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Don't worry, if you are happy with those specs you can get corporate ewaste dell towers on ebay for low prices. "Dell precision tower", I just saw a listing for
by Cerium 10mo ago
Don't worry, if you are happy with those specs you can get corporate ewaste dell towers on ebay for low prices. "Dell precision tower", I just saw a listing for 32gb ram, Xeon 3.6ghz for about 300 usd.
Personally, at work I use the latest hardware at home I use ewaste.
- cestith 10mo agoAt home some of my systems are ewaste from former employers who would just give it to employees rather than paying for disposal. A couple are eBay finds. I do have one highish-end system at a time specifically for games. Some of my systems are my old hardware reassembled after all the parts for gaming have been upgraded over the years.
- silverquiet 10mo agoI got a junk Precision workstation last year as a "polite" home server (it's quiet and doesn't look like industrial equipment, but still has some server-like qualities, particularly the use of ECC RAM). I liked it so much that it ended up becoming my main desktop.
- dotancohen 10mo agoMy main desktop is temporarily a Dell server from around 2012 or so. Two were thrown out, each with two 2 GiB sticks of RAM, so I poached the other machine's RAM for a grand total of 8 GiB. I also threw in a small SSD for the / partition (/home is on the old HDD). The thing is dirt slow but I never notice, even YouTube video playback works fine. Even on hardware well over a decade old, Debian runs fine.
- vondur 10mo agoHa, I bought one of those for $500 from Ebay. It's a dual Xeon Silver workstation with a Nvidia Quadro P400 8GB, 128GB RAM and 256G SSD. I threw in a 1TB SSD and it's been working pretty well.
- Forgeties79 10mo agoWhat are the limitations of machines like these?
- MrVitaliy 10mo agoJust performance when compared to current generation hardware. Not significantly worse, but things like DDR4 ram and single thread performance show the signs of aging. Frankly for similar $$$ you can get a new hardware from beelink or equivalent.
- Forgeties79 10mo agoGot it so basically it's one of those things you do if 1) the project interests you and/or 2) you get one dirt cheap and don't have high expectations for certain tasks
- t0mas88 10mo agoPower usage is the main limitation of using these as a home server. They have a high idle power use.
- trollbridge 10mo agoOne of the reasons I use these is because it’s cold half the year and it’s not hard to basically use to supplement the heat.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- arprocter 10mo agoOn Dell you'll probably be stuck with the original mobo, and their SFFs don't take standard PSUs
- sevensor 10mo agoIn favor of their SFFs, they get retired 10k at a time, so you might as well pick up a second one for spares.
- gpderetta 10mo agosurely these will soon be scavenged for ram? Arbitrage opportunity?
- legobmw99 10mo agoIf they’re DDR4 (or even DDR3), it has no value to e.g. OpenAI so it shouldn’t really matter
- auspiv 10mo agoDDR4 prices are up 2-6x in the last couple months depending on frequency. High end, high speed modules (e.g. 128GB 3200MHz LRDIMM) are super expensive.
- legobmw99 10mo agoIsn’t that due to different reasons (like the end of production for older standards)? I recall the same happening shortly after manufacturing for DDR3 ceased, before eventually demand essentially went to 0
- agapon 10mo agoEven RDIMM / LRDIMM prices have recently started going up. And I thought that those would be safe, because neither "big AI" nor regular consumers need them.
- gpderetta 10mo agoThe price of DDR4 is also going up!
- jl6 10mo agoDemand spills over to substitutes.
- noboostforyou 10mo agoBut it's a cascading effect, OpenAI gobbled up all of DDR5 production to the point that consumers are choosing to upgrade their older DDR4 systems instead of paying even more to upgrade to a new system that uses DDR5. As a result, DDR4 ram is at a new all time high - https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
- ge96 10mo agoOptiplex's used to be my go to the SFF, I had a 1050ti in there not crazy but worked for basic gaming
- zzzeek 10mo agoive dealt a bit with ewaste kinds of machines, old Dells and such and have two still running here, the issue is they use a crapton of power. I had one such ewaste Dell machine that I just had to take to the dump it was so underpeforming while it used 3x more power than my other two Dells combined.
- trollbridge 10mo agoI have some Dell server with dual Xeons and 192GB RAM. It is NUMA but that’s fine for Docker workloads where you can just associate them with a CPU. The RAM for that is basically ewaste at this point, yet it runs the workloads it needs to do just fine.
- fooker 10mo agoWhere can I buy something like this for a reasonable price ?
- trollbridge 10mo agoI got it off of eBay, although I paid a lot more than other people do.
- agapon 10mo agoUsed RDIMM / LRDIMM prices have also started going up, quickly.