Are CHEAP x79 Servers/Workstations Good In 2024?

The first 500 people to use my link can get a one-month free trial to Skillshare! skl.sh/hardwarehaven11231
Things I used in this video (Some Affiliate Links):
► Motherboard - www.aliexpress.us/item/325680...
► CPU Cooler - www.aliexpress.us/item/325680...
► Teamgroup SSD - amzn.to/3smA7l6
► 2.5Gb PCIe NIC - amzn.to/3QgNZFA
► IcyDock Adapter - amzn.to/45WBcOf
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Music (in order):
"Hardware Haven Theme" -Me ( • Hardware Haven Theme M... )
"Sunshower" - LATASHÁ( / best-music-pro.. )
"VULF JAMS" - GARRISON ( / garrison-brown )
"If You Want To" - Me
"CRENSHAW VIBES" - GARRISON
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Gear I Use: (affiliate links)
Recording Gear
► Camera - LUMIX G7 amzn.to/3LmfGdk
► SD Cards - SanDisk Extreme PRO amzn.to/3BPXrd1
► Capture Card - EVGA XR1 amzn.to/3Bn8qt7
► Studio Lights amzn.to/3BnYrUd
► Microphone - Shure SM7b amzn.to/3BP0TEB
► Interface - Presonus Quantum amzn.to/3QVeX3T
► Teleprompter amzn.to/3BxcN50
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:44 Skillshare (sponsor)
1:49 Why Am I Making This Video?
3:50 The Parts/Specs
5:47 Booting it up
6:20 Case, Power Supply, etc
9:00 Everything looking good, but LOUD
9:28 Power draw running Proxmox
10:10 Performance running Proxmox, VMs, Containers
11:18 Improving power draw by removing GPU
12:20 Workstation performance (Adobe Premiere, Cinebench)
14:27 How much did I spend?
15:40 Thoughts on x79 builds

[@acewintersofficial]

You should look into the x99 side of this idea. I recently got a dual x99 system running, been using it for game hosting services and for sub 350$ it's crazy what you get.

[@HardwareHaven]

Yep. Stay tuned for roughly mid-November lol

[@Adam130694]

X99 F8D Plus with 6x PCIe slots/3x M.2 slots and build-in 2x2.5Gbit LAN. With cheap 2697v3 you have 28c/56t system and LOTS of expandability… edit: or 2650Lv3 for low energy system

[@joey_f4ke238]

@@Adam130694 The L cpus only limit power under load, but they aren´t any more efficient than regular ones so you would just be limiting your max performance for virtually no reason. For power efficiency i´d go for v4 xeons. I do notice the best change there and those are running pretty cheap on ali these days

[@3of12]

Woah I'd like to see what you got for that price.

[@tfkoincognito]

I did the same with a dual xeon workstation. Dual 12 core cpus and 128gbs of ram. I did pay more than that but the cheapest I could find. Would like to upgrade it eventually. The ipc and clocks are fine Would like more cores though. What are you hosting?

[@Beny10]

I really love the sound of the pc sartup with the fan on each video, I don't know, the sound is so familiar and brings comfort of times spent using hardware

[@itisliamhfjone22]

so real :sob:

[@Flargenyargen]

A few months ago, I was absolutely blown away at the low prices on some business-aged Xeon E5-2695 v3 workstations. Ended up buying a dual CPU machine with 256 GB RAM. Replaced the stock CPU coolers and this thing has been off to the races. Troubleshooting old hardware sucks, but with performance this strong, it's worth it. The power cost is another story, though. Very cool video, though. I love exploring this hardware that's not often seen outside of business uses.

[@MezeiEugen]

How bad is the power consumption?

[@bricefleckenstein9666]

@@MezeiEugen v3 cpu like he's talking about I think is ballpark 150 watts for JUST that CPU at full load. They do power conserve when lightly loaded, but not as well as more recent stuff. That's also the high end of those CPUs though - some of the lower end can get down to more like 60 watts at full load.

