Comment by 9cb14c1ec0
7 hours ago
One day I hope to be rich enough to put a CPU like this (with proportional RAM and storage) in my proxmox cluster.
7 hours ago
One day I hope to be rich enough to put a CPU like this (with proportional RAM and storage) in my proxmox cluster.
Some of the AMD offerings like this on Ebay are pretty close to affordable! It's the RAM that's killer these days...
I still regret not buying 1TB of RAM back in ~October...
I bought a bundle with 512GB of RAM and an older 24-core EPYC (7F72) + supermicro motherboard on ebay a bit over a year ago, it was really an amazing deal and has made for a truly nice NAS. If you're okay with stuff that's old enough that you can buy decommissioned server stuff, you can get really high-quality gear at surprisingly low prices.
Companies decommission hardware on a schedule after all, not when it stops working.
EDIT: Though looking for similar deals now, I can only find ones up to 128GB RAM and they're near twice the price I paid. I got 7F72 + motherboard + 512GB DDR4 for $1488 (uh, I swear that's what I paid, $1488.03. Didn't notice the 1488 before.) The closest I can find now is 7F72 + motherboard + 128GB DDR4 for over $2500. That's awful
I've heard it claimed that the era of being able to do this (buy slightly old used server hardware cheap on ebay) is coming to an end because, in the quest for ever more efficiency, the latest server hardware is no longer compatible with off-the-shelf power supplies etc. (there was more but that's the part that I remember) and therefore won't have any value on the second hand market.
I hope it was wrong, but it seems at least plausible to me. I'm sure that probably fixes could be made for all these issues, but the reason the current paradigm works is that, other than the motherboard and CPU, everything else you need is standard, consumer grade equipment which is therefore cheap. If you need to start buying custom (new) power supplies etc. to go along, then the price may not make as much sense anymore.
2 replies →
I'm curious, what is the powe draw for such a system? Of course, it heavily depends on the disks, but does it idle under 200W?
I personally feel like I will downscale my homelab hardware to reduce its power draw. My HW is rather old (and leagues below yours), more recent HW tends to be more efficient, but I have no idea how well these high end server boards can lower their idle power consumption?
RAM! (And NAND SSDs too now, probably...)
When I was looking in October, I hadn't bought hardware for the better part of a decade, and I saw all these older posts on forums for DDR4 at $1/GB, but the lowest I could find was at least $2/GB used. These days? HAH!
If I had a decent sales channel I might be speculating on DDR4/DDR5 RAM and holding it because I expect prices to climb even higher in the coming months.
2 replies →
AMD also has some weird cpus like the 7c13 7r13, that are way way way below their normal price bands. You don't even have to buy used to get a ridiculous systems... Until 4 months ago (RIP ram prices). https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7c13-is-a-surprisingly...
Do you remember what you dreamed about 7 years ago? An Ampere Altra 80-core-CPU was sold for less than 210€ on eBay in January.
Oh, nice! I always wanted one of those, a many-core build server running ARM would be excellent for Yocto. Anything running in quemu in the rootfs is so slow on x86 and I've seen the rootfs postprocess step take a long time.
Though... these days, getting enough RAM to support builds across 80 cores would be twice the price of the whole rest of the system I'm guessing.
Wait long enough and these will be cheap on eBay.
By that point we'll be desiring the new 1000 core count CPUs though.
This is the 2026 version of "I need a beowulf cluster of these".
‘Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these’
Just give it a few years and you'll be able to buy the thing for a fraction of the 'current' price. By that time it will be considered to be 'slow' and 'power-hungry' and people will wonder why you're intent on running older hardware but it'll still work just fine. The DL380 G7 under the stairs here also used to cost an arm and a leg while I got it for some finger nail clippings.
> with proportional RAM and storage
Let's not get carried away here
Aside from the memory cost being exorbitant, 4th/5th gen ES CPUs aren’t horribly expensive for the core count you get. 8480s and 8592s have been quite accessible.
Stuffed an 8480+ ES with 192gb of memory across 8 channels and it’s actually not too bad.