can also buy TR1900x for ~$90 USD now that the platform is
| dead. In a few years upgrade to 2990wx
|
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/133925326383?hash=item1f2e924e2f:g:...
| somat wrote:
| You are comparing the the price of a cpu to the price of an
| entire entire system.
|
| 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.
| jancsika wrote:
| > Or maybe there's a quality issue that's imperceptible to you
| but was enough to prevent that shirt from going to Neiman Marcus.
|
| 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.
| wiseleo wrote:
| We have ewaste laptops with SSD, Core i7, and 16GB RAM on eBay
| for less than $100. They will cost less for electricity. I use
| them for everything.
| cjbprime wrote:
| An advantage I didn't see specifically mentioned in the article
| -- some CPUs, especially multi-core, especially Threadripper PRO,
| aren't released to the individual market, so enterprise surplus
| can be the only way to get them.
| unixhero wrote:
| Yup. E5-2697 v2 dual for the win! I have three of those machines
| on my household.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| I have a dual 2697 v3 and it's still remarkably capable. Single
| core perf is "not great" but for my use cases it works
| fantastically all things considered. Current specs:
|
| - 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!
| unixhero wrote:
| One for a casual gaming rig in the living room
|
| One for a homelab with Plex and other things
|
| One for a proper workstation
|
| I am a happy peep
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Still running my little TS140. Just chugs along...
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| I think the sweet spot is somewhere around 2018 for used stuff
| currently, when it comes to performance per money. Got an i5-8400
| with 8GB a few months ago for 80EUR. Idle consumption is 10W with
| a spinning disk.
| polshaw wrote:
| Used chromebooks are another good case of the arbitrage that the
| article refers to.
| hexo wrote:
| It already is! I've swapped old i7-3820 @ 4.3GHz for E5-2697v2
| few months ago. Bought another 32Gigs of RAM, and now I already
| have PCIe 3 (long overdue). I've also tried to overclock it via
| BCLK (100-110MHz) and gained ~300MHz. It happily compiles and
| runs windows in KVM with no problem (GPU over PCIe passthrough,
| and looking-glass yay!). Overall experience seems a lot smoother
| than i7, probably due to 30MB L3 and a lot more cores.
| nix23 wrote:
| My z600 is now ~12yo and still my main workstation, upgraded ram
| 47gb and a second cpu for pennys. I love that thing.
| accrual wrote:
| I have experience with this. My main PC is a Haswell Xeon (4C/8T
| 4GHz), 32GB ECC, 1080Ti, 1TB 860 SSD. I replaced the proprietary
| power supply with Seasonic and added a Noctua cooler.
|
| For an 8 year old chip, this box rocks and plays most games at
| 4K60.
| readingnews wrote:
| And if it gets popular, the price of old Xeon workstations will
| go through the roof, just like old stereos did. Used to be able
| to get an old Marantz 2220B for $100 on the bay. Now they are
| unobtainium or $850, as an example.
|
| 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".
|
| :)
| danachow wrote:
| > unobtainium or $850
|
| 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.
| readingnews wrote:
| I mean ubobtainium in that at one point they were everywhere
| on ebay, and now its once in a blue moon. Much like some
| Xeons the poster is talking about. I remember when supermicro
| computers, outfitted, were everywhere and cheap. Now, not as
| prevalent as before.
|
| 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.
| fmajid wrote:
| It may be companies needing to run legacy software on Solaris
| versions not supported on more recent hardware.
| lvl102 wrote:
| I ran a similar set up in the past. HP Proliant server. It was
| not reliable at all and the lengthy POST on reboot kills the
| whole experience to use it for home use not to mention that it's
| actually pricy once you start adding parts.
|
| These days, I just run M1 Mac Minis. Cheap. Fast. Reliable.
| mamcx wrote:
| Yeah, the M1 is a game changer.
|
| 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!
| admax88qqq wrote:
| I used a xeon workstation for a while. It was okay. I decided to
| go back to consumer parts.