[@toseltreps1101]

Not bad at all. Performance per Watt isn't up there with the newest stuff but full load rarely occurs in actual daily use. Idle power draw is very reasonable for a server platform. @@MezeiEugen

[@llothar68]

@@bricefleckenstein9666 The problem is that when you have dual sockets you get almost no power savings. AFAIK this is still a problem nobody worked on.

[@bricefleckenstein9666]

@@llothar68 The power savings is noticeably more than you seem to think. I DID mention "not as well as more modern stuff". If you're expecting 10 watts at idle, you need more recent gear - 50 on the other hand even for a pair of the higher-end CPUs that will soak 120watts EACH at high loads is not unreasonable - and a LOT of the power consumption is the FANS at that point, and the Hard Drives.

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

If I am going to build budget build a server for file storage, I think it's better to go for stronger cores than many cores because transfer speeds are often single threaded.

[@HardwareHaven]

Yeah that makes sense!

[@CheapSushi]

totally agree; I love X79 and X99 era and I have a collection of boards & CPUs. But for a file server/NAS, there are so many cheap boards and cpus that are more efficient and have high enough IPC out there in the used US market already. Even past Skylake and 1st/2nd gen Ryzen/Threadripper.

[@StringerNews1]

That "transfer speeds are often single threaded" claim earns an atomic faceplam. What a load of dernsely-packed hogwash! It's word salad, but implies things that absolutely aren't true. First of all the speed of light (electricity) is a constant. If you meant "data transfer rate", that's a hardware function, not a CPU function. For the last quarter century, even the cheapest disks have been DMA. In this age of gigahertz processors, show me any I/O operation that's CPU-bound! Speaking of CPU, the implication that using multiple CPU cores requires multithreading is also BS.

[@Josh-cw8by]

@@StringerNews1 What a nonsensical rant. Everyone, including yourself, knows exactly what he meant. You need to tone down the intellectual complex.

[@StringerNews1]

@@Josh-cw8by and why should I care about your rant? No, nonsense is by definition, not sensible. So if you don't know what you're talking about, don't crap on me--I'm not the liar here.

[@undertone2472]

Love old X79/X99 content. Crazy how cheap you can go. I rock a E5-2683 v4 for my server and it's awesome. Just upgraded to 128GB ECC for dirt cheap. Haswell/Broadwell also have AVX2, so that's a nice add.

[@pascalfust1035]

Same here. I am running a budget workstation on a X79 basis, including dual CPU (currently two 8 core Xeons) and 128GB RAM on quad-channel. Not the fastest beast, but powerful as a bull

[@ProcessedDigitally]

nice. i am about to complete a dual 2697 v2 with 128GB 1866 system for video rendering. @@pascalfust1035

[@bricefleckenstein9666]

If you want serious storage space for less, you need to look back one more generation. Something like the Supermicro 6047 *72 drive* hot swap server - which can be found for $1500 without trying hard. The next-gen 6048 has some advantages if you want processing WITH your file storage, but costs significantly more. E5-2630L v2 are not all that big of power hogs, even by current standards, though the non-L of that generation get kinda hungry.

[@Kevin-vh6nn]

Does the 2697 v3 or v4 support AVX2?

[@truckerallikatuk]

Those old Xeons are solid chips. Their only downside is power draw really. My current NAS runs a pair of 2620v2 chips and is plenty fast enough with 64gig of memory. For a proper server like your demo setup, a goodly number of cores is important, especially with ZFS as parity calculations are multi-threaded, and you're also using them for the VMs as well as the base OS.

[@briccimn]

Yep. Those tasks need number-crunching CPUs. Do you remember those ol' days of fever-hot PCs with dual CPU architecture and countless memory slots? 🙂 Jeez the fans were...

