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.

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.

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.

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.

What are the limitations of machines like these?

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.

Any pointers on how to buy one?

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.

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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.

    >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.

Forgot about Dell gimping Turbo Boost on that firmware.

Another route is the PowerEdge T440 (tower server), which does respect Broadwell-EP turbo logic without a reflash. Not quite as quiet as a workstation, though.

It's not an issue with Dell it's an issue with how the chips themselves are designed. There are buggy microcodes in the Haswell-EP series which can be exploited to unlock FULL Turbo Boost on ALL cores of the CPUs. This is NOT possible on Broawdwell-EP.

Man this so much incredible information in one comment

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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)

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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/

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.

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

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.

Demand spills over to substitutes.

The price of DDR4 is also going up!

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

Keep your eyes open for a better job? The work you do should have impact of some kind. In the corporate world there is business impact (increase revenue, decrease direct costs or improve system efficiency), social impact (make a product that directly helps people in some way), or personal impact (work on something that you find intrinsically interesting or helps you grow your skills or understanding).

I don't see any reason to permanently stay in a role filled with mundane triviality .

> I don't see any reason to permanently stay in a role filled with mundane triviality

Well for starters with over a decade of experience I still need to halt my entire life to grind leetcode for months.

What does a top leetcode score give you? The opportunity to build CRUD apps for FAANG. No thanks. What if I go towards working at a university as “retirement”? Well, now I’m just building apps to test hypotheses developed by someone else. Grass still ain’t greener and I still don’t need to be “collaborative”.

I think the modern developer views themselves wrongly as a world changing force. When in reality the majority of software engineering is getting paid a metric shitload of money to glue premade widgets together on a digital assembly line.

The good “deep” jobs are excruciatingly rare, typically vary wildly in pay, and highly competitive. It’s not like the early 80s and 90s when you could get in on some crazy cool world changing stuff like OS dev, networks, and things like it. Most of the highly available “cool” jobs are solved problems.

> Keep your eyes open for a better job?

This is literally opposite of “keep doors open”, if you find a better job you need to grind leetcode to get there.

Not only can the hotel select their own policies, but the cancellation is 6 months early. Surely the room will not go empty in that time.

Not bearings, this is "wear and tear" as in abrasion resistance. Cast basalt is used to create abrasion resistant pipes and flooring.

Yeah, stainless steel pipes are used to carry ash slurry away from thermal power plants (especially in China and India). Cast basalt lining increases the lifetime of the pipes by reducing abrasion.

Average gift card has a discount of 8 to 20% built in. Looks like Coinstar is currently charging 12.9%, so a gift card could actually be more profitable for them.

I switched to Kagi a few years ago and have not looked back. The quality has been great and continues to perform well.

Is location aware search usable now? The answer when I was using it like a year ago was... no

No, and since they broke language searching in December 2024, it got even worse.

I still use it because those are not very relevant for me, but it’s a shame.

In my experience, yes. I’m in Australia and when I want results from my state or even my neighbourhood, I only get the relevant results now.

I think YMMV though and this is probably highly location dependant.

I recently arrived at an Indian birthday party at 11 am (the scheduled time) and the host immediately responded, oops I forgot to tell you the real time... everyone else will arrive after noon.

Agreed, A++++++ GREAT POSTER, FAST, ACCURATE LISTING.

Interestingly, eBay feedback is still one of the quality sources of reviews. Unlike Amazon, eBay doesn't have an incentive to promote garbage products.

I'm a fellow new Garage user. I have had a great time so far - but I also don't need much. My use case is to share data analysis results with a small team. I wanted something simple to manage that can provide an s3 like interface to work with off the shelf data analysis tools.

My wife is deaf in her left ear as well. She doesn't usually tell people, but does tell people that she likes to walk on the left and sit on the left side of rectangular tables.

One interesting effect is that I have developed a preference for sitting or walking on people's right hand side, especially with good friends or people I respect.

The most interesting effect is I have noticed how much people take for granted the ability to sense where sound is coming from. Early on in our relationship I would occasionally perform "magic tricks" where I know immediately where a sound is. She would ask: how did you know where it was?