[Cerium]

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.

[silverquiet]

I 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]

My 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]

Ha, 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]

What are the limitations of machines like these?

[snerbles]

I too have a crippling dual CPU workstation hoarding habit. Single thread performance is usually worse than enthusiast consumer desktops, and gaming performance will suffer if the game isn't constrained to a single NUMA domain that also happens to have the GPU being used by that game.

On the other hand, seeing >1TiB RAM in htop always makes my day happier.

[fooker]

Any pointers on how to buy one?

[snerbles]

Personally I use eBay and find the most barebones system I can, then populate the CPU+RAM with components salvaged from e-wasted servers. There are risks with this, as I've had to return more than one badly-bent workstation that was packed poorly.

---

So the Dell Precision T7920 runs dual Intel Scalable (Skylake) and has oodles of DIMM slots (24!), but you'll need to use a PCIe adapter to run an NVMe drive. FlexBays give you hot-swappable SATA, SAS too but only if you're lucky enough to find a system with an HBA (or add one yourself). But if you manage to salvage 24x 64GB DDR4 DIMMs, you'll have a system with a terabyte-and-a-half of ECC RAM - just expect to deal with a very long initial POST and a lot of blink codes when you encounter bad sticks. The power supply is proprietary, but can be swapped from the outside.

The T7820 is the single-CPU version, and has only 6 DIMM slots. But it is more amenable to gaming (one NUMA domain), and I have gifted a couple to friends.

If you're feeling cheap and are okay with the previous generation, the Haswell/Broadwell-based T7910 is also serviceable - but expect to rename the UEFI image to boot Linux from NVMe, and it's much less power efficient if you don't pick an E5 v4 revision CPU. I used a fully-loaded T7910 as a BYOD workstation at a previous job, worked great as a test environment.

Lenovo ThinkStation P920 Tower has fewer DIMM slots (16) than the T7920, but has on-motherboard m.2 NVMe connectors and three full 5.25" bays. I loaded one with Linux Mint for my mother's business, she runs the last non-cloud version QuickBooks in a beefy network-isolated Windows VM and it works great for that. Another friend runs one of these with Proxmox as a homelab-in-a-box.

The HP Z6 G4 is also a thing, though I personally haven't played with one yet. I do use a salvaged HP Z440 workstation with a modest 256GB RAM (don't forget the memory cooler!) and a 3090 as my ersatz kitchen table AI server.

[71bw]

    >and a lot of blink codes when you encounter bad sticks

Which sadly happens quite a lot with ECC DDR4 for whatever reason.

    >If you're feeling cheap and are okay with the previous generation, the Haswell/Broadwell-based T7910 is also serviceable

The T5810 is a known machine, very tinkerable, just works with NVMe adapters (they show up as a normal NVMe boot option in UEFI) and even have TPM 2.0 (!!!) after a BIOS update. Overall, they are the 2nd best affordable Haswell-EP workstations after the HP Z440 in my opinion.

    >E5 v4 revision CPU

They are less efficient than V3 CPUs due to the lockdown of Turbo Boost, but then again on a Precision you'd have to flash the BIOS with an external flasher regardless to get TB back.

[Forgeties79]

Man this so much incredible information in one comment

[t0mas88]

Power usage is the main limitation of using these as a home server. They have a high idle power use.

[trollbridge]

One 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.

[vondur]

The CPU is far less powerful than a single Ryzen chip from now and the new system is far more power efficient. No super fast USB connections like a new system has.(It does have a USB-C 10GB connection though) Overall if you can live with a bit older machine, it's pretty decent.

[bri3d]

Very bad performance per watt and higher maintenance needs. Bad performance per watt generally means a larger formfactor and more noise as well.

[wittjeff]

I bought a Dell Precision 7910 2x Xeon E5-2687W v3 (10 cores, 20 threads each) with 32GB RAM and 512GB SSD for $425 including shipping. I found that Windows 11 Pro will recognize only 20 of the virtual cores/threads. I don't feel a need to upgrade to more expensive Microsoft OSs at this time, so I just run Ubuntu natively on that box, which recognizes all of it. Assuming used DDR4 RAM returns to more reasonable prices at some point, I intend to load that box up to the 768GB max.

[arprocter]

On Dell you'll probably be stuck with the original mobo, and their SFFs don't take standard PSUs

[sevensor]

In favor of their SFFs, they get retired 10k at a time, so you might as well pick up a second one for spares.

[arprocter]

Not a bad call, although you'll probably need to upgrade the PSU to add a GPU (if you can find one small enough to fit the SFF case)

[MrVitaliy]

Just 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]

Got 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

[trollbridge]

I 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]

Where can I buy something like this for a reasonable price ?

[trollbridge]

I got it off of eBay, although I paid a lot more than other people do.

[cestith]

At 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.

[zzzeek]

ive 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.

[ge96]

Optiplex's used to be my go to the SFF, I had a 1050ti in there not crazy but worked for basic gaming

[gpderetta]

surely these will soon be scavenged for ram? Arbitrage opportunity?

[legobmw99]

If they’re DDR4 (or even DDR3), it has no value to e.g. OpenAI so it shouldn’t really matter

[noboostforyou]

But 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/

[auspiv]

DDR4 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]

Isn’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]

Even 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.

[jl6]

Demand spills over to substitutes.

[gpderetta]

The price of DDR4 is also going up!

[agapon]

Used RDIMM / LRDIMM prices have also started going up, quickly.