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.

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silverquiet 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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trollbridge 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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vondur 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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Forgeties79 3 hours ago | parent [-]

What are the limitations of machines like these?

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snerbles 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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t0mas88 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

	▲	trollbridge an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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bri3d an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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arprocter 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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sevensor an hour ago | parent [-]

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 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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)

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3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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MrVitaliy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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

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cestith 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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ge96 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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gpderetta 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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legobmw99 5 hours ago | parent [-]

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

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noboostforyou 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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/

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auspiv 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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

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jl6 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Demand spills over to substitutes.

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gpderetta 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The price of DDR4 is also going up!

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zzzeek 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.