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Comment by mistyvales | Hacker News Reader

Here I am running a 12 year old Dell PowerEdge with dual Xeons.. I wonder when the first gen Epyc servers will be cheap fodder on eBay.

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1-3rd gen Epycs can be had super cheap, but the motherboards are expensive.

Also not worth getting anything less than 3rd gen unless you're primarily buying them for the pcie lanes and ram capacity - a regular current gen consumer CPU with half - a quarter of the core count will outperform them in compute while consuming significantly less power.

Lots of great second hand hardware to be had on ebay. Even last gen used CPUs, as well as RAM, at much less than retail.

However when you end up building a server quite often the motherboard + case is the cheap stuff, the CPUs are second in cost and the biggest expense can be the RAM.

When buying used Epycs you have to contend with them possibly being vendor-locked to a specific brand of motherboard as well.

https://www.servethehome.com/amd-psb-vendor-locks-epyc-cpus-...

They sell this vendor lock-in "feature" as enhanced security?

Yes. It keeps the board from booting if the firmware is replaced with a version not signed by the board manufacturer (i.e. so an attacker can’t replace it with a version that does nefarious things). Preventing CPU reuse in other boards is just an (unintentional?) side effect.

The cynic would say the security implications are the side effect, since selling more, new chips is the goal.

If that was the goal then the CPU would fuse on first boot for any manufacturer’s board, rather than being fused only by Dell boards.

The reason for this is that CPU upgrades on the same board were/are very viable on SP3.

Doing that on Intel platforms just wasn't done for basically ever, it was never worth it. But upgrade to Milan from Naples or Rome is very appealing.

So SP3 CPUs are much more common used than the boards, simply because more of them were made. This is probably very bad for hobbyists, the boards are not going to get cheap until the entire platform is obsolete.

IMO, 1st gen Epyc is not any good, given that 2nd gen exists, is more popular and is cheap enough (I actually have epyc 7302 and MZ31-AR0 motherboard as homelab). Too low performance per core and NUMA things, plus worse node (2nd gen compute is 7nm TSMC)

Unsure about the Epyc chips but Ryzen 5 series kit was being given away on Amazon in the week...

I snagged a 9 5950X for £242

Thanks for pointing out, it's still up there for £253 - I might consider upgrading my 8 core 5800X3D.

Whether that's an upgrade depends on your use case, as the X3D has more cache.

I don't play games so the X3D's cache doesn't really benefit me. 5950X should speed up compilation, but then, I mostly do Python at the moment :)

You might be surprised at what benefits from the big cache outside of games but that is certainly one of the main selling points. :)

Not worth. Get 9654 on eBay for $2k plus $1k for mobo. $7k full system. Or go Epyc 7282 type, and that’s good combo easily available.

They already are, and aren't very good.

Haha same, and it’s perfectly capable of anything a smallish company would need for general on-prem hosting.

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