Kadin2048's Journal: The $300 Workstation, Part 1

A few days ago, I posted a comment in response to someone else claiming that they had just bought a dual-Xeon HP rackmount server for about $300. In the comment I was rather skeptical of the pricing -- the phrase "one for each foot" was used, right after the words "I'd buy," and preceding "if they cost that much." I thought it was a pretty safe bet.

But oh, the tech world moves quickly. Apparently the dot-bombers had a lot of old gear to move quickly when their investors decided to move their retirement money into safer avenues, and it went for cheap. One of the many companies which arose to deal with this glut of liquidation, as well as the continuous flow of corporate surplus, was RetroBox.

I can't say I know very much about the company. I had never heard of them until they were mentioned in a response to my post, and I did a little Googling and apparently they're growing quickly, and seemed to be loved by all. Almost all, anyway. They do have a small but significant caveat on their website: "Final pricing will be at the full and total discretion of RetroBox.com." Essentially they're reserving the right to change the price of what you're buying, after you place the order. Now I'll grant that I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't fly in court. Something about me buying a particular good at a particular price and all that. I'll say for the record though, despite this disclaimer, I didn't have any problems working with them, and in fact found their employees to be universally helpful.

Moving on. So I was definitely eating some crow for my disbelieving comment about server prices -- they really are dirt cheap these days. You want a 1GHz Xeon in a 1U rackmount? Sure -- 150 bucks. 800MHz Dell Poweredge? $104. Not bad; and this is from a fairly legitimate establishment, not some random-ass person on eBay.

I couldn't resist. (Have you ever seen the "Go broke saving money" tagline on Dealtime? That's me.) I toyed for a while about buying a 1RU pizzabox for a while, and although there's nothing cooler in my mind than neatly rackmounted gear, the downside to them is that they require a rack. Which I don't have. Which I'd have to build. Equipment racks aren't the most challenging carpentry project in the world -- any idiot with a table saw and a power drill/driver can build one in an afternoon out of MDF and some predrilled rails from Sweetwater -- but the resulting box is HEAVY. Even commercial steel units are pretty hard to move around if any lifting is involved, at least for one person. And knockdown aluminum units are very pricey.

And did I mention I don't really have any legitimate use for a rackmount server? Sure, it'd be cool, and who knows what sort of cool stuff I might be able to come up with if I had the hardware sitting around, begging to be used. But in the end, practicality won out. Also, a rackmount box takes a lot of floorspace; they're optimized for density and not area, and in my house it's area that counts. (Yes I know I could have mounted it vertically.)

So what'd I do? I bought a desktop instead.

It's been something that I've been meaning to do for a while. I like the concept of Linux, but I've never really given it a fair shot versus my Mac. While my Mac cost $1600 when it was new and is still worth a few hundred bucks now (if the people at everymac.com are to be trusted), the most expensive PC I've ever bought was a $90 P133 clunker from the Pratt & Whitney industrial surplus store (check it out if you're ever in East Hartford, CT). Linux had always been a bit of a letdown in the experience department.

Now that's going to change. I can't afford a new Mac, much as I'd like to, but I could afford what would have been a smokin' sweet Intel workstation from not too many years ago. An HP xw5000, 3.2GHz P4, 512MB, 60GB; total cost with shipping: $293.

Although the xw5000 isn't really what I'd call a "workstation" in the traditional sense -- it's not RISC, for one -- it is a very nice PC. Or rather, it's what any self-respecting desktop computer ought to be. Big case, good power supply, lots of bays and empty slots, well-supported chipset and components, easily upgradable, excellent technical documentation. It was, except for the choice of processor, basically the sort of computer that I would build from components for myself, already prebuilt. And did I mention it was under $300?