[@JamesMyatt1]

Lack of modern instruction sets is also a big issue

[@ewasteredux]

I have a rather unique perspective on why I built an x79 (socket 2011) system. For me, I managed to start with a WHOLE BUNCH of FREE RAM. To be exact, I was gifted 384GB of ECC DDR3 RAM. So for me, it was a no brainer that x79 was the way to go. Otherwise, as you stated, it would not have been nearly as worthwhile. Even with the single core restrictions you noted, I managed to find a couple of E5-2690's (8 core 16 thread at 2.9GHz turbo to 3.5GHz) and an old barebones Dell Precision T5600 and it virtualizes great. If you stick with a T3600 (single socket) system, you can seriously find some really great deals. I found one of these for, no kidding, $39 (+$19 shipping) basically complete with no hard drives. So if you have the budget for electricity, I think it is worth the price. These are solid systems.

[@evancourtney7746]

Hmm... might be time to think about replacing my old Precision T3500 running a X5675, it's been a great computer but I'd really like a UEFI machine, and to keep my EEC RAM.

[@nathan_tasker]

Fantastic video as always, keep up the excellent work. Looking forward to seeing the x99 build.

[@JaikrishnaAdithya]

Great video!!! Your presentation is getting better and better so keep it up!!

[@husamrabie8816]

So creative as usual.. tnx a lot 4 sharing .. can't wait to see u next time

[@DynMads]

Pretty good video. Shame about the unfortunate purchases, but nice saves all around given the situation.

[@Airelon]

I've been using Sandy/Ivy Bridge Xeon servers for the past 3 years for my gaming community. One game super benefits from high core counts and is a ram hog so dual Xeon 2670's was the cheapest option out there with 128gb of ram and still running strong. My hardware is nothing I could recommend for a beginning, tinkering, or apartment dweller. It's not for the faint of heart. I wish there was a video like this one back when I got the idea to buy used servers instead of renting servers. Your experience parallels my experience. Now that my electric company charges a "Time of day" rate and increased rates overall I'm finding myself close to shutting down servers. I can't recommend my solution to people wanting to do public game servers at home anymore. Its still fun to work with and I'm not trying to make money it. Great video, liked and subscribed.

[@briccimn]

NIIIICE!!!! I love this kind of tinkering! I started doing this stuff most likely before you were born... 😀

[@AG-jj3lx]

Fun video! I was building gaming systems back in 2016 with the 1680v2 CPU's pulled from MACS on X79 boards. Great Over clockers and gaming setups.

[@ethanmoss3412]

Would be intresting to do a side by side with a similar spec'd new components and their powerdraw, would be a intresting graph to show how long it takes for the "cheap" system to become the more expensive option.

[@ElNeroDiablo]

This was an interesting first vid for YT to show me, reminds me to get around to taking the pair of X99/i7-5820K systems (both with 64GB (8x8GB) DDR4-2400) I got at home and building them for like a NAS rig and a game server rig. Heck, one of them used to be my main gaming rig with a pair of 980Ti's under EKWB TitanX waterblocks, so I just need some fresh tubing (maybe a new X99 block for the second i7-5820K as that was under an AIO) and I can get them both operational and kept nice and cool all the time.

[@TheHangarHobbit]

I've built 5 so far of the "AliExpress Special" kits and not had a single issue, I'd recommend one of those over mixing/matching as you can be assured all of it works together. Last one was a 2650V2 with board, 16GB of RAM, and nice RGB cooler for $66 shipped. Added another 8GB of RAM, RX580, 1TB NVME and a nice $40 case with 3 RGB fans and the grandson's bestie had a PC that could play his Ark and GTA V above 60FPS for less than $350, can't beat that.

[@AvisTechno]

Nice video, i hope i get this quality in the futur!

[@jburnash]

This was a lot of fun, and was useful in showing how processor (and the tech that surrounds it) has progressed over a decade. Nicely done - and I'm glad I' went for the i5-6500 myself instead of the "cheaper" Xeon :D

[@kolbyadams9979]

Awesome video! I would love a video of you making VMs in unraid cause I have been experimenting it but have been having small strange problems like screen tearing and Linux mint not using my GPU when I try to install drivers. I am sure your ability to make things simple would help me and a lot of people.

[@jimmyscott5144]

You know in the front part of that case those key sharp cut outs are for slide tabs from a metal tray add on for more hdds. I have only had a few machines with that but I've seen them with 2-4 bay expandable space.

