There comes a time in which hardware is not enough. I like my macbook pro, but it’s not the class of machine I run code on, which means inferred intuition is incorrect. Ideally, I’d like a dual-Xeon with >32GB RAM. A kind of machine everyone had at ebay – and as people turned over, I accumulated 3, before also changing banners.
My home desktop is an i7. Luckily Intel wasn’t really doing too muchanything in the consumer CPU space. It’s fine, runs occasional Civilisation or PUBG/Overwatch/StarCraft (a beer prosthetic across timezones). I need cores, RAM and numatop.
Why now? Threadripper! Competition in the CPU space! I had huge hopes AMD would at least stir the market a bit. Also, was a bit afraid of “here goes nothing” scenario, in which Threadrippers turn out to have hardware bugs. It’s September, Intel responded with i9s. Good, let’s look around. I don’t want to burn a lot of $ immediately. In the worst case, I can always buy more 🙂 After all, 7900x and 1950x are 1k GBP each for the CPU itself. Plus DDR4, motherboard.. it adds up. Here came the thought of “maybe a 2nd hand workstation”?
Europe a bit disadvantaged (compared to the US) when it comes to 2nd hand hardware. It’s still so much better than if I would limit myself to polish market/allegro – is it because all the outsourcing companies only lease laptops for their staff?
After going through ebay, I’ve narrowed myself down to: Dell Precision 5810, 7810, 7910, HPs Z620/Z820 workstation, or a similar Supermicro tower server
I gave E7-4* a moment of thought, especially as I’m OK to hunt for ES. But then, a rack is a commitment, so this will wait.
