The Best "Bang-for-Buck" PC!
A little known fact in the consumer PC market is that server grade hardware can be bought at used quality for extremely low cost. Server and workstations are traditionally used for high demanding work loads and to perform powerful tasks that the mainstream consumer equipment simply cannot handle. However, these machines purchased brand-new can cost thousands of dollars! What makes these computers extra special is the processor that comes inside. Meet the Intel Xeon CPU. The Xeon processor usually comes with a higher than average core count and a modest clock speed. Though, I will say that I have come across several of them that are actually clocked rather nicely. When buying a new system, a lot of the large price tag is from that Xeon CPU. To put into perspective the difference between consumer grade and server grade computers, focusing on the processors, let's compare an i7 6900k to the Xeon E5-2695 v4. The i7 comes with 8 cores and 16 threads and it clocked at 3.2Ghz. The Xeon CPU comes with 22 cores and 44 threads but is clocked at only 2.1Ghz.
Why Would Anyone Need 22 Cores?!
What's beautiful about modern servers is their ability to perform virtualization. If you need four servers each to perform a single task, instead of buying four separate servers, you could virtually divide the CPU resources. That's about five virtual quad core computers being ran off of one chip! The downside to the incredible amount of multitasking power of these CPUs is that the price is currently about $2,400. Check out the CPU on Newegg.
The real trick here is to buy them used at a large discount and aim for a CPU that is a little older.
Why are they being sold so cheap?
Admittedly, I do not have a straight forward answer to this. But, I can speculate. Often times the businesses or professionals that utilize these machines will upgrade them for many reasons. Below are some possible situations that one might cycle out the hardware:
- The daily work load has increased.
- Virtualization servers are replacing dedicated systems.
- SAS environments are switching to SSDs.
- Service contract has ended
- Manufacturer support has ended
While these end-of-life (EOL) computers might be too out dated to perform server or workstation duties, the hardware can still be quite relevant when compared to standard consumer equipment.
What To Look For When Shopping
When shopping for a deal on a used workstation, there is a lot of specific requirements that the hardware has to meet for me to be interested enough to purchase:
- Newer Architecture - Probably Sandy Bridge
- Slightly future-proofed core count
- Clock Speed
- Amount of RAM included
- Hard Drive included?
My most recent purchase was an HP z420 workstation. I paid $369 before shipping and I received a Xeon E5-2640 CPU (6 cores, 12 threads @ 2.5Ghz), 32 GB of RAM, and a 500 GB HDD. Here's the exact machine I bought: Link.
This computer is amazing for the price it was purchased at! It outperforms many of the i7s that are out. While it's not the best score ever, it did score a 730 in Cinebench. All I need to do to transform this into a top-notch gaming rig is purchase a graphics card.
In my opinion, you absolutely cannot beat the performance value of buying a refurbished workstation. If you're in the market, this is where you need to be.