Comments on: Buying Old PCs

By: etbe

etbe — Wed, 07 May 2008 10:06:12 +0000

daveg: Thanks for the reference, I just won a couple of P3 systems on dola. I spent $18 on the auction and shipping is $52. $70 for two Compaq machines seems like a good deal. Of course I have to wait and see if they work…

By: daveg

daveg — Fri, 02 May 2008 08:47:14 +0000

Dola.com.au (an auction site that sells government seconds) has a bunch of PIII desktops at the moment for sale. Here’s a lot of 11 which seems to be IBM, HP, Compaq, Dell and erm, Ipex… http://www.dola.com.au/onlineauction/Auction/APViewItem.asp?ID=152588

I guess if you kept an eye out there on the site there’d be more.

By: etbe

etbe — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 22:33:32 +0000

Marcin: The P4 was simply bad by design. The Intel marketting people were pushing clock-speed so they produced CPUs that ran at a higher clock rate without regard to performance. The P3 core apparently does 1.5* as many instructions per clock cycle as a P4 core on average, so scaling up the P3 core with hyper-threading (as is the rumoured origin of the Core series) was obviously the right way to go.

Albert: Yes, it is an assembly-line process. Red Hat’s “Kickstart” thing is good for this, it’s a pity that we don’t have something similar for Debian.

By: Albert Lash

Albert Lash — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:05:00 +0000

Hi Russell - I hear you, building one computer can be fun, building two interesting, any more and its time for an assembly line! :-)

By: Marcin Trybus

Marcin Trybus — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:06:56 +0000

I didn’t say it’s impossible. You may got lucky to have an energy efficient mainboard. Chipset plays a huge role in power consumption, that’s why Core 2 on P35 still uses more power then Athlon X2 on AMD 790, even though it has lower TDP.

One way or the other, P4 is as ad-hoc market-filler released by Intel because of AMD’s momentary advantage in desktop processors performance. Intel took one step forward and two (if not five) steps back. The much later Core processors were based on a Mobile P3 architecture, rather then P4 and smash its predecessor on every field.

By: Daniel de Kok

Daniel de Kok — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:09:38 +0000

@marcin: I used a reliable appliance energy meter. But it’s probably not representative for the average P4 machine ;).

By: etbe

etbe — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 01:03:20 +0000

Marcin: Thanks for the Toms Hardware link, that’s interesting stuff. While solar power might not work too well where you are, wind power might be an option.

http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/D201GLY/index.htm
Albert: The d201gly looks like a nice board (link above). But if I used it then I would have to get back into the PC assembling business which is something I don’t desire.

Daniel: I have not yet tested machines with a tickless kernel. My document on power use is idling on an older kernel, so I’ll have to do a bunch of new tests when the tickless kernel becomes common. I expect that the new test results will still show P3 machines taking less than half the power of P4 machines.

Albert: Thanks for the reference for US readers. For me it seems unlikely that it would be possible to do business with them given the delay and expense of international shipping.

By: Albert Lash

Albert Lash — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:00:07 +0000

Check into centrix-intl.com - they often have old, cleaned up hardware for cheap. I’ve bought a lot of stuff from them and have been quite satisfied. Unfortunately they don’t seem to have any P3s right now.

By: Marcin Trybus

Marcin Trybus — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:36:45 +0000

@Daniel:
Desktop P4 1.5Ghz is the slowest of them all, so the lower power consumption is understandable. Your processor has a TDP of 55 or 58 Watts (depending on voltage) which is considerably more then the fastest P3 1.4GHz with a TDP of 32 Watts. [2] The huge gap is hardly justifiable. Because of the numbers I seriosly doubt the total demand under full load of 80 Watts.

The P4 “Willamette” (180 nm) you have is actually technologically inferior in almost every way to the final P3 “Tualatin” (130 nm) line. The 130 nm P4 models were far better, as for the same TDP as your model they reach 2,2GHz.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_4_microprocessors#.22Willamette.22_.28180_nm.29
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_III_microprocessors#.22Tualatin.22_.28130_nm.29

By: Daniel de Kok

Daniel de Kok — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:34:21 +0000

Actually, not all P4’s are that bad. Previously, I used a Dell OptiPlex GX240 machine as my home server (1.5GHz P4). With p4-clockmod, cpufreq, and a tickless kernel, the machine used ~38W idle, up to ~80W (kernel build). Since the machine was idle most of the day it was usually using less than 40W. I suppose things get worse very fast >1.5GHz.

Fortunately in The Netherlands there is a company (NowThatsIT) that sells such machines for less than 100 Euro.