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by chrissnell 9 days ago
My home cluster is built from surplus Dell Optiplex desktops that I got from BYU Surplus and added some RAM (before RAM price went totally bananas) and SSDs to. I spent less than the cost of one of these Pis to acquire all of them together.

I later added a large machine that I used to use as a Linux desktop, with a GPU and 64GB RAM, which I use for generating OpenStreetMap tiles.
4 comments
teh_klev 9 days ago
> My home cluster is built from surplus Dell Optiplex desktops

I used to do this as well and this is fine if you're able to source cheap power. But I'm in the UK, electricity prices are insane and I can't afford to run this kind of setup any more.

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serf 9 days ago
it's not unmanageable to do if you have plentiful and cheap access to area that can see the sun. My 'vintage' computing collection got a lot bigger when I switched to solar.

a big ask in most of the UK, though.

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xnyan 9 days ago
> less than the cost of one of these Pis to acquire all of them together.

Before RAM went crazy, the Pi 4 was $75 for *8GB and $125 for 16GB.

Another consideration is heat and power consumption, I have an OptiPlex micro (also surplus) and power consumption is 8W-90W (standby versus peak), 5x-10x more than a Pi 4.

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esskay 9 days ago
Similar here. I lucked out, a charity in the UK (Bernados) has an ebay account and they had a huge joblot of about 200 brand new DELL Optiplex 3050 Micros (i7 6700T, 16GB DDR4, 1tb SSDs).

I picked up 4, at £50 each, and when they arrived they were still sealed, and included a power supply, keyboard, mouse and windows 11 license (which never got used).

Makes the pi look like a terrible deal given you've also gotta buy power supply, a hdmi adapter for their moronic decision to use mini hdmi, etc

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bityard 9 days ago
How much power does that cluster consume?
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