|
| 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
| loeg wrote:
| I ran a current gen (at the time) Xeon-D microATX for a while,
| for ECC support. Biggest downside was it didn't have a
| soundcard. Now I use AMD for ECC and it has all the consumer
| niceties.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| From an environmental efficiency perspective I cannot recommend.
| The power consumption of old server chips, even in idle, is
| pretty big compared to modern, more efficient 10-7nm desktop
| chips.
|
| 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.
| bojangleslover wrote:
| Who cares? Compared to heating and A/C (in the US and Japan),
| 10 Xeons probably aren't even a drop in the bucket.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Reduce > Reuse > Recycle
| 35mm wrote:
| Also they tend to be quite loud
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Comparing system idle across large generations is somewhat
| tricky, but we can pull some ballpark comparisons.
|
| 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.
| 60Vhipx7b4JL wrote:
| A Dell T110-II with a quad core xeon and 4x4GB RAM and and a
| 3.5" HDD idles around 21W. It really depends on the systems.
| jeffbee wrote:
| People fail to grasp that a thing drawing power at idle is
| the memory, which doesn't have a useful idle state. It must
| be refreshed constantly. 16GB is pretty reasonable. 8GB
| would be more efficient if you can get away with it. If you
| lard up a workstation with tons of RAM you don't need, you
| pay for it on your power bill.
| Felger wrote:
| Had almost the same setup and saw about 32W idle on mine.
| T110 II with Xeon E3 1220, 4 Gb RAM ECC, 1x 128 GB SATA SSD
| + 1x 6 To HDD IronWolf on a PERC H200 PCIe card.
|
| With a WD 10 GB external HDD, the UPS gives me a 50W load.
| api wrote:
| If you have unusually expensive energy then this is correct.
| Globally though this neglects embodied energy. A new machine
| with all new chips takes a _ton_ of energy to produce. It 's
| usually most efficient to reuse old stuff as long as it's
| useful rather than pitching it as e-waste and buying new.
|
| 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.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Erm, reusing is more effective than building a new computer
| from scratch. New chips are not environmentally friendly to
| make, use large amount of pure water, etc...
|
| related article from a few years ago about the Z400:
|
| https://boilingsteam.com/gaming-on-a-cheap-xeon-the-hp-z400-...
| wiseowise wrote:
| They're going to be made regardless of whether you buy them
| or not.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| In a world where we had a reasonable tax on carbon,
| environmental friendliness and individual economic
| rationality would be one and the same.
|
| But we don't live in that world. So they are not.
| abraae wrote:
| If ever there was a glove perfectly fitted for the
| invisible hand of the market, it's saving our planet by
| taxing carbon.
|
| Yet here we remain, whining about why it can never work.
| iasay wrote:
| Not when you're paying the electricity bill it's not.
|
| 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.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Op specifically said environmental perspective, so it
| doesn't matter whether you pay 5ct or 90ct per kWh.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| It absolutely matters if those kWh are backed by
| environmental damage. Also if you can spend that money
| elsewhere to reduce environmental damage.
| iasay wrote:
| It does however depend on how much coal you shovel into
| it.
|
| 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.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| That however is a fair point. I would be genuinely
| interested in the actual numbers. Gut feeling tells me
| buying a new computer has to be much much worse than
| running a ten year old machine even on coal, since a lot
| of these components come from all across the world, get
| produced in countries some of which have lax to no
| regulation regarding pollution, use of toxic substances,
| and so on. The hard thing is probably trying to break
| this down to one individual computer being made.
| hexo wrote:
| OK, let's calculate! Old PC amortized to 130W constantnly,
| 24/7, @ 20c per kWh = 0.624$ per day, that is 227.76 per
| year. New workstation today is like ~4000$. So that means
| you'd have to run it more than 17 years at that price of
| electricity to be on par with price of new computer, not
| counting electricity for new PC.
|
| 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.)
| loeg wrote:
| Your $4000 figure is way too high for something
| comparable with the ancient workstation. Try $800. And
| 130W might be low.
| znpy wrote:
| I thought the same. We're not comparing old workstations
| to new workstations, we're comparing old workstations to
| current day desktop computers.
