Hence the hobbyist. As a professional engineer I mostly care if the investment into expensive hardware (and developing/adapting a software stack) is worth the gains. And I can totally see that adding a $2k card to a bunch of $5k servers can be cheaper than throwing more servers at a problem (especially after saving on power, rack space and cooling).
But in that context I'd only consider a used $350 card for dev/eval work. I don't want to tell the customer that his infrastructure was down for a few days because I convinced him to cheap out on a NIC.
> But in that context I'd only consider a used $350 card for dev/eval work. I don't want to tell the customer that his infrastructure was down for a few days because I convinced him to cheap out on a NIC.
I would argue that it strongly depends on the price differential and how resilient your system is. If your system is properly failure tolerant, and you can buy twice as much hardware for the same price by accepting a 20% failure rate (say), then it would be strongly advantageous to buy all used hardware.
