6 ms·

> the problem for the PC industry is that old PCs are good enough, hence people don't feel the need to upgrade. Throwing away a working electronic device to re

by sdeziel 10y ago

> the problem for the PC industry is that old PCs are good enough, hence people don't feel the need to upgrade. Throwing away a working electronic device to replace it with a new one is really bad when you think of the ecological impact. I'm glad that some resist to the urge of buying shiny new stuff.

at-fates-hands 10y ago
This. I've had my HP Workstation for 5 years now. I found an xw8400 workstation off of EBAY for around $400. Oh sure the specs are a little lower than what you'd find on the newer PC's: - Dual intel Xeon x5355 processors at 2.67GHz - 16GB of DDR2 RAM - Two 500GB hard drives in RAID config - nVidia Quadro FX 4600 768mb video card But I can expand the RAM out to 32GB and I've already upgraded the RAID drives to an SSD. I can also upgrade the video to 1.5gb or 2gb video card. I'm still impressed how stable its been and how even the 768mb card handles Adobe resources without any lags - I constantly have two or three Adobe programs running at a time which is normally a huge resource hog. I just fell in love with the performance and the stability of the HP workstations. For a fraction of the cost, and its easily upgradeable so I don't feel like I need to go drop 1K on a new laptop or PC. Also, with such an abundance of these on the market, you can always find a really good deal on them.
- VodkaHaze 10y ago
  That sounds like a lovely workstation. I had a dream machine of overclocking a dual x5670 xeon machine, but motherboards that let you do that now are too rare and expensive.
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  Yep, and ECC RAM starts getting pretty important >8GB if you value stability. Workstations depreciate like bricks typically, so a last-gen system can be had for a song if many cores if what you're after. A short while back, some Xeon engineering samples were flooding eBay and were a better deal per-core than whatever the latest i7s were at the time. I forget the model number.
  - jamessb 10y ago
    Probably the Xeon E5-2630 v4 [1], discussed previously [2]. [1]: http://www.techspot.com/review/1218-affordable-40-thread-xeon-monster-pc/ http://www.techspot.com/review/1218-affordable-40-thread-xeo... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12249317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12249317
  - JTenerife 10y ago
    I'm running 32 GB Ram for 5 years without the siltiest stability issue. ECC is probably for really, really big machines 128 GB up or overall an overrated myth.
    - patates 10y ago
      Yeah, me too. I think if one needs the RAM for running VMs (so, not doing ZFS or running Prod databases), paying extra for an ECC enabled architecture isn't the greatest investment.
  - wbl 10y ago
    The Colluseum is still standing with 2,000 year old bricks. They don't depreciate that fast.
- hashhar 10y ago
  Could you tell me what I gain from workstations compared to standard dev boxes? - Does the number of cores affect general performance or only helps in multitasking and data science? - Is ECC memory worth it (in practice, not in theory)?
  - effie 10y ago
    Server architecture: more cpu cores, more cache (resulting in better performance per clock period), detection of RAM errors (1-bit and 2-bit) and correction for those (1-bit), built for non-stop operation. ECC arch. is worth the money wherever correctness of the computed results or integrity and stability of running programs is imperative - scientific and engineering calculations, database systems handling precious information (money), etc. In practice, it seems ECC in a personal computer is not necessary for most people, but in 2009, a study of DRAM errors in datacenters, ECC was found to be very benefitial: "Across the entire fleet, 8.2% of all DIMMs are affected by correctable errors and an average DIMM experiences nearly 4000 correctable errors per year" http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf
    - StillBored 10y ago
      Outside of the rare socket 2011 i7's (the only real i7 IMHO) you get more PCIe lanes and significantly more memory bandwidth with xeons too. The extra PCIe lanes can matter for SLI setups.. But this is where Intel irritates me. I want a socket 2011 CPU with both an unlocked (or low core high clock rate) multiplier as well as ECC RAM. For some reason, intel refuses to make such a product.
      - effie 10y ago
        I was looking for something similar and indeed there isn't much choice in that department. I eventually switched to the high-core lots-of-performance/per-buck E5-2670 especially considering its low price. But if you want high single thread performance, take a look at E5-1650 or, if you have unlimited budget, E5-1680 v2 (12% faster).
- nine_k 10y ago
  What about power usage? One area where CPUs made significant progress was energy efficiency, especially when idle.
  - qplex 10y ago
    It comes down to how you generate the electricity to run your hardware. Manufacturing processes take a lot of juice and materials.
VodkaHaze 10y ago
I mean for the average use case, a 5 year old pc generally has the compute capability. Gaming requires updating (though 32nm cpus are still perfectly fine). Scientific computing will move to the cloud soon enough, as you either need absurd capabilities, or a recent laptop is generally powerful enough for data science (depending on the usecase). Hell, I dusted off a 10 year old core2duo HP laptop and it does most of what I need it to (browsing, jupyter notebooks, etc.) fine. The one common app that's painful to use it with is Facebook and other sites that became a sort of monstrosity (the ones with 40 NoScript dependencies you need to whitelist to see content)
- RodericDay 10y ago
  I'm using a 2013 Macbook Air and the only website that makes it feel aged is Facebook. Even the input boxes are poorly and awkwardly given these stupid resizing animations.
BatFastard 10y ago
I am running 5 - 16 year old PCs on my network and they play 99% of the games on steam. Stuff I purchased in 2000 is still running like a CHAMP. ASUS Motherboards( half died in the first year, and were replaced ). Once they make it past 1 year they seem to run forever. I have upgraded components like the disk drive, a few of the processors from 2.3Ghz Core2 Duo, to a blaze 3.0 GHz Core2 Duo. And replace thed GPU with what I can as friends upgrade theirs and sell old ones for cheap. Now that they are all running Windows 10 64Bit, I can put up to 8 Gb of ram in them. My kids love it, they can have 4 friends over and play Killing Floor, Men of War, Terreria.

