I need a mixed purpose computer, looking for suggestions

[DiTBho]

I was VERY comfortable with Finalcut for VideoEditing. Unfortunately my Apple M1 air-laptop was stolen in my car (oh, got a broken window too) ... and for the moment I won't buy it back. Maybe an M2-laptop in the next semester.

A second bad thing that happened: the mobo of my assembled-server suddenly died on the same day as my birthday, and I am literally going ahead with a cluster of mac-mini units, a very old mac-mini/PPC with a 7450@1.6Ghz and a mac-min/x86 with a Core2 Duo  P7350 @2.00GHz.

I can survive to simple tasks, but umm, it's not enough, and instead of buying a new motherboard, I am thinking about buying a whole computer.

Anyway, I need a mixed purpose computer for 2024-tasks, such as

• building Linux kernels { v2.6.*, v5.*, v6.*}, and GNU/Linux rootfs (Gentoo/Catalyst { MIPS/BE, MIPS/LE, PPC32/BE, PPC64/BE, ARM32/LE, ARM64/LE, HPPA2, x86 }+ OE)
• building Haiku kernels and rootfs { RISC-V, x86 }
• 4 Qemu/{different architectures} virtual machine in parallel, don't need GPU passthrough or anything, they are just "server-profiled", so ... accessed through ssh and only on a text-console
• video editing + H26* encoding with { Windows10/Premiere, GNU/Linux/DaVinci }
• drawing on a WacomOne with { GNU/Linux/Gimp, GNU/Linux/Inkscape }

Looking for a second hand workstation, or server + GPU.
Tempted to by an HP(Z800? Z4? X8?) Workstation with a decent (AMD?) GPU.

Open to suggestions 

[Whales]

Budget?  How patient are you?

Judging by the fact you're looking at second hand prebuilts I presume you're rather budget sensitive.  Your list is technically achievable by any computer with enough RAM made in the last 10 years (eg a 2014 Haswell SFF with 16GB of RAM would work, 32GB might be better if you want to run the VMs at the same time as everything else).

Nothing in your list is realtime sensitive (like gaming or live video encoding for streaming) so there I don't see a minimum performance requirement other than your patience level.  If you can give more info on your budget vs patience tradeoffs (eg how long do you want kernel builds to take?) then I might be able to help more; otherwise my suggestions will seem random.

A few random points:

• Beware userbenchmark, they are heavily biased and should basically be ignored.
  
• For new rigs: building your own computer tends to be cheaper (and better quality) than pre-builts of the same price
  
• For second hand rigs: pre-builts are a cheap base to build on BUT will have an older CPU socket (less upgrade opportunity), might use an older (more expensive) RAM variant or be missing M.2 slots (can't use modern NVME SSDs).  Generally something like an old SFF is good for an office machine or a home server but is not good for high-performance tasks.
  
• Compiling large projects might depend on disk IO just as much as CPU power, so investing in an NVME SSD is probably wise.
  
• "DRAMless SSDs" used to be a bad thing, but I'm not 100% sure any more, lots of the companies are doing it even with their more expensive products.  Probably worth reading into.

[DiTBho]

Budget? 

Good question.
We're talking about hobby things, say (x) =< 1000 euro.

For work-things I just have to fill out an application form, present it to the right person in the purchasing office, also fill out a supporting report to the manager on duty, who in turn will give approval to the purchasing office, and wait for it to be accepted.
Usually, it takes a few weeks.

How patient are you?

I can reschedule a lot of my development hobby-tasks, well the lightest ones, on the two mac-mini-s, and wait for 3-4 months. No problem.

Virtually, I also have my X1 Carbon 2017 laptop on hands, I had it at home but it's now fully "reserved" for job stuff, so I cannot bring it back home with me again. It must stay in the laboratory, at most I can take it to the bar-area, which is located inside the company, but it can't leave the gates even if it's my property.

Nothing in your list is realtime sensitive (like gaming or live video encoding for streaming) so there I don't see a minimum performance requirement other than your patience level. 

umm, I think in my case:
DaVinci for video editing + h26* encoding is the only application that really benefits from a GPU;
while the need of running several Qemu/$arch virtual machines in parallel for compiling "heavy things" (1) for non x86/64bit targets is the only scenario that takes advantage of both lots of CPU threads and lots of RAM.



(1) heavy things
compile the { Linux, Haiku } kernel from source
compile the { GNU/Linux{glibc, musl, uclibc}, Haiku } rootfs from source

[DiTBho]

Compiling large projects might depend on disk IO just as much as CPU power, so investing in an NVME SSD is probably wise.

