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Comment by 7speter | Hacker News Reader

> Speaking of "CPU horsepower" i just replaced a 1.5kW HP[0] server with a .2kW Ryzen 5950x "server" that is about 5% faster overall - don't forget that old stuff, while capable, adds to the electric bill, usually at a constant rate.

What I’ve observed is people on subs like r/homelab and r/sysadmin ridicule people who appreciate the available horsepower with modern consumer tech because “no ecc memory” or the like and I wonder if you people who are looking to make labs using the latest ryzen or i7/i9 (really, I’m thinking of getting started by converting an old thinkcentre with a 4th gen i5, possibly undervolting the cpu, and 24gb ddr3 into a pfsense router and some sort of server) will really be missing out on some necessary enterprise feature?

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Enterprise servers make no sense at home, but they are more fun to play with than old laptops. It's a hobby. After a while you appreciate buying good tools rather than making do, like any other hobby.

Old HPE servers have jumped in price though. Last year you could buy insanely powerful stuff for under $200 but it's all $400 and up for the same gear at the moment.

> “no ecc memory” or the like

ECC is about long term stability and data integrity. For a router, meh, the network protocols will deal with any flips. For a file server or database it's better if those random bit flips don't happen to critical data.

AMD based systems can sometimes be forced to use ECC mode even if the BOIS doesn't support it.

ECC is more important in systems with very large ram footprints because there's that much larger of a memory footprint area for cosmic rays to corrupt. If you've got one-two sticks of ram, and you're not running vital business data, meh, it's not required.

I really like ECC. But I'm not really willing to pay a significant premium for it.

I run companion systems to production out of my house, mostly development lanes comparable to production deployments. If they're down, it's really not mission critical. I also run my home security/surveillance systems. The other significant systems are those related to my children's computer lab.

One argument I’ve heard, which seems valid enough, is that running a homelab setup without EEC memory is a good thing, because you then need to build stuff that can handle memory errors (or at least notice and learn from them) which you will occasionally see in your half a dozen or so homelab machines. Once your deploying production work systems “at scale” with hundreds (or thousands) of servers, you will be guaranteed to see occasional memory errors (probably even with ECC).

One of my first real homelab setups, was 6 raspberry pi’s, laid out as two load balancer, two web app servers, and two database servers. The “unreliability” of pi’s running everything off SD cards was a _feature_ because it gave me lots of experience in how my (work) software stack running on our typical AWS design held up in face of failures.

I was running Wok + Kimchi + gingerbase on the HP, i'm now using proxmox instead. Short of having lights out management (out of band) built in, i haven't noticed much difference between the platforms being "a server" and "a desktop"; make no mistake, 5950x is a monster chip, but it's still a desktop with two few PCIe lanes for me to consider it "a server" - luckily i only require enough PCIe to have an old GPU and extra SATA ports. If i was building out stuff to do more research i'd want more pcie lanes than the Ryzen Desktop supports.

On that note ryzen does support ecc.

It is not validated. So YMMV, but it works and is seen by Linux for me at least .

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