|
| An average build is more likely in the range of $1250 +/-
| 250$
| maccard wrote:
| 130w is definitely low. My Xeon workstation is closer to
| 250w.
| hexo wrote:
| I've just measured it with wattmeter. Xeon E5-2697v2,
| 64GB ram, SSD + 2x HDD, GTX1080. Excluding monitor, that
| might add another 15W according to its "energy usage bar"
| which sits at about 25%.
|
| 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.
| ac29 wrote:
| It runs at 250W 24/7?
| maccard wrote:
| Welli turn it off out of working hours but it idles at
| 250w yeah. Peak power draw is much higher.
| metadat wrote:
| 170w to 300w for an older (2010-2015 era) dual-processor
| Xeon idling is what I've measured at my house across
| numerous Supermicro builds.
|
| 2018 and newer server chips may have better low-power
| idle mode support.
| TimPC wrote:
| If your computers produce so much heat that they heat
| your house during winter you should also factor in the
| extra AC costs in summer.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| Can't speak for OP, but if you leave your windows open in
| the summer, waste heat would be a non-issue
| hexo wrote:
| It's not "that much heat", it's that good insulation.
| Also, I don't really need or want AC, I love hot weather.
| iasay wrote:
| Where does your 20c/kWh come from?
|
| 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.
| hexo wrote:
| 20(euro)cents used to be average price in my country. I
| actually have much lower price (about one third of that)
| because I don't have other energy source. It does not
| really matter where that price came from, as it can
| nicely serve as reference point and you can easily scale
| it according to your price of electricity.
|
| 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.
| iasay wrote:
| $400 mini PC gets you an i5-11500T with NVME SSD that
| will take 128Gb of RAM. Some of them even pop up with
| NVidia T400 in them. New with Lenovo warranty on eBay.
|
| 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.
| hexo wrote:
| Just that 128GB DDR4 is more than 550usd in my country.
|
| GPU with 2GB of VRAM is not much today, my 4k desktop
| consumes 1.6G vram and i'm not even running any game.
| iasay wrote:
| Fits in your $4000 workstation budget :)
| hexo wrote:
| Also, have you seen high-end laptop prices? Dell XPS is
| easily 3k+$.
| iasay wrote:
| Yeah I have a fully loaded XPS 5500 and a 14" MBP
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| We have them at work, XPS are overpriced garbage machines
| that just look and cost premium. Do avoid.
|
| Midrange machines <1000EUR from Lenovo and HP make great
| workhorses at a fraction of the price.
| iasay wrote:
| As an owner of one I completely agree with this.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> my 4k desktop consumes 1.6G vram and i'm not even
| running any game_
|
| 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.
| stigz wrote:
| It's not about you, bud. Speaking at a global level it is
| more efficient.
| iasay wrote:
| Show me the calculation.
| scns wrote:
| My plan was upgrading my i5 4460 and get the best bang for
| my buck. Was eyeing an i7 4790K which would have cost
| 140EUR. Got a workstation with a xeon equivalent to the
| 4770, with a quadro K2200, an intel dc ssd (RSP new ~400$,
| a 2TB HD and 32GB RAM for 180EUR instead.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Citation? There's a cost to generating/transmitting energy,
| there's a cost to building/shipping new computers. Any idea
| which is "worse" for the environment (for some definition of
| "worse")?
|
| 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.
| johnfernow wrote:
| No figures for a Xeon machine in particular, but some other
| figures for a general idea (from The Carbon Footprint of
| Everything by Mike Berners-Lee, 2020 second edition, page
| 140):
|
| 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.
| gpapilion wrote:
| A typical server tdp will vary a lot depending on the
| components buts it's a safe bet to look at 1u being right
| around 1000w for a recent Xeon.
|
| 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.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| a refrigerator, ironing clothes, heating or AC consume at least
| 3-5 times as much (assuming they are latest generations, which
| usually are not, and the CPU is running full throttle all the
| time, which is not usually the case).
|
| 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.