Yup, I already have one in my dead computer, so I can use it again.
Thank God, it's in perfect working order

[DiTBho]

Found an HP Proliant ML350 6th generation server 

it's very heavy, ~25Kg X____X, and big full metal tower
with:
- 2x Xeon E5620 @ 2.40Ghz
- 32GB ram (ECC)
- 8X 146GB SAS (to be verified) disks
- no GPU, anything ...
_________________ 250 euro _______

[Whales]

I would not recommend that Xeon E5620 based server.  It's 14 years old, it's architecture is ancient and slow, a cheap new build from consumer parts will smoke it.  It's not worth 250euro.

Checkout this synthetic benchmark comparison between the E5620, a very cheap consumer modern processor (i3-10100F@$115AUD) and a more reasonable consumer modern processor (5 5600@$200AUD).  I prefer to look at single-threaded performance in this particular benchmark as the multi-threaded is almost just this multiplied by the number of the cores.

32GB of new RAM is vaguely 90-150AUD depending on variant (DDR4 vs DDR5) and speed.  Ram for your Xeon will probably be very cheap on the second hand market (perhaps even $30AUD per 32GB) but you will need to make sure it's the right type for your board (registered versus unregistered DIMMs, it's a different thing to ECC vs non-ECC) otherwise it won't work.  DDR3 memory throughput will be a fraction of DDR4 or DDR5 throughput. 

[brucehoult]

- 2x Xeon E5620 @ 2.40Ghz

Ugh. That's only 8 cores total in two different chips.

Any recent generation Core i5 will thrash it -- they've all had 6 cores since Coffee Lake (late 2017) and all except the 35W TDP ones have 4.5 to 5+ GHz turbo.

The only attractive thing is the 250 euro price, but with E5620 using 80W per chip (and you've got two of them) you'll be using maybe an extra 2 kWh every day with the Xeon, if you're keeping it busy. At prices in Europe that's potentially 500 euro of extra electricity in a year.

I don't know what the idle power use is, but for sure that's a lot less with the i5 too.

I'm not even counting all those disks, vs a single decent 1 TB modern one.

[Whales]

For your budget of 1000 euro I would suggest you consider:

 - Ryzen 7600 (6cores) or 7700 (8cores).  Very modern parts, single core performance in Passmark is about 4x the Xeon you mentioned.  The 7700 is almost the same thing as the 7600 but with more cores bolted on (and sadly a much more expensive price).  Be wary of the variants with letters on the end (like 'g'), sometimes they are completely different processors with different specs just to confuse you.
 - 64GB of RAM (or 128 if you want more for your VMs).  There are some compatibility issues with AMD AM5 (Ryzen 7xxx) when it comes to non-JEDEC speeds, so don't buy "faster" ram unless you've read up on compatibility first.
 - Any compatible AM5 motherboard with enough IO for what you want.  Quality and support from all vendors is hit and miss.  Make sure it has the full 4 DDR5 slots, not just 2.  You don't need a fancy VRM unless you're overclocking and using very big coolers.
 - A new PSU is probably worthwhile when investing this much into new parts.  Don't buy anything that costs less than 100AUD (60euro).

GPUs are a wildcard.  They can cost anything from more than your entire budget to $150 second hand.  I hate the GPU market at the moment so I'm not a good source of info.  Usually I prefer AMD (especially on Linux) but if you want to run LLMs/generative AI then almost all of the software is only compatible with Nvidia's offerings.

It sounds like you might already have the rest of the parts.


An alternative option might be to run your VMs on a separate machine somewhere else on your network.  That might be a good opportunity for something second hand.  I do not recommend considering any CPU arch older than Haswell (2014) for Intel and older than Ryzen 1 (2017) for AMD, the power efficiency will be garbage and you'll end up losing your savings in electricity (and heat).

[magic]

The most important thing is to have CPU load, memory and disk I/O monitors on your desktop so you know your workloads' demands and don't need to ask questions like this

[Microdoser]

For a datapoint, I stumbled into having a server. I made a low eBay bid on an 8 core (16 thread) xeon with motherboard and 16GB RAM. I think it was something like £38. I managed to get 64GB ECC RAM for £10 and a 10 core 20 thread CPU for another £15. A cheap low profile cooler (£22), 512GB NVME drive (£29) a 16 port SATA connector (£40) connected to some old drives that were laying about, and a 2.5GB NIC (£25) combined with an old PSU and some 3D printed parts and hey presto, I slapped on ProxMox and it's the cheap 'homelab' server I've been running for a while, while I get used to having a server.

It runs fine, I have too many cores for what I use it for, and not enough RAM. It's my Pi-Hole, Truenas core server, and a testbed for any OS that I like the look of. I have one VM that just runs After Effects (scanning a shared dataset folder on the TrueNas server for projects and rendering anything it finds there) I have web based system monitoring on it and I can see it is hardly being used anywhere near capacity except for RAM.

