Just musing. A lot here seem focused on getting a Big expensive Plotter (BeP) maxed out to get 50 plots a day. Would it not be a lot more robust to get a Redundant array of inexpensive Plotters (RaiP) to churn out the same amount of plots more reliable and with an added resilience and maintenance bonus?
e.g. 6 of these should probably be the same price as one big 5950x (use the 1600AF if you prefer an AMD build)
Well, the smart money is on older decommissioned servers. Especially since Intel holds an advantage on plot speed. Even older Intel generations perform well on plotting, if you give them enough disk speed!
Also
I personally feel that 16c/32t is kinda the limit of what you should attempt to do on a single machine. It gets quite complex with more cores than that… 24, 32, 64 cores… balancing all that I/O is tough.
They are great for if you like to tinker with old computers and have a cool space to house them far away from you living quarters. That said I think most novices would underestimate the babysitting these machines usually require and the many gotchas that can go into setting them up and maintaining them.
These machines are ofc not as repurposable as your typical gaming/workstation build should you get tired of chia
Not really though, a 5950X build isn’t going to set you back 2900$
I do think that it might be interesting if you can find some good deals on second hand gaming systems or something like that.
But six PC’s also take up a lot more space. If you have cases that can fit many hdd’s, this could be a pretty big cost saving instead of getting JOBS and such.
I’ve also been reluctant to venture into servers, just because I’m so unfamiliar with the hardware and possible software/driver issues
Agree on old Xeon servers being good. You can pick up a server with dual E5-2690v1s and 64gb of memory for $600 shipped. Then just add 2 x 2TB SSDs and you have a perfectly balanced plotter doing 30-40 plots per day. Total cost would be roughly ~$1k. It is power hungry and uses ~300w constantly, makes a lot of heat, and is loud, but it gets the job done.