| maccard wrote:
| My fridge uses practically no energy for 23.5 hours a day,
| and for those 30 minutes it's active, it's a heat pump which
| tends to be incredibly efficient. Many parts of the world
| (huge parts of Europe for example) don't need or have AC, and
| for 9 months of the year I don't need heating in my home -
| despite living in a 130 year old stone building in Scotland.
|
| 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.
| Something1234 wrote:
| You're not wrong if your only calculation is my power usage
| rather than the roundtrip of making the new chips and the new
| computer. There's a reason it's reduce, reuse and recycle.
| Reduce the amount of junk. Reuse existing junk. If neither
| work, then dispose of.
| iasay wrote:
| At some point there's an energy efficiency trade off which
| needs to be considered. It's way more complicated and depends
| on where you get your energy from and the efficiency of the
| device.
|
| Using something until it dies is not always the best outcome.
| pdpi wrote:
| Even if you don't care about the environmental side, power
| consumption is still very important. When I'm playing games,
| the temperature at my desk is 2-3 degrees higher than the other
| end of the room, and the fans get pretty damn loud. I'm
| actively trying to figure out how to at least keep my current
| performance while getting that heat under control.
| bowsamic wrote:
| > Even if you don't care about the environmental side
|
| Why wouldn't you?
| wizofaus wrote:
| Is there an IT equivalent of coal rolling?
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Crypto mining.
| [deleted]
| elteto wrote:
| Yes, programming in dynamic languages like Python.
| 2III7 wrote:
| Running all cores on turbo even when idle.
| iasay wrote:
| I think this entire thread is about doing that.
|
| My MacBook I'm typing this on is sitting here at 9.2W
| (battery full, running off mains).
| pdpi wrote:
| I thought that was a more polite than saying "even if
| you're a selfish asshole, there's still a reason to do it
| out of pure self-interest".
| peyton wrote:
| Wow, fifty years of oil company rhetoric has really
| gotten to people. Individual behavior change hasn't
| worked at scale, nor should anyone expect it to. I'll
| continue to use as much electricity as I'd like while
| advocating for nuclear and renewables.
| ipdashc wrote:
| I mean, on the scale of things, typical computer usage is
| just not that _much_ energy, right? Compared to stuff like
| air conditioning and transportation.
|
| 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.
| n4bz0r wrote:
| Have you considered water cooling? The heat is, of course,
| still going to get dissipated, but the noise should become
| much less of an issue. As a bonus, idle temps should drop
| close to room temperature.
|
| 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
| iasay wrote:
| You can use a fan to cool a computer or you can introduce a
| Rube Goldberg machine to cool a computer with a fan.
|
| Bar some extreme cooling requirements liquid cooling is
| about showing off.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Isn't liquid cooling much higher performance? I've seen
| some liquid cooled PCs with parts below 40 C under load
| and very quiet fans. I wonder if we could take it even
| further by placing the radiators out of the air
| conditioned room or even outside the house.
| iasay wrote:
| I was running my air cooled parts at 60oC without the
| complexity. If you use large fans it makes the same
| noise. And approximately the same energy is burned 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?
| phs2501 wrote:
| Or overall less noise, especially in smaller cases where
| you can't fit an extremely large (read: large fan) direct
| attached air cooler. Larger fans mean more cooling per
| dB.
|
| 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.
| iasay wrote:
| I've built several air cooled and water cooled PCs. The
| benefits are over spoken by a mile. You can run CPUs at
| far higher temperatures with no net noise increase. And
| it costs a lot less and has less maintenance.
|
| 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| Arguing over everyone's favorite equipment without a
| particular application and set of goals in mind is silly.
| It's like a formula one driver and a truck driver arguing
| over which vehicle is best. There's no "benefits" to one
| over the other. They have different characteristics which
| make them suitable for different applications.
|
| 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.
| n4bz0r wrote:
| In this case, water cooling is not so much about cooling,
| but more about noise reduction.
|
| 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...
| iasay wrote:
| I've built the same thing. Fractal Define case with Be
| Quiet Dark Rock, Be Quiet PSU and 120mm slow fans and it
| was inaudible under full load of a Ryzen 3700X.
|
| Without water cooling.
