megatron-uk wrote:

... and even then if you do have something along those lines, such as a server, you have to ask yourself; "is it worth running s […]
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sliderider wrote:

... You shouldn't need an insane amount of wattage, either. I probably wouldn't use more than 550W with any machine from a PIII backwards but I'm sure someone has a machine that requires more than that, I just can't think how they would need that much on a machine so old unless they were running a dual Xeon server with 10 hard drives and an AGP Pro video card. (Or an ALR Quad 6 or 6x6)

... and even then if you do have something along those lines, such as a server, you have to ask yourself; "is it worth running such a 'seemingly' beast of a machine?".

A short time after buying my house I replaced two dual processor machines; a dual P3-933 on an ASUS CUR-DLS and a dual AMD Athlon 2800MP on a Gigabyte DPXDW. One was my filestorage/av store of 3.5 Tb, and the other my website/email/development system.

All of those services are now on an AMD X4 6400 HE processor (45w) and the disk service has been reduced from 8 x 500GB SATA disks, to 5 x 1Tb. It's a lot quieter, a lot cooler, uses only 1bar of power on my UPS, compared to 2+ *each* for the dual systems, and actually, is massively quicker too.

I get the appeal of retro kit (check out my videogame database sometime), but sometimes it makes more sense to use modern equipment for 'work' purposes (by 'work' I mean that in the broadest sense - ie providing a service).

Some server hardware, though, people have just for the sake of having it. For bragging rights. Some are a challenge like the ALR machines. Finding the parts to assemble one is difficult and can be expensive. You almost never see one for sale in one piece anymore, and if you did they'd cost a fortune to ship. It's like a badge of honor to be able to say you gathered together all the parts and got one up and running, even if they do cause the lights to flicker when you power them up.

I get it, I really do - there's two SGI workstations sitting under this desk right now; the Octane probably sucks as much power as that amd x4 fileserver, my main q6600 desktop and the P4 dos machine all put together! (the PSU is rated for 720W!!!) - but for day to day use a lot of old kit is too noisy, power hungry and, well, too expensive to use!

megatron-uk wrote:

I get the appeal of retro kit (check out my videogame database sometime), but sometimes it makes more sense to use modern equipment for 'work' purposes (by 'work' I mean that in the broadest sense - ie providing a service).

Ofcourse this is true. I mean, theres people driving like 40 or 50 year old cars in seemingly mint-like condition! And seeing one drive through the streets is of course a much better attention grabber then just one of those modern assembly line cars!!....but would I actually go to work in such an old car? Probably not. Modern cars are a LOT cheaper to maintain and use (including the fact that modern cars use much less petrol then really old ones, are more quiet, more comfortable etc etc etc).

The "work" my old rigs perform is usually for LAN parties (and those are just old computers of like 8 to 10 years old max), the older ones usually serve only specific purposes for me, at least at this time.