by sdeziel 10y ago

at-fates-hands 10y ago

This. I've had my HP Workstation for 5 years now. I found an xw8400 workstation off of EBAY for around $400. Oh sure the specs are a little lower than what you'd find on the newer PC's: - Dual intel Xeon x5355 processors at 2.67GHz - 16GB of DDR2 RAM - Two 500GB hard drives in RAID config - nVidia Quadro FX 4600 768mb video card But I can expand the RAM out to 32GB and I've already upgraded the RAID drives to an SSD. I can also upgrade the video to 1.5gb or 2gb video card. I'm still impressed how stable its been and how even the 768mb card handles Adobe resources without any lags - I constantly have two or three Adobe programs running at a time which is normally a huge resource hog. I just fell in love with the performance and the stability of the HP workstations. For a fraction of the cost, and its easily upgradeable so I don't feel like I need to go drop 1K on a new laptop or PC. Also, with such an abundance of these on the market, you can always find a really good deal on them.

VodkaHaze 10y ago
That sounds like a lovely workstation. I had a dream machine of overclocking a dual x5670 xeon machine, but motherboards that let you do that now are too rare and expensive.
seanp2k2 10y ago
Yep, and ECC RAM starts getting pretty important >8GB if you value stability. Workstations depreciate like bricks typically, so a last-gen system can be had for a song if many cores if what you're after. A short while back, some Xeon engineering samples were flooding eBay and were a better deal per-core than whatever the latest i7s were at the time. I forget the model number.
- jamessb 10y ago
  Probably the Xeon E5-2630 v4 [1], discussed previously [2]. [1]: http://www.techspot.com/review/1218-affordable-40-thread-xeon-monster-pc/ http://www.techspot.com/review/1218-affordable-40-thread-xeo... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12249317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12249317
- JTenerife 10y ago
  I'm running 32 GB Ram for 5 years without the siltiest stability issue. ECC is probably for really, really big machines 128 GB up or overall an overrated myth.
  - patates 10y ago
    Yeah, me too. I think if one needs the RAM for running VMs (so, not doing ZFS or running Prod databases), paying extra for an ECC enabled architecture isn't the greatest investment.
- wbl 10y ago
  The Colluseum is still standing with 2,000 year old bricks. They don't depreciate that fast.
hashhar 10y ago
Could you tell me what I gain from workstations compared to standard dev boxes? - Does the number of cores affect general performance or only helps in multitasking and data science? - Is ECC memory worth it (in practice, not in theory)?
- effie 10y ago
  Server architecture: more cpu cores, more cache (resulting in better performance per clock period), detection of RAM errors (1-bit and 2-bit) and correction for those (1-bit), built for non-stop operation. ECC arch. is worth the money wherever correctness of the computed results or integrity and stability of running programs is imperative - scientific and engineering calculations, database systems handling precious information (money), etc. In practice, it seems ECC in a personal computer is not necessary for most people, but in 2009, a study of DRAM errors in datacenters, ECC was found to be very benefitial: "Across the entire fleet, 8.2% of all DIMMs are affected by correctable errors and an average DIMM experiences nearly 4000 correctable errors per year" http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf
  - StillBored 10y ago
    Outside of the rare socket 2011 i7's (the only real i7 IMHO) you get more PCIe lanes and significantly more memory bandwidth with xeons too. The extra PCIe lanes can matter for SLI setups.. But this is where Intel irritates me. I want a socket 2011 CPU with both an unlocked (or low core high clock rate) multiplier as well as ECC RAM. For some reason, intel refuses to make such a product.
    - effie 10y ago
      I was looking for something similar and indeed there isn't much choice in that department. I eventually switched to the high-core lots-of-performance/per-buck E5-2670 especially considering its low price. But if you want high single thread performance, take a look at E5-1650 or, if you have unlimited budget, E5-1680 v2 (12% faster).
nine_k 10y ago
What about power usage? One area where CPUs made significant progress was energy efficiency, especially when idle.
- qplex 10y ago
  It comes down to how you generate the electricity to run your hardware. Manufacturing processes take a lot of juice and materials.

VodkaHaze 10y ago

I mean for the average use case, a 5 year old pc generally has the compute capability. Gaming requires updating (though 32nm cpus are still perfectly fine). Scientific computing will move to the cloud soon enough, as you either need absurd capabilities, or a recent laptop is generally powerful enough for data science (depending on the usecase). Hell, I dusted off a 10 year old core2duo HP laptop and it does most of what I need it to (browsing, jupyter notebooks, etc.) fine. The one common app that's painful to use it with is Facebook and other sites that became a sort of monstrosity (the ones with 40 NoScript dependencies you need to whitelist to see content)

RodericDay 10y ago
I'm using a 2013 Macbook Air and the only website that makes it feel aged is Facebook. Even the input boxes are poorly and awkwardly given these stupid resizing animations.

BatFastard 10y ago

I am running 5 - 16 year old PCs on my network and they play 99% of the games on steam. Stuff I purchased in 2000 is still running like a CHAMP. ASUS Motherboards( half died in the first year, and were replaced ). Once they make it past 1 year they seem to run forever. I have upgraded components like the disk drive, a few of the processors from 2.3Ghz Core2 Duo, to a blaze 3.0 GHz Core2 Duo. And replace thed GPU with what I can as friends upgrade theirs and sell old ones for cheap. Now that they are all running Windows 10 64Bit, I can put up to 8 Gb of ram in them. My kids love it, they can have 4 friends over and play Killing Floor, Men of War, Terreria.