Adjadent to the article, there are some interesting builds with pulled parts from decommissioned servers in places where hardware is expensive or heavily taxed.

There's an entire parallel ecosystem around Chinese X79 and X99 boards [1](brands like Huananzhi and Machinist). They exist almost entirely to soak up scrap-tier Xeons and decommissioned server DDR3 and DDR4 ECC RAM that get pulled from datacenters for next to nothing. You see them online in Russian/Chinese/SE Asian online communities as budget builds, so nearly all the BIOS mods and documentation are in Russian or Chinese.

I think in NA we'd tend to write this hardware off as e-waste unless you're a homelabber (though I know Kimsufi still includes DDR3 builds in their catalogue). But in emerging markets, people have been squeezing real utility out of discarded enterprise silicon for a long time out of pure economic necessity. I've been tempted to do my own build but I already seek to have collected an overwhelmingly unnecessary amount of 2012-era workstations that I'm not sure my partner would appreciate an addition to.

[1] https://post.m.smzdm.com/talk/p/am9d3zv4/

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Retr0id 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Until about 6 years ago I also mostly used ex-server "ewaste" hardware, because it's always been cheaper, except for electricity use which I wasn't paying for myself. My desktop in ~2015 was built from 2006-era hardware, with 32GB of ECC DDR2, which felt like a lot at the time.

My "6 years ago" build was with more typical current-gen consumer-grade hardware, because at that point I was on the hook for the electricity bill. I haven't thought about what my next build will look like because it's still going strong (aside from a flakey DIMM... so my next system will have ECC).

	▲	swed420 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've been extremely pleased with my R320 in a NAS role. Idles at 40 watts, is quiet, has ECC, and the drives stay cool. Maybe that's still too much power for some people, but I'm happy with the tradeoffs.

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

I imagine those countries have sane energy prices compared to Western Europe.

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DoctorOetker 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Regardless if the market allows consumers access to negative solar prices or not, consumers can attach solar panels to their servers (independent of the grid), so the LLM is there when the sun is shining.

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gib444 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Me too.

EU average is just under 29c/kWh (non-contract price) [0]

In the UK I got 27.5c/kWh (+ 58c/day fixed charge) on an 18-month contract a month ago

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

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snazz 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

That is expensive. If it makes you feel better, U.S. utilities' published kWh rates don't include a whole bunch of other things that make bills much higher than you'd imagine. For example, I used 280 kWh last month for my apartment, at a nominal rate of either 11 or 13 c/kWh (the rate changed from 13 to 11 partway through the month as it got cooler).

But after all the "sales true ups" and "affordability charges" and "resource adjustments" and "fuel cost charges" and "interim rate adjustments", not to mention the city fees and sales tax, the final bill divided by my usage gave me an effective rate of 23 c/kWh.

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

My thought was that the EU average can't be that high, but apparently Finland is just the outlier here.

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b112 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think in Quebec they've been paying me to use power.

	▲	gib444 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Good for you

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cinntaile 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Energy is a commodity so the price will be very similar for the same goods. What they tack on as taxes might be different.

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stefanfisk 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Energy means electricity in this case, and the EU prices are about 2-3x those paid in China AFAIK, for both residential and commercial.

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doikor 4 hours ago | parent [-]

EU is big and prices vary. (Transfer capacity is limited)

Afaik electricity is around 7c/kWh in China. I got 8c/kWh 2y contract a couple weeks ago here in Finland. Though have to add 4c/kWh for transfer to that (no clue if the Chinese prices I could find include that). Commercial prices are less then that (no VAT and possibly lower power tax bracket. The 8c includes all taxes/fees)

	▲	stefanfisk 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The cheapest price in Europe at best equaling the average price in China sounds like it just proves my point?

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mitxela 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Electricity cannot be shipped from one place to another in bulk quantities.

	▲	RunSet 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And data can be. Which is why I suspect most nominal "data centers" are fronts for crypto mining, an activity that seeks out the cheapest energy.

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

The E5-2670v1 was goated for this back in 2016-2017. You could get them for like 25-50 bucks. I still have one of the supermicro boards I got from work in hardware decommissioning and one of the chinese franken-boards with a modded bios.

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project2501a 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Typing this from an Asus X99 WS 3.1 with a E5-2696v4 . I got 256GB of RAM, sees only 128GB but I am sure with some overvoltage and lowering the ram speed it could see all 256GB.

if anybody got a tip, i'd be more than glad to listen, please.

	▲	TacticalCoder 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Typing this from an Asus X99 WS 3.1 with a E5-2696v4. Yeah the Xeon E5 v4 to me are really an amazing spot. These things, today, are basically free. If you look a bit you can buy stuff like four 20 cores E5 v4 for $60, making them effectively $15 each. Basically free. And here's the trick: I don't need my Xeon to be up 24/7. 8/7 is sufficient, so I save 2/3rd of the electricity cost. I set up my network so that when I sleep, my main server doesn't need to be on. The services that really need be on 24/7 (say my DNS for when I'm sleeping and my wife/kid need Internet) are running on a Raspberry Pi (which consumes nothing). And when I need the shitloads of cores / ZFS etc.: I turn the Xeon on. Now it's still a server in my case: my main machine is a recent AMD. > if anybody got a tip, i'd be more than glad to listen, please. Slap 128 GB of the 256 in a $50 used Xeon server and use that has a backup / to run VMs / ZFS / etc.

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colechristensen 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are significant performance/energy ratio problems with older hardware, particularly with the rise of ARM.