Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fnbr 3393 days ago
Where did you find them? eBay?
3 comments

HP z820/z620/z420 and Dell T7600/T5600 are great used workstations that support the Xeon E5-26xx V1 series processors at very reasonable prices on eBay. Workstations are $300-$700 (maybe add CPU, RAM, HD, graphics card) shipped. I've bought a z820 and z620 at $420 & $499 respectively. My machines were partially usable missing only a second CPU & graphics card in the z820. z620 was fully usable with dual E5-2620s. I added a pair of E5-2660s, 128GB of RAM, and a second CPU cooler+fan to the z820 for $500 shipped and swapped the graphics card. So for $920, I got a 32 threads and 128GB beast z820 (probably would have cost $20K new) and a E5-2640 and 16GB of RAM to sell. So easy to work with too with their tool-less design.

It's a great 4K video/photo editing & OpenShift lab machine. Literally 300 chrome tabs and it hasn't cracked past 16GB of RAM usage in RHEL. Just need to spin up some VMs now.

This used to be <$500, but currently $633 for a motherboard, dual E5-2670 CPUs, and 128GB ECC memory: http://www.natex.us/Intel-S2600CP-Motherboard-Package-Deal-p...
Highly recommend this case if you go with an Intel S2600CP (or any other SSI EEB mobo): https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681185...
I am using the Fractal Design Define XL R2 (what a name) for my Supermicro dual CPU mobo, I drilled one extra mounting hole and the mobo mounted just fine.

Very quite and solid.

+1 for natex. That's where I got my motherboard and it's worked great for about 6 months.
To the extent that dual socket LGA2011 ATX/LLB boards moved up in price to a point where you could pay three or four times more for a suitable mobo than for sixteen cores of CPU.

eBay E5-2670