[microtonal]

I have given this advise on Hacker News before: on eBay 2-3 year old workstations can be had for 300-400 Euro. Typically these are workstations from companies that replace machines every 2 years or so.

These are typically equipped with Xeon CPUs, plenty of memory, sometimes ECC etc. Moreover, since they are usually HP/Dell workstations, they are certified to be compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so all the hardware is pretty much guaranteed to work.

Just to give one random example:

http://www.ebay.de/itm/DELL-Precision-T1650-CPU-Intel-Xeon-E...

Xeon CPU, 32 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD for 425 euro.

[sireat]

I love buying old workstations, however power costs have to be considered.

For example my 2x Xeon 2670 (16 cores/32 threads) is quite the power hog.

Your example is pretty good since V2 Xeons are Ivy Bridge le vel and consume noticably less power than V1 equivalents.

However that particular CPU is basically i5 not i7 (just 4 cores/4 threads).

[egeozcan]

This is very cool. I wonder how much the electricity costs would be if I let that machine stay on 7/24 for a year. Power, in Germany, is a bit expensive (learned the hard way).