How many PC's do you have?

[meeko]

Most powerful CPU wise is a Supermicro dual Opteron server, I forget the model number.  Dual 16 core 2.1 GHz CPUs, 128GB RAM, GeForce 670 (to potentially be passed through to a virtual workstation, or for CUDA) and 4 200GB SSDs (2 RAID 1 arrays--one for the OS, one for VM images).  Horribly underutilized at the moment, as all it runs is my Plex server.  Bulk storage is on the NAS, which is a home-built Haswell-generation Pentium on a Supermicro server board, with 5 2TB WD Reds, and the OS on an 8 GB SATA DOM.

Then there's my desktop, which can probably do the most total FLOPS, and is the most power hungry (700-something W, IIRC; the Supermicro's only about 4-500 W, and the NAS is, like, 60 W) at full load (Kaby Lake i5, 16 GB RAM, 120 GB SATA SSD, 512 GB M.2 NVMe SSD and dual Radeon Fury Xs in a Thermaltake Core V21 micro-ATX cube case--those 2 closed loop liquid coolers were fun to cram in); my currently unused, but still plugged in, ex-HTPC (Zotac ZBOX ID-33, Atom CPU w/NVIDIA Ion 2 chipset/GPU, 4 GB RAM, 60 GB SSD and BD-ROM/DVD-burner); my Chromebook (Samsung Series 3); my work laptop (Thinkpad T440, i7-4600U, 8GB RAM, 256 GB SSD) and an Xbox 360 (mostly used as a replacement for the ZBOX on media player duty).

In the basement, there's a Zenith eazy-pc EZ-3 (NEC V40 7.14 MHz, 512 KB RAM, DD 3.5" floppy, 20 MB HD, CGA-compatible onboard-video w/built-in white-on-black monochrome monitor) that powers on but won't boot anymore, an Amiga 500 that still works, and a pile of other unused PCs, in various states of completeness.  Anything from a Pentium 120, which was the first computer I bought with my own money--everything before that was either given to me (an Apple III w/colour monitor and a broken 5 MB hard drive), or was actually Dad's (a C64; the Amiga mentioned above; and a 386); the eazy-pc actually came much later than my Pentium--to an i5 3570K.

[mariush]

Most powerful CPU wise is a Supermicro dual Opteron server, I forget the model number.  Dual 16 core 2.1 GHz CPUs, 128GB RAM, GeForce 670 (to potentially be passed through to a virtual workstation, or for CUDA) and 4 200GB SSDs (2 RAID 1 arrays--one for the OS, one for VM images).  Horribly underutilized at the moment, as all it runs is my Plex server.  Bulk storage is on the NAS, which is a home-built Haswell-generation Pentium on a Supermicro server board, with 5 2TB WD Reds, and the OS on an 8 GB SATA DOM.

I would replace that with a Ryzen 5 or something equivalent, or Threadripper if you really want ECC memory for your virtual machines.

That's not a bad machine, but those processors are really low performance and use a lot of power - you'd probably recuperate the money spent on new machine with the energy savings made in 2-3 years.

-

I still use a FX-8320 based PC with 16 GB of memory, several hard drives (~ 6 TB of disk space) and several video cards (mining Ethereum during the nights). 
I'll probably update to Ryzen 2xxx in a few months, was just waiting for a long time for memory prices to go down and then waited on AMD to have all kinks from socket AM4 platform.

I also use an Intel  E4500 with 4 GB of memory and 80GB HDD as a glorified ebook reader, near my bed... used to have an IBM T40 laptop for that purpose but developed some problems with the motherboard (freezing randomly) and decided it's not worth trying to repair it.

[Ian.M]

If we are talking ix86 boxes: 6 working of various ages going as far back as the Windows 3.1 era, one of which was originally a genuine IBM AT that got upgraded through various motherboards till it ended up as a VESA bus 486DX2-80 with 8MB RAM AND SCSI drives running Windows 95.  They are all on my home LAN and get powered up occasionally when I need to do something retro that is awkward to do in a VM. Then there's about as many again in various states of disrepair from bootable with minor faults to parts donors pining for the fjords + a couple of boxes of bits that include a couplke of motherboards that could probably be salvaged with sufficient effort.

Non ix86:  Two recently acquired Raspberry Pis, one working Sinclair QL with SuperGoldCard 68020 accelerator card, and a 40MB HDD,  a couple of ZX Spectrums of various models, a Sinclair Z88, then there's the heap of bits and carcasses, which includes various other QLs and speccys, and IIRC theres a Zx81 and a BBC Master packed away somewhere which were in working order when last used  maybe ten years ago.

[VK3DRB]

PC means IBM Personal Computer, or clones as well? Prior to the PC? All up, 26 "PC's" since 1979, including prior-to-the-PC a rotten Apple II bought in the Golden Centre den of thieves in Hong Hong, and a System 80 Dick Smith EMI noise generator. In the house today, I  only have 3 PC's.

