Buying a refurbished computer

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Rebel
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Joined: Thu Aug 18, 2011 12:04 pm

Buying a refurbished computer

Post by Rebel »

Uri Blass wrote: Sat Jul 06, 2019 7:56 pm I think to buy a new computer and I wonder what is the elo of stockfish and lc0 for different prices of hardware.

Is there a table for comparison that give price and elo estimate for both?
The "buying a new computer" thread inspired me to share my experience with refurbished workstations and have both of the AB and NN world.

http://rebel13.nl/home/hardware.html

Cheap?, still to expensive?, negative experiences? etc. ?
90% of coding is debugging, the other 10% is writing bugs.
jdart
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Joined: Fri Mar 10, 2006 5:23 am
Location: http://www.arasanchess.org

Re: Buying a refurbished computer

Post by jdart »

I have several refurbished workstations, mostly HP. Businesses tend to lease these for 3 years. Once they are off lease, they are sold to a liquidator, and are often available at attractive prices. It is pretty common to remove the hard drive for security reasons.

eBay usually has a large selection.

I have found these to be reliable and they run pretty quiet. The latest one I bought is a Z840 with two 2690v3 Xeon processors and 64G RAM.

The only downside is that this particular box has the hard drives in slots, with the connectors plugging into sockets at the bottom of each slot. I was not able to get a SSD installed because they are really set up for a 3.5" form factor and while you can get an adapter, those are designed for a more conventional kind of drive cage. Maybe this is soluble but I just put in a spinning disk. Also it is not clear to me that this case can accommodate a large graphics card. I am not sure what it came with - it is some kind of workstation card but not a super-high end one I think.

--Jon