That Magical Word: Workstation | Hacker News Reader

That Magical Word: Workstation

smackeyacky.blogspot.com

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For a while around 2012 or 2013 I was using a circa-2008 Dell M4400 workstation laptop. It cost me $350 used on Craigslist, complete with docking station and HDD caddie, and it absolutely beat the pants off of anything you could buy new at that point for twice and probably even three times as much money.

It came with a 15.4” 1920x1200 display, 2.80Ghz T9600 Core 2 Duo CPU, Nvidia Quadro FX 770M (GTX 9600M equivalent) GPU, 8GB DDR2 RAM, a hotswap bay, wifi/Bluetooth card, and WWAN slot and a ridiculous number of ports, including 4x USB, full size DisplayPort, and gigabit Ethernet (and that’s before docking it!). Its only real downfall is an odd design decision to bridge a large gap between the heatsink and GPU with a thick thermal pad, which was fixed by replacing the pad with thermal paste and a copper shim.

I don’t have a lot of use for it now, but I’ve upgraded it to a 2.53Ghz QX9300 Core 2 Quad (socketed CPU!!), Samsung SSD, and an Intel Wifi 6+Bluetooth 5 card just for fun. With all that, it’s quite serviceable nearly 14 years after manufacture when running a lighter modern OS and good adblocker.

The value on that machine is probably among the best of any tech purchase I’ve ever made.

How are the batteries doing? Keep an eye on those, old laptop batteries can sometimes behave in weird / dangerous ways. See reddit 'spicypillows' for some examples.

Yeah, one of the batteries I have for it is shot while the other holds an hour or two of charge under moderate use. Definitely keeping an eye on them.

If they are 18650 form factor you may be able to replace the cells, and probably with higher capacity ones.

We have tossed out some 5 year old HP laptops, but they are big, the power bricks are huge, the screens aren't the best quality, they make quite a bit of heat and have some fan noise...

Other than the dedicated GPU, a 3 year old slimmer version seems to work at lot better for most people. Not sure how good integrated graphics are right now compared to that vintage.

You made me realize again how much I miss the 1920x1200 screen of my HP 8740w. I'm on a ZBook now, and even though full HD, or a multiplier thereof, is more standardized, I still miss 16:10 enormously.

The good news is that 16:10 is finding its way back into laptops. The Thinkpad X1 Nano I bought last year is 16:10, as are several other Thinkpad models refreshed recently. Same is true for the XPS 13/15/17 models.

Also, Apple has stuck to 16:10 with MacBook Pro’s this entire time, with exception of the latest 14” and 16” models, which are 16:10 but with extra vertical pixels for the menubar to “live” in.

> QX9300 Core 2 Quad (socketed CPU!!

Yes, socketed CPU on a laptop! The HP equivalent to the M4400, Elitebook 8530w, even had a slotted GPU (MXM slot), which you could upgrade, wow! I loved doing that kind of upgrade with older workstations.

Sadly, Haswell is the last chip that was socketed on laptops. Anything newer and you get a pre-soldered chip that you can't upgrade.

They can be overclocked substantially, partly thanks to FIVR (VRMs on-die, Haswell exclusive, very hot - literally), often outperforming Skylake and even newer chips lol

Only solution nowadays if you want a laptop is to get one of the rare ones using a desktop CPU. They're surprisingly not as huge as you'd imagine, about the same as the article's Elitebook. Still, a pain in the ass.

>On the second desk at SmartShepherd I normally have the first laptop I bought when the company started: an Acer that sported 16gb of memory, ATI graphics and an AMD A10-9600p processor. When I bought it, the research indicated that bang-for-buck this machine was pretty good. It turns out that it was garbage, the main culprit being that A10-9600p. The processor had specifications that suggested it should be about as fast as a mid-range Intel i5 (2017 is when I purchased it).

