https://www.ebay.ie/itm/Dell-Powered...Condition=3000

They seem to be throwing these things away here - €300 in auction, rising to €600 'buy it now.' So some ebay merchant bought them for next to nothing and his profit is in the €300. I'm not rushing in to buy, I'm just curious.

There's some good hardware - 15k SAS drives (=2.4T), The cpu could be anything - they released so many models of Xeon, and a likely year is 2014/15 and appears to be 22nM lithography. Ram is DDR3 1600Mhz AFAICT, & 48GB of it.

Given the cpu is 8 cores or more why are they going so cheap?

Maybe because they can be power hogs and older tech. Newer tech is miniaturized in comparison.

Hell. After changing out the inverter on my Panasonic Cf-48 toughbook.
That made it feel like a new laptop .

But that cf-48 is a power hog compared to my chromebook. So not worth much. Plus hardware specs are minimal at best.
It was a 1000 dollar unit it's hey day though. With XP and a floppy drive with cdrw. At least I could slip in a 1 gig stick in to make it a whopping 1.2 gig ram Pentium 4 single core toughbook.

This post makes no sense because hobbies can be cash burners.
One man treasure is another mans junk.

That is what I like about perspective. I am in paradise surrounded by junk.

In my country server much more expensive and not possible to buy on ebay.

You should put in a bid on it so. I'm not going to. The power hog bit doesn't worry me too much. The noise of a number of turbines (er, ropey fans) makes it a non starter for me. Also, there's 48 GB = 6×8GB dimms. But there's 4 memory lanes in each xeon, so I fancy it should at least be 8 dimms (= 64GB) and probably more. I fancy it was a lot more, but that some got pulled.

@rokytnji: You could be right about power and size. It's 2U, but VERY DEEP. Look at the photos.

But they are specialized and used. Pulled from a data center means I would like look at date stamps before buying.
But they have choice on what you get.
Then there is Housing and power requirements. Cooling.

Maybe the 300 price tag justifies all the above sales conditions. You don't even have a hour log on how long some of the units ran.

You have to be real serious with a mission to incorporate that hardware.
Kinda like me with motorcycles.
Emotion over rides common sense in my mind when it comes to 2 wheels.

Built a 20 x 40 seperate building to accommodate my madness.
If my madness was computers.

I'd say. Boy what a good deal.
Instead. I buy a samsung chromebox 3 that is defunct with a expired Google ChromeOS on it.
Trying to downsize my Linux collection to more modern gear.

I get free dell servers and IBM desktops from city hall. Check the dumpster diver social group here.
So when I buy a chromebox for about 40 bucks. I must be serious.
Being a cheap skate and all.

There is a question you need to ask yourself. Do I have any use for it? 48 GB of memory. What applications do you run which actually can utilize it? And so on. I myself can say I could not find any use for it. I have a server, runs i3-4130T and this is more than enough, 16 GB of memory, good for RAIDZ, but more RAM would not improve anything.

The only thing I noticed about the ram was that it's a twin Xeon, with 4 memory lanes each = 8 DIMMs but it only has 6. But I don't want the thing. Single threaded performance wouldn't be great. I don't want fans like turbines, or a behemoth like that thing in my room when I can't physically move it about. But I was interested in what people thought was unattractive about it @ €300.

I don't feel I have to use all of the 2.4T of storage or 48GB now. It might be nice for VMs, where you need ram and cores. I'd only use a fraction of that networking capacity. But what do you get in the way of a PC for €300? Not a lot.

Some organizations will get rid of anything that is out of warranty. I was always puzzled by this attitude when I was working for a big corporation. Yet they thought nothing of sending those systems off to a 3rd-party data center for something like $1200/month/server. [smh]

Actually, 300 pounds isn't a half bad price for a system like that but those small fans have to run at speeds that make the system sound like it's powered by a small jet engine. I could work in a corporate data center when large Suns and Alphas were the majority of the systems but when all the 1U and 2U systems came in, ear protection was needed. I wouldn't have been very popular if I were to pick up any of these systems, even when we had a basement to run them. I'm certain the din would made its way up into the living area through the HVAC ductwork.

We used PER720 until a year ago and replaced them because of the Intel-CPU-problems and the mitigations for that crippling the CPUs down to around 60%. 2620 is also one of the rather weak models. When you buy refurbished versions of these look for at least "269x v2" for this price.
An actual ryzen 3 for 99$ has more CPU-Processing power than both CPUs together in that setup and uses 65 Watts maximally, compared to more than 180W for the two xeons:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare...100/1214vs3715

For 600$ you can get much more than that with actual hardware that didn't run for 7+ years non-stop.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks very much for the reply.

So, in a word, they were power hungry and sucked bad. You did say What actual hardware had you in mind?

There are new desktop PCs available for about that price. Some on ebay, some at the big box stores.

Actual Dell Servers with good CPU-performance are poweredge r6515 with Epyc (zen2) CPUs.

For the actual hardware I had in mind: I just compared that dual-cpu server you mentioned with the CPU my daughter has in her PC running Debian 10, her whole PC (with new hardware) costs less than what you mention there. -> The low-budget, low-power desktop CPU with integrated graphics wins against two old Xeons.

What application do you need the servers for?

I don't really need servers atm. I was surprised to see those so cheap, because the peripherals & ram looked ok, and thought I'd learn by asking the question! And I did

I was keeping an eye out for a more powerful Arm than the RazPi 4. but I'm not sure I'd even buy that.