LucifarGundam @lucifargundam@qoto.org

@antisophon @may@pl.serialmay.link @ezio@akko.wtf Story time: In China, there was a hardcore PC DIY community known as the "Trash Guys", known for their ability to build usable systems while spending the lowest amount of cash possible, using trashed, decommissioned second-hand hardware that nobody else wants, often from servers (businesses can't use them because they need mission-critical hardware, ordinary desktop users can't them because server CPUs are designed for parallelism and clocked too slow for satisfactory desktop responsiveness). Many CPUs originally costed $1000-$5000 could be purchased for like $100-$500.

Even then, they were top-of-the-line CPUs of the yesteryears, so they could still beat the current-gen mid-end customer-grade hardware for many use cases, so many second-hand Xeon E3 and E5 CPUs have reached an almost legenary and cult-classic status on the web. There was a running joke that these guys could run an entire net cafe with $500 (though you can't guarantee such a net cafe isn't going to blow up after a few months). The golden age of this community was around mid-2010s, mainly because there was very little real CPU performance gain in this era, between 2st-gen Intel and 6th-gen Intel, the speedup was like 20%, so old chips still had enough power for a mid-range desktop.

These days it's gradually becoming a shadow of its former self after AMD introduced high-core-count CPUs to the customer market, collecting old Xeon CPUs no longer makes much sense.