Did the author only look at the core/frequency and concluded "it should be about as fast as a mid-range Intel i5"? Surely someone who's technically savvy like him would know to look for benchmarks? If we look up benchmarks for the AMD A10-9600P[1] and compared it to a "mid range i5"[2], we see that the intel is about 50% faster despite having approximately the same frequency and half the cores.

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-A10-9600P-Bristol-Ridge-No...

[2] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i5-6300U-Notebook-P...

I have to admit that one of the conclusions I came to already in this article is that the author is bad at choosing a good laptop. Acer isn't exactly known for their high quality and reliability. And after his bad experience with the first one he went and bought another one.

Great taste in the old stuff, though!

Yeah, everyone in the enthusiast space knew all bulldozers were dogs compared to basically any Intel offering, but the market iterates so quickly it's easy to get out of date.

OP here. Sure I suck at buying laptops (the Acer Nitro isn't bad though). In the bad old days, you used to simply look at the frequency and it would pretty much tell you the performance, and at the time I bought the A10-9600p laptop I did exactly that. I have learned since then that the simple approach to buying anything with a multi-core CPU doesn't work like it did a decade ago. Some of us are slow learners!

Off-lease business-class hardware is a goldmine. I've converted several old Dell Dimensions and Optiplex machines into decent gaming machines by adding a GPU and a higher-end CPU.

OP here. My office is populated pretty much exclusively with older HP gear. Some resellers offer 2 year warranties making them extremely attractive compared to buying something new.

Mostly I reformat the drives and install Debian on them, which is always an instant 30% speed increase for development work. Can't say I have done a lot of gaming on them. The laptop from the article does have Wolfenstein "The New Order" from 2014 on it that I did for an experiment, and it's surprisingly snappy.

As development machines though, just unbeatable.

My main machine is an HP Elitedesk I saved from the dumpster at work (actually paid $30 for it). Upgraded with spare parts like an SSD and 32GB memory, it has an i7.

It's not the fastest machine in the world but it does everything I need it to do while being fairly compact and quiet.

Slightly surprised to find out it's 8 years old.

This is true with ultra books as well. 3 or 4 year old Thinkpad X1 Carbons or XPS 13s are an easy cost savings and quality improvement compared to low or even midrange contemporary competitors.

Batteries last 3-4 years and can already be very hard to get hold off after that time. I had a tough time sourcing a genuine replacement battery for my 4 year old X1 Carbon. It's a shame as otherwise the user replaceable battery would be a huge advantage over e.g. a MacBook.

The older XPS "developer edition" models with a lot of ram and an SSD also make very good home servers. Power usage at idle is a fraction of what you would otherwise use and the performance is great.

I'm a big fan of the few generations old ultra small form factor machines. They're what I recommend to anyone specifically looking for a general purpose/small business desktop.

Do you have any specific recommendations, particularkt for running Linux? I’m on an M93p at the moment but would like a faster browser experience.

My impression while doing that was that Dell was designing for incompatibility to avoid their business-class stuff from watering down demand for their Alienware line.

I couldn't get a PSU's that had enough power for a decent GPU while also fitting in the wonky proprietary slot. Nothing a Dremel tool couldn't solve, but almost annoying enough to let the bastards win and buy separate stuff.

About two years ago, I was researching this very topic and ended up with an HP z400 workstation. I maxed out the RAM at 48GB, put in the best Xeon available, put in a mid-range video card, and installed a SATA 2 HBA and SSD. It idles just under 100 watts which isn't ideal but it's been a fun project and a great workstation. I see it like buying an older car and fixing it up. It takes some knowledge and research, it's not as fast or sleek as a modern car, but it's YOURS and you know it inside and out.

Similar to what car enthusiasts do, restomods are probably the sweet spot for performance and ownership.

His point about enterprise gear being a good value on the secondhand market is well taken. I've refreshed old optiplex workstations with some new components, and given them to kids and organizations who need a new computer, and they work great. Besides being cheap, they're also designed for easy maintenance.

Business class is where it's at. Especially for laptops. A latitude is going to outlast and inspiron any day, and you can get parts for about a decade.

