[homebrewer]

Those sellers never disappeared; although I'm from not from Paraguay, the situation is familiar. These days they're selling desktops built on 10+ year old Xeons which you can buy for dirt cheap on AliExpress, installed on frankenstein motherboards from noname Chinese manufacturers which are desktop-oriented, but take server processors. The graphics card is something old like RX480, and comes from being run into the ground by years of crypto"currency" mining, then resoldered on a new board, also often developed by Chinese manufacturers you've never heard of.

Graphics cards especially are very unreliable and frequently die within a few months of purchase. But when you can buy a whole PC for the price of one modern videocard, many don't have a choice.

https://aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-intel-xeon-processors.htm...

https://aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-motherboards-xeon.html

https://aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-amd-radeon-rx-580.html

[zozbot234]

The notion that GPU chips can be "run into the ground" by years of crypto mining or AI workloads has been debunked pretty thoroughly by now. The hardware is quite resilient, it doesn't really fail at a higher rate.

[nazgulsenpai]

I bought a XFX RX 580 that was used for cryptomining from eBay, used it for 3 years then handed it down to my son who used it for 2 more. It still worked when he removed it. Can confirm.

[gsck]

I used an AMD Radeon 7770 for years, then I upgraded to a GTX 1060, the 7770 became my younger sister's GPU for her PC. It has only recently gave out, after some 14 years of service.

Likewise for the 1060, its still going strong. I upgraded to a 3060 round about the time my younger brother decided he wanted a PC so he is now using it without any issues. About 10 years use out of it, plenty more to go.

GPUs are pretty damn resilient if you aren't pissing around with them.

[lossyalgo]

Also any miner worth their salt knows to undervolt to save power (=money), run cooler, last longer, and run at very close to full speed or even in some cases 100% full-speed, depending on silicon "lottery".

[mfro]

I think the problem is the distinction here between chips and boards. The entire GPU assembly can absolutely be worn down from continuous use, thermal pads, paste, VRMs, fans do degrade. The chip itself may be fine but it's very rare to find anyone willing to transplant a GPU from one board to another.

[sombragris]

Well, a lot of people here would have loved to have 10-year old Xeons in their motherboards; while power hungry, I guess they would make good CPUs since they have good cache sizes. But no, there's no Xeons in our offers here. What people get here now are Intel Pentium and Celeron-branded CPUs, or N-class CPUs, with the onboard GPU only, 4GB RAM and 1 TB HDD running unlicensed Windows with understandable results. But when you are a digitally illiterate parent seeking to purchase a first PC for your children of school age, this looks attractive enough at a good price point.

[toast0]

> Intel Pentium and Celeron-branded CPUs,

Don't look at the branding. Look at the core type, count, and speed (maybe).

It's been a while since I shopped Intel, but they used to typically release a low core count/lower clock speed Pentium/Celeron on the mainstream cores, often with no hyperthreading. These were typically low cost and could be a good value, you'd get decent single core performance because it's the newest architecture and multicore performance would be iffy but you can't have everything.

> N-class CPUs

These are definitely worth avoiding most of the time. Usually twice the cores, but much less performance per clock. Never feels fast for interactive work. But they make sense for some situations. Some of these get an n3 branding to trick people looking for i3s.

[drnick1]

> These are definitely worth avoiding most of the time.

They may not be ideal for desktops, but they are great low power home server CPUs. In fact, they are much better than ARM alternatives like Raspberry Pis for the money.

[toast0]

Yeah, I consider home server to be non-interactive. If it's got your connectivity needs (and won't self-destruct), n/atom is a good fit.

[anthk]

A NUC would be enough for a 90% of cases and much cheaper on the long run.

[zozbot234]

NUCs are high-end miniPCs, there are much lower-end ones including on the second-hand market that are okay for baseline uses.