If I had more budget and were to do it again, I'd go for 128-512GB of RAM, a newer xeon, ideally with 20 cores (40 threads), and a 10GB NIC. I've seen machines like that in 2U size with 16x900GB SAS drives (something like 14TB of storage), although without the 10GB NIC, quite cheap, although they do go quick and then seem to be relisted at a much higher price.

[DiTBho]

I'm not even counting all those disks, vs a single decent 1 TB modern one.

umm, I prefer the opposite, for several reasons.
With several disks in mirroring, the probability of losing data is less than the chance you have if the data is all on the same device and it dies
And SAS >=1T disks are so bloody expensive.
in fact, I'm tempted to call this guy and ask him if he's willing to sell just the SAS-disks 

[DiTBho]

Raspberry Pi 5 + USB disk .

how you can run Windows10 on a RPI?
how you can do video editing (Davinci on a RPI? seriously?!?)?
how you can run 4 Qemu/$arch vm in parallel (with max8 GB!?!? and no VM-support?!?)?

I'm not looking for a toy/NAS, I'm looking for a workstation/server; the specifications of what I need are in the first post!

[DiTBho]

The most important thing is to have CPU load, memory and disk I/O monitors on your desktop so you know your workloads' demands and don't need to ask questions like this

look, I don't understand anything about x86 computers, and I would prefer to spend my money on much nicer things like POWER9(PPC64/LE) and/or AMPERE (ARM64).

All things that I work(1) on every now and then, which are in the order of at least 4000 euros, and they make sense neither about electricity(2) as they tend to consumer more, nor the possibility to find second hand.


(1) commercial solutions, made by Raptor Computing Systems / Raptor Engineering
I have qty=8 Talos II units at work.

• Talos II
  two-socket workstation/server platform using POWER9 SMT4 Sforza processors, available as 2U server, 4U server, tower, or EATX mainboard.
  With { 4 , 8, 18, 22, ... } core chip options until chips with more cores are available.
  
• Talos II/Lite
  single-socket version of the Talos II mainboard, made using the same PCB.
  
• Blackbird (cheapest)
  single-socket microATX platform using SMT4 Sforza processors, up to 4–8 cores, 2 RAM slots supporting up to 256 GiB total
  

(2) IBM offered for free some POWER units to Cern, which rejected them because, according to them, the difference in unit/price (for future purchases) and in the bill at the end of the year is more convenient with x86/64.

[magic]

RasPi 5 wih a quad core at 2.4GHz is a joke. Next thing somebody will suggest is Arduino Uno with bitbanged SDRAM and SD

As an AMD fanboy I would look at the AM4 platform or maybe AM5 if it became cheap enough, get as much RAM as needed, spend the rest on the fastest CPU in budget. Try to get ECC if possible (ASUS AMD mobos tend to have it, which is rare in consumer world).

No idea about GPU acceleration of video encoding, perhaps some money could be shifted into that for better performance. Myself, I always get the cheapest GPU that can drive whatever monitors I have. AFAIK you can't speed up GCC with GPU

Don't bother with RAID arrays for software development, unless RAID1 of SSDs. You don't need lots of storage for source code, but things like git really speed up on SSD a lot, if you don't have it all in page cache.

[SiliconWizard]

If you're going for a "cheap" oldish Xeon-based system, at least go for the high-core count ones, otherwise it's worthless, as Bruce said. But it's not gonna cost you 250 euros.
I have recycled Xeon CPUs before (v4 series, 2016, now cheap), can be interesting but yeah, go for >= 12 cores per CPU.
Now of course a complete system around this with several HDDs will draw a lot of power, so depends on whether electricity is cheap or not where you are.

[DiTBho]

RasPi 5 wih a quad core at 2.4GHz is a joke. Next thing somebody will suggest is Arduino Uno with bitbanged SDRAM and SD

ummm actually - why not an X86 PCI accelerator for your HPPA2-RISC workstation? - the next thing Ania suggested

Yep, she did! And technically they "exist".

SUN made them for Sparc workstations, and they were an epic commercial failure. Sure, they survive thanks to eBay and collectors, but the best you can find is a "complete PC with serial, Video and pATA" in "PCI-board-shape" with an i586 CPU and umm less than 128Mbyte local FastPage/72pin RAM, and, worse still, one these bloody things appears on the PCI bus as "bus-master" when it needs to access the shared RAM, or to more RAM, or to a device.

The damn things need a lot of patches and have always been ignored by developers because they are too expensive and very rare to find, not very efficient (hey? i586@200Mhz? really?) and *VERY* difficult to support.

So... guess the idea was to migrate there the Windows tasks (umm Premiere? LOL), but thanks, no thanks!

[DiTBho]

No idea about GPU acceleration of video encoding, perhaps some money could be shifted into that for better performance. Myself, I always get the cheapest GPU that can drive whatever monitors I have. AFAIK you can't speed up GCC with GPU

Yup, GPU can be an advantage for H264/H265, the standard required by Youtube. That's great for me!
Doesn't speed up Gcc, but I need to video edit by time to time, and I no more own my Apple M1 laptop, as got stolen.