[@issaclin7445]

x99 is also a solid platform. I have a hand-me-down 6800k rig that I'm planning to get a xeon upgrade. Might be a great video idea in the future!

[@Zimmerpflanze88]

starting at intel 6000th series you need server specific mainboards for the xeons.

[@paulbirch7635]

I enjoy this kind of repurposing old hardware, but it has to make sense and be usable in the long run. I think you nailed it in the intro that this video started as a series of bad purchase decisions, as this video sort of exemplifies the curse of sunken costs when everything is tallied up. Great content none the less, and as a small time homelabber and tinkerer I really enjoy this kind of retrospective reviews to find out if a build would suit my applications. Keep it up! :D

[@FunkyHQYT]

great video as always!

[@OsX86H3AvY]

i bought an HP Z840 a few months ago along with 256GB of mem, a bunch of cheap SSD's and 10G networking...I think I'm all in like $700 or so but it runs everything I need it to and is just rock solid...i have an HP Z600 as well it was meant to replace i now use as a backup....5-8yr old xeons are just SOOO much fun to mess around with, especially with all those cores and threads!

[@ScottMosier12345]

I bought a Dell T3600 off eBay cheap, then bought RAM for it and the best Xeon processor it supported. Runs great as my VM host.

[@matthewhanson498]

I appreciate you sharing you mistakes, we all go through a learning process. its refreshing to see

[@10siWhiz]

During winter the wattage does not go to waste at least. My pcs cut my heater use. Power is never wasted its just converted.

[@vanloggins]

built out a E5-2670 V3 workstation a couple of months back with a HUANANZHI X99-QD4 Motherboard and cpu combo that I picked up off Aliexpress along with two 8GB DDR4 ECC ram sticks. combined with a cheap 1tb nvme gen 3 drive and a Sapphire Radeon RX-5600XT video card it makes for a very nice machine for gaming at 1080P, scoring just as well in every aspect as my current gaming machine that has a ryzen 5800X3D cpu, 32GB of ram, and a RTX 3070 8GB video card. gets a lot hotter, but with a good tower cooler with proper thermal compound application in a well ventilated case it never gets close to the high temperature range that would cause it to shut down.

[@realjoecast]

I'm currently using an HPGen8 with dual 8c/16t xeons. I was using ESXI but gen8 support is lacking. I have a Server22 license so i use that now. 16c/32t. 384gb ram, 22 1tb SFF 7200rpm SAS, 2 300GB 12000rpm SAS, 1 256gb Agility 2 (yeah old) SSD for the host OS. Works great. I have one 2950L v2 and i'm ordering another to upgrade to 20c/40t at lower TDP but lower clock speed. The clock speed does cause some performance issues when trying to do something like owncast. ESXI limiteded me though. havent tried with hyper-v yet. Drives where the expensive part. paid ~10-15$ each, the gen 8 with CPUs and 128gb of ram was about $250 and adding more memory about another 80$ If I had to do it again, I would've gotten a system that took 3.5 drives as larger capacities are cheaper in that format.

[@Trains-With-Shane]

I recently built both a new workstation/gaming machine and a server using the slightly newer X99 architecture Xeons. And so far both have been great. They also support that instruction set you were missing which limited your Adobe version. Also bumping up to DDR4 was an added bonus. Being a long time fan of Craft Computing as well as your channel I had seen the light early on with these retired enterprise CPU's with Chinese motherboards. My server idles around 110w but i've got 6x 3.5" spinning drives in there as well and haven't really messed with C-states in proxmox at all. It's honestly pretty good. with 64gb ram i'm able to run a 60tb ZFS pool and all my services in Docker under an Ubuntu based Cloud-Init image. And it'll transcode in Jellyfin without issue.