| n4bz0r wrote:
| Ryzen 3700x is only 65W, of course you wouldn't need to
| water cool it.
|
| 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.
| greggyb wrote:
| If you are near a window or other hole in the wall, you can
| duct your exhaust outside pretty easily. If you are near a
| lesser used room, you can shove your desktop on the other
| side of the wall and run the cables you need through.
|
| Or you can combine these by putting the desktop in a closet
| and ducting the exhaust outside.
| raverbashing wrote:
| I would also not recommend because of overall support
|
| 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.
| Felger wrote:
| AVX is supported since 1st gen Xeon E3 (Sandy Bridge),
| launched Q2 '11.
| api wrote:
| I've never seen anything that actually requires AVX. SSE yes,
| but virtually all 64-bit x64 chips have SSE.
| [deleted]
| nix23 wrote:
| Star citicen needs avx...z600 sadface here
| zwieback wrote:
| I work at hp where we get new PCs every few years but I also have
| two maxed-out z800 workstations, one for Linux, one for Windows.
| For the most part this works great but the one downside is that
| the ancient BIOS and older slots prevent some upgrades.
| nine_k wrote:
| It could be a good peak load computer, which you turn on when you
| have a large number-crunching job, like compiling a large
| codebase.
|
| They are great at running at top speed, but not great at idling.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Full in sync with the advice, except for playing with modern
| graphics, my 2009 laptops are perfectly alright.
|
| 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.
| voltagex_ wrote:
| I pay 34c/kWh and likely more in the future. No thanks.
| joenathanone wrote:
| 58c/kWh in CA
| https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/vpjcz5/what_in...
| zbrozek wrote:
| You might be in California?
|
| 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...
| heretogetout wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| Imagine all the people, sharing all the world...
| [deleted]
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| I'd assume something like: double your income, rates go up
| by 20%.
|
| That way you are still incentivized to make more money.
| zbrozek wrote:
| I'm getting to the point, at 34 years old, that I think I
| should sell out and move to a low cost of living place
| that doesn't penalize me and retire. What happens to an
| economy if lots of other prime earning years people did
| the same thing?
| teh_klev wrote:
| Same situation here in the UK.
|
| - 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.
| odiroot wrote:
| We can totally expect another 40-50% raise in October.
| sam345 wrote:
| Wow, where is that?
| namecheapTA wrote:
| Northern California is not much different. It actually makes
| most plug in hybrids cheaper to run on gas than electric at
| around $3.50 a gallon and below.
|
| https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate-
| plan-o...
| ttyyzz wrote:
| Germany. I know this because I pay the same.
| Roritharr wrote:
| Same here, it's actually one of the reasons I am looking to
| move to Canada now.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| OJFord wrote:
| I'm surprised to see market efficiency/management as a
| reason to move to Canada - usually in such context it's
| protectionism, milk tokens, etc. being (negatively)
| discussed.
|
| 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/
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| Yep, highly variable based on the province. In Quebec
| it's so cheap that electric heat is common.
|
| 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.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Germany's energy market is a huge mess, I read that
| consumers are heavily subsidising extremely cheap energy
| for commercial users.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Data point: I have been doing exactly this with a X3430 45nm
| system for over a decade. Old Xenon systems are very power hungry
| compared to modern servers. Expect to pay tens of dollars per
| month if you want 24h uptime. I just checked the Kill-A-Watt
| behind the UPS and it's reading 170KWh for 2054 hours. I'll leave
| the exercise of determining if this is cheap or expensive to the
| reader.
| gjvc wrote:
| hp Z240 SFF quad-core xeon w/ 64G RAM here, NVidia K1200
| graphics. works great for Debian.
| mmalachowski wrote:
| I went a little further in 2020 and started working on HP Server.
| They are even cheaper than Workstations but need some upgrades to
| be comfortably used at home (silent fans etc).
|
| 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...
| dervjd wrote:
| Take it from someone who has done this - it's a terrible idea.
|
| 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.
| fmajid wrote:
| Gresham's law at work. If a company is shedding half its
| workstations due to upgrades, the stable and reliable ones used
| by non-smokers are not going out first.
