Published 2023-11-29
Intentions of "writing more" aside, I have ended up buying a few new pieces of hardware. A while back my 16GB M1 Macbook Air threw multiple "out of memory" errors in a week, so I traded it in for a M2 Max Macbook Pro with 96GB of RAM (the most it supports). Since then, the extra power of the laptop has made the coding projects where I use my i5-CoffeLake Dell 3070 (a SFF box with 32G of RAM) seem pretty small. I've been reading up on buying a quarter-rack (12U) and looking in to how expensive some Dell R710 and R6XX series 1U servers would be, but between the cost of the rack ($600+) and the noise of the 1U and 2U servers, it seemed I was going to be "stuck" with either using my laptop, living with an underpowered machine, or building my own out of new parts at significant cost.
Then I found this Dell T7810 refurbished on Amazon's Renewed store for $370. It has 2 x E5-2680v3 Xeon processors for a total of 24 cores and 48 threads, 128GB of ECC RAM (with eight slots total, up to 256GB for around $410), and comes with a 480GB SSD and an Nvidia Quadro card. Considering my main issue with the SFF machine was CPU power, I'd say this resolves many of my concerns around having "enough" crunching capacity on the side.
If I find myself in need of some added storage, the board supports PCI-E NVME drives, so I can throw in a 4TB disk and an adapter for ~$200 total.
It is scheduled to arrive between today and Friday (Dec 1), so I'll be putting up specs and notes after it gets booted.