[@mrz80]

My x5690 is about to get a bit of a boost. A coworker who lives a lot closer to the bleeding edge than I do (he's using big Ryzens and Threadrippers) is cleaning out his "old hardware" and giving me an X99 mobo and a pile of DDR4 RAM. $15 to Amazon netted me a 12-core Xeon E5-2690v3. And a few months back one of my fellow network jockeys came across a server some faculty had put together with spare parts and petty cash that they were just throwing away, so he grabbed it and carried into the cubefarm going "Who wants a server?!?!" Dual cpu Xeon, 64GB RAM, dual RAID controllers, heck yea I want that! I do love working with a bunch of other computer nerds. :D

[@klote82]

Awesome channel bro, I own a PC repair business and I literally just launched that exact Compaq tower into my trashcan! I would like to save towers like that but aint got no room. I run this biz from my house and my wife says im a computer pack rat. Someone gave me their sons old gaming computer. Asus z97a (or something like that) motherboard and its a sick glass case with blue LED's and its using 32GB DDR3 and its a dam beast! I run so much off of that computer and keep it on 24/7. DDR3 can still be very useful!

[@kondirecs]

5 years ago I had the pleasure to be working on a HP Z-something with the Xeon cpu. I bet it was pretty much maxed out, cause 5 years later I still haven't experienced the same smoothness and flow in Adobe's programs ... even on the newest Macs.

[@LeoLijo]

Interesting video as always

[@JordanPlayz158]

Interesting, Crafty, will need to check it out, I use pterodactyl which is good but I'll see what Crafty has to offer

[@mp0011]

I am still on my HP z420. 64GB, e5 2667v2, NvME ssds... Works just great.

[@TheMrJRM1981]

This video got my sub. 😀👍🏼

[@chromerims]

Kudos for the informative content on x79 xeons in 2023😎

[@JayBriggs00]

Thanks to all these videos you’ve been posting, I’m buying a desktop mobo, ram, and cpu with these parts. asus prime Z270-P motherboard. - 15-7600K 3.8GHZ 4 cores 4 threads. - Nvidia geforce gtx 970 4gb VRAM. - 2 gskill ripjaw ddr4 RAM 3200MHZ 8gb. (16gb total) - Cooler master cpu cooler. All for $150. I’m going to salvage my old psu if I can to see if it’s any good, and reuse that case, and I just need to scoop up some drives down the line when I get more money, and maybe double my ram. Going to run my Minecraft, beammp, and fivem servers off of it! Thanks Hardware Haven!

[@ScottGrammer]

Excellent video! Very interesting.

[@sinnful0]

i have a old Lenovo c30 its a dual xeon 6 core 2.3ghz 64gb ddr3 1866 ecc i paid 230 off ebay over a year ago . love it does what i need to for casaos, jelly and my arr programs

[@techmaster170]

Nice video. I got a Lenovo P700 free from work when it was being tossed out due to it's age It has two E5-2620 v3s in it. 128GB of ECC DDR4 and I tossed in a 128GB PNY SSD with truenas scale installed. Two 8TB Ironwolf NAS drives. Using plex and pi hole on it.

[@Fishgod1216]

That's hell of a find. Nice job repurposing that beast!!!

[@techmaster170]

@@Fishgod1216 Thanks. SMB network share, pi hole, plex and now it's a pxe server using iventoy.

[@OShackHennessy]

That is really awesome it’s crazy what some people throw away

[@techmaster170]

@@Fishgod1216 Thanks! It's been running 24/7 for about half a year so far.

[@techmaster170]

@OShackHennessy Especially rich businesses. A few years ago one person asked for a 10,000 dollar pc and they just got them one. They hardly even used it.

[@Spoolingturbo6]

I like these budget videos. great work. Have you ever thought about a 2009/2010 MacPro ? They're super cheap now. and usually have 2x CPU's most people have upgraded to X5680 CPU's. have 4 Sata bays. 6 if you use the DVD bays. they make the perfect Proxmox Box. Dual Xeons, 128GB Ram, GPU Encode/Decode Hardware acceleration. For me I spent $250 for a beast of a system.!

[@masterhoshi]

Built one of these years ago and still have it. It is quite a nice machine and does run well. Multicore beat my (also old) 6700k overclocked to 4.5ghz skylake machine.