I avoid brand name PC's such as Dell, HP, IBM (Lenovo) etc because they are poor value for money and full of crapware, bloatware and malware that you have to clean off. Much better to build up yourself a decent machine if you know what you are doing.

The trick is a 5 year plan for computers. Build your own by buying mildly leading edge components, upgrade to the affordable sweet-spot at 2.5 years, and replace at 5 year mark, reusing the case DVD drive, O/S etc.

[NiHaoMike]

The trick is a 5 year plan for computers. Build your own by buying mildly leading edge components, upgrade to the affordable sweet-spot at 2.5 years, and replace at 5 year mark, reusing the case DVD drive, O/S etc.

I planned to do a big overhaul of my PC at 5 years, but it's 6 years now and still don't see a reason to replace the CPU/motherboard. I did upgrade the GPU and monitor at the 2.5 year mark - 4K is really nice.

[rdl]

I'm using a computer I built in 2012 to play games, though I did finally get a better video card last year. The games I've played lately  look and run just fine, probably better than the newest consoles. No need to upgrade at this point, not that I can see anyway.

[VK3DRB]

The trick is a 5 year plan for computers. Build your own by buying mildly leading edge components, upgrade to the affordable sweet-spot at 2.5 years, and replace at 5 year mark, reusing the case DVD drive, O/S etc.

I planned to do a big overhaul of my PC at 5 years, but it's 6 years now and still don't see a reason to replace the CPU/motherboard. I did upgrade the GPU and monitor at the 2.5 year mark - 4K is really nice.

I have to admit the 5 year plan worked well when PC technological advancement was on a steep curve. It seems to have flattened out, so maybe a 6 year plan is OK, except for high-end gamers and Creo/Solidworks/Inventor users. Those using Altium will find Altium 18 (the long overdue rewrite) is blisteringly fast compared to Altium 17 and earlier where it was all written in Pascal, so upgrading a PC for Altium 18 does not make much sense.

[Urs42]

I'm not sure how many i have.

Switched on at the moment are those systems:

At home:
Workstation Core i7-4790 32G RAM, Debian 9
Wyse Thinclient, Debian 9
HP MicroServer, Debian 8 KVM Host
Supermicro Xeon X3430 16G RAM 14T ZFS Storage, Debian 9

At the datacenter:
HP DL120 8G RAM Webserver, Debian 8 (Chaos Computer Club Switzerland web/mail)
HP DL360 16G RAM  KVM Host, Debian 8 (My web/mail)
HP DL385 48G RAM  KVM Host, Debian 8 (Hackerspace)

Not in use:

I have no idea. A ton of servers, not many desktop systems.

[@rt]

4 in the house, 3 are mine, 1 is a cheap XP laptop only used for reading PDFs.

If you want to count retro computers, 2 more

[raptor1956]

My most powerful PC, a home-built workstation for 4K video editing, is a couple years old and newer hardware would be nice but not going to happen for the time being.    For most everything else I do almost any of my PC's including my laptops are more than adequate in power, but 4K video is VERY demanding, particularly when using H.265 files.  A 18-core CPU would max 4K editing much nicer but, again, that's going to have to wait. 


Brian

[Fsck]

11 active. 6 or 7 oldies that I just keep around for memories.

A 5820k workstation, x5650 workstation, i5-3330s VM desktop/workstation.
e3-1220v2 NAS, dual e5-2670 NAS/vm host
i3 3220 running Sophos UTM Home
2 e3-1220v2 VM hosts, 1 e3-1230v2 vm host
2 laptops, one x220 and one old vostro 1500 that runs winxp for old stuff.

The oldies are AMD S939 systems mostly with a special mention to a pin modded dual xeon system off an Asus PC-DL board. I also have an old G5 Power Mac I'm using as a nightstand.

[raptor1956]

11 active. 6 or 7 oldies that I just keep around for memories.

A 5820k workstation, x5650 workstation, i5-3330s VM desktop/workstation.
e3-1220v2 NAS, dual e5-2670 NAS/vm host
i3 3220 running Sophos UTM Home
2 e3-1220v2 VM hosts, 1 e3-1230v2 vm host
2 laptops, one x220 and one old vostro 1500 that runs winxp for old stuff.

The oldies are AMD S939 systems mostly with a special mention to a pin modded dual xeon system off an Asus PC-DL board. I also have an old G5 Power Mac I'm using as a nightstand.

My desktop 4K video editing rig is also a 5820K based PC and I've mildly over-clocked and use water cooling on it.  My GPU is also a water cooled nVidia 980Ti that is mildly OC'd as well.  32GB of DDR4 3200 RAM and a 512GB PCIe SSD for OS, program and scratch.  Main storage is two 6TB WD Black HD's. 