| watmough wrote:
| As much as love Z620's in particular, my experience of a used
| one wasn't that great. In particular, watch for v1.0/v2.0
| motherboard versions that prevent you from using the faster
| Xeons, and in general, the model seems to suffer from power
| supply problems. Just as I got my dual-processor 64Gig Z620
| working under macOS, the 2nd processor daughterboard quit.
| Similar experience on my work Z620 at the time. Exact same
| failure. Better just to reset and build the fastest thing you
| can afford. My fast box runs a Ryzen 9 5900x and is 4x faster
| than my 2019 Razer Blade 15" for building the software I work
| on.
| coredog64 wrote:
| I had an old Nehalem/Westmere PC kicking around and what kept
| biting me was the instruction set support. I couldn't use PyTorch
| because some Python dependency had a C library that assumed AVX.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| I had a Xeon workstation, 1st gen Core architecture, similar to
| the first Mac Pro. Yes I managed to buy it cheaply, but the noise
| was pretty loud. Especially during POST it would spin the fans at
| max for 30 seconds which sounded like a vacuum cleaner! Not great
| for nighttime use.
| landemva wrote:
| After a few boot cycles, I usually change BIOS setting to skip
| the POST. It just takes too long and the results don't have
| much value on a stable machine - if it broke during last
| shutdown, I know anyways on startup.
|
| Have an older Xeon which I use as remote desktop. Is solid.
| fmajid wrote:
| HP Z workstations are pretty good and have specified acoustic
| levels. In places like Germany I believe it's a workplace
| safety requirement.
| virtuallynathan wrote:
| I got a 3 or 4U chassis and hacked in Noctua fans, made it
| silent.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Question for those who have a beefy box as a dev workstation: do
| you run a hypervisor and try and compartmentalize the way the
| machine is used, or do you just run/drive a bare OS install? I
| like that a VM can be started, stopped, moved around,
| snapshotted, rolled back, etc.
|
| 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?
| blep_ wrote:
| I just run bare Linux on mine. Sometimes containers on top of
| that, but only for specific things, not for general use.
|
| 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.
| jasomill wrote:
| I sort of do the opposite; my main Windows dev box is a dual-
| socket HP Z820 ESXi host with multiple GPUs, a large SAS SSD
| RAID 10 array, and an additional SSD and pair of large SATA
| hard drives for ESXi scratch/swap and local backups,
| respectively.
|
| 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.
| csdreamer7 wrote:
| Reduce, reuse, recycle.
|
| 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.
| iasay wrote:
| pcdoodle wrote:
| I'd go for a SFF workstation, You can get a CPU with a passmark
| above 8,000 to idle under 10w for the whole system.
|
| We decommissioned a dual xeon setup after realizing it was
| sucking over 200w while doing nothing. YMMV.
| immigrantheart wrote:
| Can you give me an example of those CPUs? I am thinking of
| building a home server/NAS.
| InvaderFizz wrote:
| i5-6500 Optiplex is under $100 shipped on eBay. Scores 5600
| passmark. Step up to the $200 i5-8500 Optiplex and now you
| are looking at 9500 passmark.
|
| The 8500 is a great CPU. It is what runs my home Docker setup
| with Plex (hardware video transcode).
| dervjd wrote:
| Keep in mind that unless you're doing something like
| transcoding for a Plex server, you don't really need much in
| the way of CPU for a home NAS.
|
| 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%.
| pcdoodle wrote:
| My current setup is a HP EliteDesk G3 w/i7 6700 CPU. The PSU
| inside is 80+ rated and I've seen the externally measured
| power consumption as low as 9W idling Windows Server 2019. I
| have no spinning disks inside so add at least a few watts
| average for each.
|
| 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.
| Havoc wrote:
| >Xeon E5-2667 v2
|
| ....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...
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| If you're UK based, that famous auction site has had a glut of
| Dell T3610s for a while with 32Gb and a basic nvidia quadra for
| PS140 delivered which i thought was alright.
|
| 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 PS12/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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-02 23:01 UTC)