Comment by wmchen
14 hours ago
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.
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).
My homeserver is essentially a top of line gaming PC from 2012 with a Quadro RTX 4000 from 2018. It was not top of the line in 2013 when I bought everything on sale but after many inexpensive ebay upgrades, it's now what I wish I could have afforded back then. Most of the time, it's perfectly fine since it's main job is jellyfin. I'm sure I could be saving some electricity with newer hardware but with the current market, it's just not worth it. I'm missing AVX2 support which Claude Code has recently made a requirement but now I just have Claude ssh into it from another PC that is a few years newer.
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.
I have 2 Huananzhi EPYC boards.
At about $350 each, I had to try them. Everything else was double.
Only thing I can say so far is, they boot linux on second hand EPYC 7002 series CPU's.
Haven't put them through their paces yet. V
Oh, I remember quirk #1 ... apparently, only 1 of the case fan headers is speed controllable, the others run at full speed all the time, with no bios setting.
You can fix it with a fan hub that supports pwm so not a show stopper by any means, for those wanting to try these motherboards.
What's up with the "V"? I've seen a couple of your comments that have a lone V at the end of the comment or paragraph.
I end up with B sometimes because I use iPhone double-space to get a period and accidentally triple space but I miss the third and hit B. Maybe V is the same.
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peace V
I guess its a substitute for "just so you know" or "fyi" or any other "I'm an authority on something" ending. :D
About six years ago (as a holdover until I went full homelab, which I never did) I built a machine with some spare parts, a $40 Xeon E5-2650v2 (8 core Ivy Bridge), and one of those Machinist motherboards.
Initially it was just for home server stuff (ZFS array for storage/backups, Plex, Vaultwarden, etc) but then I wanted to experiment with a remote dev environment using LXC/LXD.
I now do all my web development (mostly back-end, Python and C#) on that machine via tmux and VS Code remote SSH. I'm sure if I was running my browser on it it might painful given the slow single-core performance, but honestly I've felt zero need to upgrade it. Once the RAM-pocalypse is over I'll probably look at doing so just for reliability's sake.
I have one of these Machinist boards sitting in my closet, which I haven’t set up mostly out of laziness. What I really want is a PCI-E card that can take DDR3 RAM to be used as a RAM disk for containers that do a heavy amount of heavy I/O.
One or two DDR3 ramdisk cards were produced but they’re basically non-existent today. There are DDR4/5 ones (CXL), but they they’re restricted to specific enterprise motherboards.
I imagine those countries have sane energy prices compared to Western Europe.
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.
> when the sun is shining.
So no LLMs for 3-5 months a year in most of Europe?
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Energy is a commodity so the price will be very similar for the same goods. What they tack on as taxes might be different.
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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Electricity cannot be shipped from one place to another in bulk quantities.
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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...
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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My thought was that the EU average can't be that high, but apparently Finland is just the outlier here.
I think in Quebec they've been paying me to use power.
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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.
Yeah, I have an old X99 old asrock Fatality (lol) board, micro ATX with a Xeon E5 2640 and 128GB of ECC DDR4 running 24/7 as a Truenas server with 80TB of storage in it. It seemed like an overkill when I put it together two years ago when I replaced my 5820 CPU that had been my daily desktop but now with storage and everything prices exploding it has turned into a very useful thing. I still don't like the fact that it sits at around 130 watts. But given that it has so many hard drives in it, it's not that bad. My whole basement cloud now feeds into it.
I just bought a Xeon E5-2690 v4 for $16 and a Sparkle A770 for like $350. Going to try some local models on there. I think it will be plenty good for my use cases.
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.
Thanks for this! Your post inspired me to look at my X99-UD4 system that was put in a closet some years ago. The board currently has a 5960x CPU, and I did not know I could put an E5-2697v4 CPUs in it. I have a couple of these v4 CPUs and tons of DDR4 modules from a recent data center decomm event. Time to hack again - it may revive my old PC!
> 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.
There are significant performance/energy ratio problems with older hardware, particularly with the rise of ARM.
It's fun to think about running datacenter hardware at home, until you get the electricity bill.