inexpensive computer source

Stephen Hawkins
Stephen Hawkins
Joined: 11 Mar 15
Posts: 70
Credit: 86,164,780
RAC: 139,054
Topic 231453

For all you crunchers that live not too far from a University do a search and see if they have regular surplus sales.  I live within a reasonable once a month or so driving distance from Iowa State University.  They have a regular surplus sale.  I have purchased in ones and twos over time 6 Dell Desk top computers.  They are all Intel i7’s.   About 3/4 of them had 16GB of memory. I paid $50 each for them.  I added some memory to bring them all up to 16GB.  I removed the HD and installed a 240GB SSD.  Since einstein@home is pretty much all they run they do well with this setup.   I installed Linux then boinc and einstein@home.   This gave me a lot of hardware for einstein@home without spending a fortune.

I live out in the sticks in a sea of corn and soybean fields.  The wonderful small coop telephone company has run fiber to my house.  I installed a low end commercial grade gigabit router / firewall and three 8 port gigabit switches and I am off and running.  That gave me enough ports for the einstein@home computers plus all my and my wifes computers.  

Stephen Hawkins

73 49 111 01001001

mikey
mikey
Joined: 22 Jan 05
Posts: 12,568
Credit: 1,838,938,974
RAC: 20,377

Stephen Hawkins wrote: For

Stephen Hawkins wrote:

For all you crunchers that live not too far from a University do a search and see if they have regular surplus sales.  I live within a reasonable once a month or so driving distance from Iowa State University.  They have a regular surplus sale.  I have purchased in ones and twos over time 6 Dell Desk top computers.  They are all Intel i7’s.   About 3/4 of them had 16GB of memory. I paid $50 each for them.  I added some memory to bring them all up to 16GB.  I removed the HD and installed a 240GB SSD.  Since einstein@home is pretty much all they run they do well with this setup.   I installed Linux then boinc and einstein@home.   This gave me a lot of hardware for einstein@home without spending a fortune.

I live out in the sticks in a sea of corn and soybean fields.  The wonderful small coop telephone company has run fiber to my house.  I installed a low end commercial grade gigabit router / firewall and three 8 port gigabit switches and I am off and running.  That gave me enough ports for the einstein@home computers plus all my and my wifes computers. 

Great idea thanks!!

Filipe
Filipe
Joined: 10 Mar 05
Posts: 185
Credit: 392,221,362
RAC: 203,018

Stephen Hawkins wrote: For

Stephen Hawkins wrote:

For all you crunchers that live not too far from a University do a search and see if they have regular surplus sales.  I live within a reasonable once a month or so driving distance from Iowa State University.  They have a regular surplus sale.  I have purchased in ones and twos over time 6 Dell Desk top computers.  They are all Intel i7’s.   About 3/4 of them had 16GB of memory. I paid $50 each for them.  I added some memory to bring them all up to 16GB.  I removed the HD and installed a 240GB SSD.  Since einstein@home is pretty much all they run they do well with this setup.   I installed Linux then boinc and einstein@home.   This gave me a lot of hardware for einstein@home without spending a fortune.

I live out in the sticks in a sea of corn and soybean fields.  The wonderful small coop telephone company has run fiber to my house.  I installed a low end commercial grade gigabit router / firewall and three 8 port gigabit switches and I am off and running.  That gave me enough ports for the einstein@home computers plus all my and my wifes computers.  

Nice work! Now if you could add a small used GPU to each one of your rigs (1060?1650?1660?) you could run the O3AS search and the BRP7 search too.

 

 

Tom M
Tom M
Joined: 2 Feb 06
Posts: 6,285
Credit: 9,030,939,174
RAC: 12,666,634

Hurray!

Hurray!

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