Adrian Caspersz <
[email protected]d> wrote:
I want to make an electric fan heater, but I also want it to do
something else useful with the power in, other than just heating an electrical element.
Look on ebay for old servers, and then look up their cpubenchmark.net
scores. It's a tradeoff between price and performance. Older servers are typically more power hungry as a rule of thumb, and cheap, but not so fast.
As far as performance goes, I'd probably be looking at the Xeon E5 and
(rarer) E7 series (from 2011 onwards). The older Xeons (Ennnn, Xnnnn or
just nnnn) are quite a lot slower (~2006-2010).
Also worth bearing in mind idle v peak power: eg I have a dual Xeon E5-2670
v1 mobo (2011): peak power 400W, idle power 100W. If you want a
'thermostat' you can make it drop back to idle, but you can't get below 100W without turning it off.
Old servers can be noisy, so you'll either want to have it somewhere that doesn't matter, or look at replacing the cooling with something quieter
(that typically won't fit in the standard server enclosure). Old
workstations often have server-grade processors in bulkier, less noisy
cases.
Worth looking for 'computer recyclers' near you, since a good part of the
price of old kit is shipping. I'd imagine there might be some good bargains
to be had nowadays, given the price of electricity has gone up so much companies will be clearing out power hungry kit.
Also what do you plan to do with it? Ethereum mining on GPUs used to be a
way to make some 'return' on your wasted power, but that's not a thing any more. Bitcoins are all custom ASICs these days. Not sure about other
crypto coins. Maybe some of the other distributed computing 'challenges' (proteins, cancer, SETI, etc) might be more amenable to CPU rather than GPU compute.
Theo
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