[mrbill]

It's not just workstation hardware - I've recently bought a couple of Dell T410s off eBay for $125 each (shipped!). Quad-core Xeon E5620s, 4G RAM, 6-bay hotswap chassis, DVD-ROM, iDRAC 6 Enterprise, PERC 6i RAID card.

Upgrades: $25 for 120G SSD (boot drive, goes in the empty second 5.25" bay), $27 for 16G RAM, $20ish for an E5670 6-core CPU, $35 for an LSI HBA in IT-mode (supports >2T drives), $10 for a set of SFF-8087 cables to go from the HBA to the existing hotswap backplane. 30-45 minutes to upgrade all the firmware for the DRAC, lifecycle controller, BIOS, etc.

Grand total of around $250 for a really nice server with full remote management, and for the cost of another E5670 and a Dell heatsink I can upgrade to dual-CPU (12 cores/24 threads).

They're so cheap that I've gotten two systems to upgrade as described, and this morning ordered a third (yet again $125) to have for spare parts.

The eBay vendor emailed me and offered to sell me a pallet of 24 for $80 each, but I don't have that kind of need or money lying around...

As for laptops, I tend to get refurb/off-lease Thinkpads from arrowdirect.com (coupon code ARROW gives 15% off), then max out the (cheap DDR3) RAM and throw a SSD in where the HD was. I've built up a T420s and an X230 like this for when I need a decent portable machine but don't want to take my expensive Macbook Pro somewhere. For the T420s I even got a $50 adapter board from a guy in China that let me put a FHD IPS screen in, instead of the 1440x900 TN LCD that it came with...

[Piezoid]

I upgraded a free T410 with two X5675, 32GB ECC RAM, PCIe to NVMe adapter, a RAID array of 2TB drives and an USB3 controller.

I's a quite capable machine. I needed it to learning about NUMA archs and test my software.

However there is no sleep mode. The boot time is not that bad for a server so I start it with IPMI bounced from a SBC.

I made it quiet the hard way, mainly for fun and learning about embedded control loops: water cooling with a passive motorbike radiator and a Arduino to control pumps and monitor temperatures while feeding fake hall sensor data to the original BMC so it doesn't freak out.

[colechristensen]

Building my own home server I went a different route with the latest, fastest i3 processor (at the time i3-7350k, not i3-8350k) to prioritize lower power and single thread execution speed.

E5670 holds up surprisingly well, similar total performance – 1/2 single thread execution speed 2x threads – in a similar power envelope for half the cost.

The value in those used workstations is mostly in the case and that is hard to replicate in these days of style-driven (wtf?) computer hardware where everything has LEDs and is generally targeted to excite 12-year-olds.

[magashna]

>pallet of 24 for $80 each

at those prices I really do wonder about that cross section of recycling/dumping and inefficient power consumption

[mrbill]

I'm amazed that they can sell them for $125 including shipping (which has to be at least $40-50) and still make a profit. Makes me wonder what THEY paid for them..

Vendor said they had more than 100 still available, and both of the units I've gotten so far are the original config as shipped from Dell according to a service tag lookup.

[user5994461]

They probably don't pay for it. The hardware is decommissioned after a few years of usage.