Don't bother with RAID arrays for software development, unless RAID1 of SSDs. You don't need lots of storage for source code, but things like git really speed up on SSD a lot, if you don't have it all in page cache.

Yup, I don't bother at all as all the "commit" and "repository" storage will go outside the workstation/server through NFS, and for local pporcessing I also have fast SSDs,  but I don't have any SAS disk; I have SCSI and sATA disks, so ... getting qty=6 SAS disks (146GB each) for 60 euro in total is a great thing 

[DiTBho]

If you're going for a "cheap" oldish Xeon-based system, at least go for the high-core count ones, otherwise it's worthless, as Bruce said. But it's not gonna cost you 250 euros.

it was one of the first things I looked at, as seen in a customer's office.



(HP Z800)

I was looking at one of those beautiful Z800 made by HP.
Specs here

Look how clean they are inside! Well made! WOW!

... unfortunately it's an old computer.
and, umm, a decent Z800 workstation
- Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor 5500 Series, usually E5504@2GHz
- 32GB ECC ram
- NVIDIA Quadro FX 580 512 MB PCIe Graphics Card
seems liested for 400-500 euro 

[DiTBho]

I have one VM that just runs After Effects (scanning a shared dataset folder on the TrueNas server for projects and rendering anything it finds there) I have web based system monitoring on it and I can see it is hardly being used anywhere near capacity except for RAM.

I like this idea 

[DiTBho]

I don't know what the idle power use is

I have a few solar panels on the roofs and an accumulator.
3k Watt in the best case.
The max electricity I decided to use for computing stuff is 800 Watt.
The main UPS is 1K watt.

[DiTBho]

umm, the HP Z4 Workstation is a 2018 computer.
It's not as nice as the Z800 but I like it, and looks good a candidate for my needs 

[Microdoser]

I have one VM that just runs After Effects (scanning a shared dataset folder on the TrueNas server for projects and rendering anything it finds there) I have web based system monitoring on it and I can see it is hardly being used anywhere near capacity except for RAM.

I like this idea 

I'm still ironing it out, but the concept is that you edit on one machine, then save the project in a shared folder that is set to be watched with all the source on a mapped network drive (with the compositions you want rendered in the root of the project) and it sits there rendering out anything it finds. You can have many machines all checking that folder and saving individual frames to the output folder. They skip already generated (or partially generated) frames so as long as your data can be served fast enough, or your project is complex enough that the load time is much shorter than the frame generation time, you can really speed up rendering and have a farm.

While that is chugging away in the background, you can be editing another composition. Finish the work day and it carries on while you sleep...

[Halcyon]

The HP Z-series are good, but power hogs. Not sure whether that's important to you or not.

[Ice-Tea]

Question: why a server? What can a server do that a "regular" desktop PC can't?

[DiTBho]

Question: why a server? What can a server do that a "regular" desktop PC can't?

Good question, bug incorrectly formulated: if anything, why do you prefer Servers?
well ... 

• I usually use machines remotely, over { vt100/RS232, ssh, X11, RDP, KVM }, but that's not a great point here.
  If really anything, it's that "Desktop PCs" are usually sold with a pre-configured setup that includes an overloaded GPU, which is usually exactly what I don't need.
  
  HP offers at least four profiles to choose from
  - 2D, super basic, super cheap, and very little power since all the circuits for 3D graphics are physically missing
  - basic level (3D)
  - medium level (3D+)
  - high level (3D++)
  
  You choose! This is precisely where I should consider who advised me to build a PC myself but... if it's x86 stuff I'm not too knowledgeable about prices, what to look for, where to buy, and compatibility of parts.
  
  With HP, IBM, and (and above all with) Raptor Computing Systems (POWER9!!!), for each product you have full documentation, including part numbers of what does work and what does not, with the firmware, with Linux, etc, so, it's easier.
  
• I usually don't like those desktop PCs full of flashing LEDs and other features meant for the "gaming" profile
• Servers are usually made with redundant PSUs (I like this!), and rack mount option, which is also a great solution if you want to mount them securely in a mini cabinet of the "computer room" in your attic or cellar(1), and usually server cabinet offer more space for HDDs and larger or longer cards, which can be interesting, e.g. if I want to install a PCIe-to-PCI bridge to develop something for my PCI-FPGA cards.
  

Just this 


(1) I had to modify the case of an Apple PowerMac G4 MDD, and make steel brackets, to cut the steel, weld, hammer it, drill it in order to install that bloody computer into a rack cabinet. Umm, so yes, feasable, but ... the point here is ... with Desktop PCs I have the feeling you always have to "hack" something to make it rack-mountable.