Adjadent to the article, there are some interesting builds with pulled parts from decommissioned servers in places where hardware is expensive or heavily taxed.
There's an entire parallel ecosystem around Chinese X79 and X99 boards [1](brands like Huananzhi and Machinist). They exist almost entirely to soak up scrap-tier Xeons and decommissioned server DDR3 and DDR4 ECC RAM that get pulled from datacenters for next to nothing. You see them online in Russian/Chinese/SE Asian online communities as budget builds, so nearly all the BIOS mods and documentation are in Russian or Chinese.
I think in NA we'd tend to write this hardware off as e-waste unless you're a homelabber (though I know Kimsufi still includes DDR3 builds in their catalogue). But in emerging markets, people have been squeezing real utility out of discarded enterprise silicon for a long time out of pure economic necessity. I've been tempted to do my own build but I already seek to have collected an overwhelmingly unnecessary amount of 2012-era workstations that I'm not sure my partner would appreciate an addition to.
EU is big and prices vary. (Transfer capacity is limited)
Afaik electricity is around 7c/kWh in China. I got 8c/kWh 2y contract a couple weeks ago here in Finland. Though have to add 4c/kWh for transfer to that (no clue if the Chinese prices I could find include that). Commercial prices are less then that (no VAT and possibly lower power tax bracket. The 8c includes all taxes/fees)
Regardless if the market allows consumers access to negative solar prices or not, consumers can attach solar panels to their servers (independent of the grid), so the LLM is there when the sun is shining.
[−]colechristensen · 2026-10-11 Sun 09:00 UTC ·
link
There are significant performance/energy ratio problems with older hardware, particularly with the rise of ARM.
Until about 6 years ago I also mostly used ex-server "ewaste" hardware, because it's always been cheaper, except for electricity use which I wasn't paying for myself. My desktop in ~2015 was built from 2006-era hardware, with 32GB of ECC DDR2, which felt like a lot at the time.
My "6 years ago" build was with more typical current-gen consumer-grade hardware, because at that point I was on the hook for the electricity bill. I haven't thought about what my next build will look like because it's still going strong (aside from a flakey DIMM... so my next system will have ECC).
The E5-2670v1 was goated for this back in 2016-2017. You could get them for like 25-50 bucks. I still have one of the supermicro boards I got from work in hardware decommissioning and one of the chinese franken-boards with a modded bios.
Typing this from an Asus X99 WS 3.1 with a E5-2696v4 . I got 256GB of RAM, sees only 128GB but I am sure with some overvoltage and lowering the ram speed it could see all 256GB.
if anybody got a tip, i'd be more than glad to listen, please.
There's an entire parallel ecosystem around Chinese X79 and X99 boards [1](brands like Huananzhi and Machinist). They exist almost entirely to soak up scrap-tier Xeons and decommissioned server DDR3 and DDR4 ECC RAM that get pulled from datacenters for next to nothing. You see them online in Russian/Chinese/SE Asian online communities as budget builds, so nearly all the BIOS mods and documentation are in Russian or Chinese.
I think in NA we'd tend to write this hardware off as e-waste unless you're a homelabber (though I know Kimsufi still includes DDR3 builds in their catalogue). But in emerging markets, people have been squeezing real utility out of discarded enterprise silicon for a long time out of pure economic necessity. I've been tempted to do my own build but I already seek to have collected an overwhelmingly unnecessary amount of 2012-era workstations that I'm not sure my partner would appreciate an addition to.
[1] https://post.m.smzdm.com/talk/p/am9d3zv4/
Afaik electricity is around 7c/kWh in China. I got 8c/kWh 2y contract a couple weeks ago here in Finland. Though have to add 4c/kWh for transfer to that (no clue if the Chinese prices I could find include that). Commercial prices are less then that (no VAT and possibly lower power tax bracket. The 8c includes all taxes/fees)
Which is why I suspect most nominal "data centers" are fronts for crypto mining, an activity that seeks out the cheapest energy.
EU average is just under 29c/kWh (non-contract price) [0]
In the UK I got 27.5c/kWh (+ 58c/day fixed charge) on an 18-month contract a month ago
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
My "6 years ago" build was with more typical current-gen consumer-grade hardware, because at that point I was on the hook for the electricity bill. I haven't thought about what my next build will look like because it's still going strong (aside from a flakey DIMM... so my next system will have ECC).
if anybody got a tip, i'd be more than glad to listen, please.