On Sat, Apr 13, 2024 at 3:58 AM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Given the FX-6300 has a higher clocks speed, 3.8GHz versus 3.2GHz for > the Phenom, I'd think the FX would be a upgrade, quite a good one at > that. More L2 cache too. Both are 6 cores according to what I found. > Anyone know something I don't that would make switching to the FX-6300 a > bad idea?
The most obvious issue is that you're putting money into a very obsolete system. Obviously hardware of this generation is fairly cheap, but it isn't actually the best bang for the buck, ESPECIALLY when you factor in power use. Like most AMD chips of that generation (well, most chips in general when you get that old), that CPU uses quite a bit of power at idle, and so that chip which might cost you $35 even at retail might cost you double that amount per year just in electricity. If your goal is to go cheap you also need to consider alternatives. You can get used hardware from various places, and most of it is 3-5 years old. Even commodity hardware of that age is far more powerful than a 15 year old CPU socket and often it starts at $100 or so - and that is for a complete system. Often you can get stuff that is ex-corporate that has a fair bit of RAM as well, since a lot of companies need to deal with compatibility with office productivity software that might be a little RAM hungry. RAM isn't cheap these days, and they practically give it away when they dispose of old hardware. The biggest issue you're going to have with NAS is finding something with the desired number of drive bays, as a lot of used desktop hardware is SFF (but also super-low-power, which is something companies consider in their purchasing decisions when picking something they're going to be buying thousands of). Right now most of my storage is on Ceph on SFF PCs. I do want to try to get future expansion onto NVMe but even used systems that support much of that are kinda expensive still (mostly servers since desktop CPUs have so few PCIe lanes, and switches aren't that common). One of my constraints using Ceph though is I need a lot of RAM, which is part of why I'm going the SFF route - for $100 you can get one with 32GB of RAM and 2-3 SATA ports, plus USB3 and an unused 4-16x PCIe slot. That is a lot of RAM/IO compared to most options at that price point (ARM in particular tends to lack both - not that it doesn't support it, but rather nobody makes cheap ARM hardware with PCIe+DIMM slots). -- Rich
