Hits and misses

I had some good deals on Yahoo! Auctions, but also snagged myself some bad ones.

For example, you can find some used servers for good prices. I got myself a Poweredge R320, then a R720, and recently, a R430. The R720 is now my main workhorse server, running several virtual machines, one of which runs several containers for services.I even managed to get a Quadro P400 and a GTX1050Ti, both used, at reasonable prices via auctions. The P400 is being used for video transcoding, while the GTX1050Ti is being used for remote gaming.

 

The R430 is actually quite fast as it came with two Xeon E5-2643 v3 (base clock 3.4 GHz, max speed 3.7 GHz, 6 cores 12 threads each for a total of 12 cores 24 threads). However, it is only capable of fitting in half-length, low profile, single slot cards, so until I can find something that fits, it will be sleeping for a while. I will probably get a PCIe extension cable and run a 75W GPU outside the case. The R320 may eventually become my backup NAS if I can get the harddisks.

At the same time, I had many misses. My current desktop has a Ryzen 3600, which does not come with integrated graphics. I had been wanting to get a Ryzen APU so that I can pass through the GTX1660 Super to a virtual machine. I tried getting used Ryzen APUs (5700G and 4750G) via auctions... but both came as duds. So that's expensive junk. Sigh.

Similarly, I was thinking of getting more graphics cards. So I got a single-slot GTX1050Ti and a Quadro P620 too... and again, both were misses. The single-slot GTX1050Ti wasn't even recognised by the R720. As for the P620, it actually worked for a day. Then all of a sudden, the system could no longer initialise the card, even though it recognises it. So I ended up with two small paperweights and two larger paperweights, all of them expensive.

I guess I need to train my eye to watch out for junk on auctions. I think I have learnt my lesson and will be more careful from now on.