I was working at IBM in the 1980s when they came out with the term "workstation" -- many of us winced at such a terrible term and concept. They did that to market PCs to corporate customers. The term takes the machine from a place where you can invent and create to one where you simply toil. IBM chose the lucrative corporate customers in doing so, letting Apple fully own the "creatives" (artists, musicians, advertisers, ...).

That's fascinating! Is there anything you can share about any less-enterprise, more "creative" alternative names that might hjave been considered? My initial guess was someone probably suggested "CreateStations...but that doesn't roll off the tongue as smoothly as "workstations"...BTW, I always interpreted the "work" portion in workstations as a machine *working for me*...though i totally get they "toil" perspective you noted.

The following generation machine (8770w) is my daily driver at home. If anyone else is thinking about getting a laptop like this, I maintain a little site that sifts through, cleans up, and sorts the current eBay listings:

https://createdtolast.com/laptops

Select "workstation" from the size drop down to see only 17 inch machines.

Only i5 and i7 as CPU choices? That's not a workstation.

For me, having a Xeon (for ECC) defines a workstation.

I have one of those. An 8770w. It was a beast of a laptop at the time I got it. I inherited it, I would never have bought one, they were ludicrously overpriced imo. I used the crap out of it for years. It started suffering from what seemed to be extremely bad overheating, where it would auto-shutdown, eventually only being able to run for less than a minute before shutting down. I tried replacing thermal pads + thermal paste but to no avail. Maybe the heat pipes were broken.

If anyone wants it hmu. Ships from Ireland tho.

Good to know. This 8760w runs at reasonable temps but I will keep an eye on it.

The HP mobile workstation lines were incredible, often coming with great displays (WUXGA; 1920x1200 17").. but they weighed a ton, and struggled to fit in most bags. Acer made some similar gaming rigs. I used to build product demos that didn't need internet access (you could easily load them up with 16gb memory and SSD's, and run multiple VMs with excellent performance).

Ran IRIX back in the day and the thing I most remember is display postscript with zoomable everything. Today a resto-modded [1] ThinkPad is probably a better choice, featuring repairability, 64GB max RAM, three storage drives, docks, usb-C, a choice of modern hi-res display screens, openboot etc.

(1) https://www.xyte.ch/shop/x2100-pricing/

Irix! When I got my MFA in '88 we had Mac IIs, Amigas, and a SGI workstation. There was a huge difference: the macs/amigas sat quietly on the work desks in their sleek beige boxes, the workstation was about 3'x2'x3' box with roaring fans that whirred menacingly from beneath the desk, and took up all legroom.

These laptops can actually be upgraded with newer GPUs as well. They use a modular graphics card standard called MXM 3.0B, although not all GPUs are compatible. Seems like the 980m and 970m are popular choices: https://www.userbenchmark.com/System/HP-EliteBook-8760w/3989

This brings back memories. My university offered this laptop to students at a reduced price. I carried it everywhere with me even though it was thick and heavy as a brick. I was jealous of students with a fancy MacBook, but it ran Matlab like a champ.

Was the A10 really that bad back then, or did Acer nerf it with poor cooling or slow ram? I remember a time when the A series chips were a good buy, but that may have been substantially earlier than 2016

Probably both. I've never been impressed with any A series CPU. They've always seemed far slower than they should be for their specifications. Back in the early 2010s everybody was excited the AMD was going to be coming out with multicore bulldozers and pile drivers. But they bombed out pretty hard. And he made some choices that made sense at the time but didn't pan out. They fixed it with the Ryzen.

The AMD Bulldozer architecture was really not great. And the updates weren't much better. Zen was a huge improvement.

The integrated GPUs were always significantly better than Intel, and sometimes the pricing was great, but if you wanted good CPU performance, in that time frame, you needed an Intel and the latest "core" architecture was usually the right choice. And then Intel stalled around Skylake/Kaby Lake.

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