My old workstation cost me a 14” MacBook Pro in power in 5 years.
Plus you can get new in box Lenovo mini PCs with 11th gen i5 in for less than the price of a second hand Xeon desktop that’s actually usable now. They pull average 30 watts.
I've actually was able to turn off all heaters during winter and heat my house using computers only! I'd say, "higher" TDP of older CPU was really an advantage here. And, let's be real, new high performance CPUs arent low-TDP either (270W for new AMDs), or GPUs (350W range for high end gaming card).
So, I'd really say it's environmentally friendlier to use waste heat as house heating than using "space heaters" only. (I really do have to heat using electricity, as I don't have gas nor any other source.)
In summer what to you do with that excess heat?
Far more nuanced than trite calculations chosen to back up your conclusion.
Also you’re rebasing the argument on a new $4000 spend when you can spend $400 on a mini PC with the same performance as an old Xeon as suggested.
Also, $400 mini PC have performance nowhere near workstation, since RAM only costs more, not even thinking about gaming GPU or price of decent SSDs and HDDs.
What did I do with excess heat? Opened window and turned off POWER8 energy hog.
The i5-11500T has better single and multi thread performance.
Sure you won’t get an RTX in it but that’s a 1% case really when we’re talking software engineering.
That’s a hell of a lot better value proposition than a 5+ year old Xeon which is what we’re seeing suggested here.
GPU with 2GB of VRAM is not much today, my 4k desktop consumes 1.6G vram and i'm not even running any game.
Midrange machines <1000€ from Lenovo and HP make great workhorses at a fraction of the price.
What desktop is that? I ran Windows 11 desktop with youtube and bluray rips fine even while allocating only 512MB of VRAM, though the more you allocate it the more it will use, to cache and speed up various frequently used apps, but even with 512MB it still worked fine.
An average build is more likely in the range of $1250 +/- 250$
2018 and newer server chips may have better low-power idle mode support.
Even if it does idle at 170w, the build was less than $2k, it has 50 cores, 384GB ram, tons of storage.. 1 year uptime, so sick! Has not let me down yet! Even if the mobo croaks, it's easy to source a cost-effective replacement from fleabay.
110W "idle" with firefox running + few opengl programs.
160W at steam startup, then it jumps between 120W and 160W. It stabilizes at 110W in about 2 minutes.
130-230W when compiling emacs (takes about 30 seconds).
150W when loading Facebook in Firefox. Then stable at 110W again.
175W-180W running Prison Architect. Very safe to add another 220W when running GPU heavy game (thats not very relevant here, new GPUs consumes ~same or more power).
I'd say my "randomly guessed" 130W amortized is pretty OK. And remember, this guess was for reference only, scale it to your needs.
Of course it can get higher when having a lot of things up and running, with a lot of active tabs in firefox.
The point is you can’t go “the environment” and throw half the concerns out of the window. It’s way more nuanced than that.