Both the CPU and GPU came a little early for them to natively support H.265 decoding so video playback of H.265 4K video is spotty even with the above hardware.  Newer CPU's and GPU's are supposed to handle H.265 better, but for editing video, 4K video, the CPU dominates and having a higher core count than the 6 in the 5820K would be nice.  My next editing rig I hope to go with an 18-core or there abouts.


Brian

[med6753]

Currently 3....I whittled down my collection recently.

Daily driver: Brand new Acer Aspire E15 laptop running WIN10
Media PC: 3 year old home built utilizing an AMD A10-7850K running WIN7. It's connected to my audio/video systems.
8 year old Toshiba L655 laptop running dual boot WIN7 and Ubuntu 17.10 LTS.

[paulca]

One non-24 hour.  (+2 Raspberry PIs).

I used to run loads of PCs until I worked out the electricity cost of running a PC 24/7.

Although I am thinking of re-instating a 24/7 media/file server, just low power.

[Astrodev]

I should not have looked at this post as it has made me think about what I have at present and realised that maybe there are just too many as I stopped counting at 50 and that was just the ones that came to mind easily and are in a running condition.

This is despite giving away a couple of Dell PowerEdge servers last week and not including the embedded PC's in some of the test gear

[paulca]

One.

But I just bought another today.
Ryzen 2700X, 16Gb DDR4 3666Mhz, Asus Crossfire VII X470, NVidia 1070Ti, Fractal Designs Define R6 case, Corsair 750W PSU, Samsung 256Gb M.2_2 Mve SSD, 500Gb Samsung SATA SSD.

[meeko]

I would replace that with a Ryzen 5 or something equivalent, or Threadripper if you really want ECC memory for your virtual machines.

That's not a bad machine, but those processors are really low performance and use a lot of power - you'd probably recuperate the money spent on new machine with the energy savings made in 2-3 years.

Electricity's relatively cheap here.  We have time-of-use pricing which, IIRC, averages out to around 10 cents/kWh including tax for a 24x7 load.  Even if it was running flat out at 500 W 24x7, that's 4,380 kWh/year, or about $440.  Just a Threadripper 1950X is $1300 including tax, or about 3 years' worth of electricity for the Supermicro, never mind what the Threadripper would cost to run, or the rest of the parts.  In reality, even once I finish building it out, it'll be using a lot less juice than that, too.  Of course there's also air conditioning costs to consider in the summer, but in the winter, it's "free" heat.   

To reduce my energy costs, about the biggest bang would be replacing my old oil-fired boiler.  Oil here costs nearly 3x what gas does per kWh.  A mid-efficiency gas boiler should cut my ~$500/month oil bill to under $200.  A high-efficiency condensing combi boiler (also replacing my 60 40 gallon electric DHW tank) would do even better.

[Giuss]

3 desktop , 1 notebook and 1 old netbook

[NivagSwerdna]

I know this is cheating but at work... I had 1000 in a room once.

[Red Squirrel]

Too many, if I count servers. 

As far as 24/7 machines:

-Linux workstation (daily machine)
-Windows workstation (for gaming mostly)
-Firewall (I'll count it as it's a 1U server)
-Home automation server
-VM server
-File/NAS server
-Mail server (used to be the "everything" server before I started to virtualize - need to move mail too)
-Ethereum mining rig

Older pic but this is my server room:



More recent pic with mining rig mounted: (box with 3 fans)



I have some super powerful fans I want to put in there but I want to design a speed controller so they rev up based on internal/external temp difference. They're like 5 amps each lol.

[IanJ]

Here's my active PC's:

1 * desktop (my workshop main dev PC 24/7)
1 * 15" laptop (house use)
1 * 13" laptop (take away from home use)
1 * Webserver/Mail (24/7) in 19" rack
1 * Webserver/Mail backup (turned off usually) in 19" rack
1 * Logging PC (GPIB to 3458A DMM - only on when logging) in 19" rack
1 * 5 GPU Ethereum Bitcoin mining PC rig (temperature controlled mining so acts as temp controlled heater for workshop also - Yup, a heater that pays to be there!)

1lot * plethora of bits from previous media server PC's etc in loft surely enough to build another couple of random PC's if required.

PS. Workshop & house is fully alarmed & secured...........and we have two dogs you wouldn't want to mess with. Just saying.......

Ian.

[Red Squirrel]

PS. Workshop & house is fully alarmed & secured...........and we have two dogs you wouldn't want to mess with. Just saying.......

Same here but instead of the dogs I have a cranky siamese cat. 

[nanofrog]

PS. Workshop & house is fully alarmed & secured...........and we have two dogs you wouldn't want to mess with. Just saying.......

Same here but instead of the dogs I have a cranky siamese cat. 

Seriously cranky cats can put any dog to shame IME.  And I've the scars to prove it.