Ebay started recommending these to me with the approach of black friday. I've seen them pop up now and then but when I was browsing I was into higher ram/threaded systems. Now that I'm noticing how good the prices are for the performance/footprint. They may not be Mac Minis but these are relatively small mini towers @ 14x17x7 (in), and you could stack them if you made a collection. Seem like pretty cost effective crunching hardware. Here is the t1600 flyer http://site.pc-wholesale.com/manuals...sion-T1600.pdf
For those unfamiliar with the e3-12xx xeon line here's the gist: The e3-12xx are all single CPU. the E3-12xx comes in a "non-version" (i'll call v1 in here), v2, and v3. Think of v2 and v3 as the upgrades they get from Intel's "tick and tock." the original, dubbed v1, is a 32nm Sandy Bridge family xeon, the v2 is a die shrink to 22nm and v3 is the Haswell which is NOT the same socket as v1, and v2. the v3 being a haswell is socket 1150, rather than 1155 of the previous. Okay, the last digit will usually be a 0 or 5. The models ending in 5 will have integrated graphics, these are p3000, p4000, and p4600 following their "v1", v2 and v3 models respectively. These are as far as I can tell, and benchmarks show, the same as their HD3000, HD4000, HD4600 counterparts found on consumer level i5-3570k, i7-2600k desktop models. This part could use some feedback or more research; the hd3000 is only OpenCL 1.1 capable, and the hd4000+ are OpenCL 1.2 making the former null in BOINC production. Basically all the refurbed/offlease t1600 with e3-12x5 on ebay are "v1" so they'll have p3000 / hd3000 on die video which no BOINC project currently uses that I know of. Lastly one thing that makes research a lot easier is the e3-1230 is the first model to have hyperthreading. All model numbers preceding will have 4 cores and no HT. All models higher and including the -1230 have 4 cores and 8 threads. The e3-1235 is the first model with HT and graphics but is rather rare, the e3-1245 is a good choice.
The ebay auctions are often listed with a lower end workstation graphics card such as a quadro 600, v4800, which can crunch BOINC projects (the firepro v4800 being the best). Theres quite a few systems currently well under $100 bids for anyone thats interested in these and doing some bid sniping.
http://stores.ebay.com/mergtechlaptopsandmore/ These guys post a lot of hardware in the area mentioned above and start bids at 9.99, seems like things can go for under a 100.
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Originally Posted by FourOh