[@HeroRareheart]

Old Zeons are great. My server is a Dell R710 in my garage, I got it for free. Sure it's DDR3 and power hungry, but 8 cores and 72GB of RAM is nithing to scoff at. It runs my Jellyfin, Minecraft server, Satisfactory server, and Nextcloud with no issues.

[@milescarter7803]

Try P520 or P520c. Only 120 150 for a whole rig, and it's Skylake Xeon

[@riskin620]

Having to power cycle the capture card after doing all that troubleshooting is so typical. It's always the thing you didn't think to check. So frustrating. I feel your pain.

[@haydenc2742]

ooh, you so need to slap in a 4x NVME drive bay on that PCI slot and do a passthru! Very cool build but will get the stuff done..I love those ICY Dock 5.25" bays...just need to get you a few 2TB SSD's! Oh I found that assigning the VM's in PROXMOX on older hardware (I have an I7-3770), give it ALL the threads, so 24 for each machine...PROXMOX will autobalance them and unless you have a VM that is literally using all the cpu power (which is very rare) PROXMOX will balance very well and all the VM's will be snappy and much faster. Keep em coming!!!!

[@UnderLoK]

I've been running x58 and x79 since they came out and they are both still running. The x59 box just runs all my backups and syncing which is pretty good since the board has 2 x16 slots (Gen2 so 8gbs), but the x79 w/ a 2680 (these OC pretty well, 3.5ghz), 64gb of ram that runs 10 VMs, Plex w/ a 1070ti, and has all my storage. Both the x58 and x79 boards have tons of features because back then people had "workstations". The 58 has firewire, 6 sata 3, 2 sas, dual nics, x16x16x4 or x16x8x8x4, but tri-channel memory which is silly. The 79 has gen 3 x16x16x2x1 or x16x8x8x8x2x1 with 4 sata 6 and 2 sata 3, 2 esata 6, dual nics, bt, and USB 3.0. Yea the power sucks, but honestly I don't forsee my newer systems lasting this long and really don't see any reason to migrate. Granted, if it wasn't for Icydock I probably would have migrated by now... lol

[@OShackHennessy]

Lenovo ThinkStation P520 with Xeon W2145 and 96GB RAM. 1TB SSD cache and 3x 8TB HDDs for 16TB total using Unraid. I’ve been so happy with this setup after trying a few others. It’s been super stable and reliable had it 8 months so far. About $250 without storage, was $175 with Xeon W2135 cpu.

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

A lot of the xeons are cheap, the boards are often...too expensive though.

[@HardwareHaven]

Yep

[@mikem9536]

Yeah if you can get a board and case cheap, then it can work, but if you have to buy a motherboard, consider it a dead platform.

[@GewelReal]

Just get a Dell Precision as they are pennies rn

[@LtGen.Failure]

i'm still running a E5-2650LV2 with 128GB ECC on a Supermicro X9SRI-F as a TrueNAS Scale Server with Plex and an extra VM for some docker containers. Still satisfied. The onboard controllers handle 10 drives and i threw in a quadro p400 for transcoding in plex and a 10GB NIC. Sure.. it's not fast but with most of my machines connected through 1 and 2.5 gbit ethernet the server delivers either up to the networking limit or the drives limits, which ever comes first. For WS use i'd recommend an E5-1650V2 which is overclockable. I'm running one an a Huananzhi X79 Board.

[@prashanthb6521]

How is the realiability of these motherboards ? Dependable for 24/7 workloads ?

[@EngineerLewis]

I prefer to buy a DELL Precision workstations for around $200 max with the E5 CPUs ... and a good amount of memory. They work well for my work which includes 3D Modeling software. The DELL approach to no tools designs works well for me. Thanks for demonstrating what you can do with one of these X79 systems. 👍

[@lucasrem]

You need newer CPU's for Adobe etc, X99 is too old too.

[@Scarsuna]

@@lucasrem Not if you're OK with waiting double or triple the time for processing jobs on a budget.

[@blitzzmann]

big fan of your videos, keep up the good work. I think I found a broken link in your recording gear - ► Microphone - Shure SM7b

[@nectarinetangerineorange]

The linux implementation of zfs os preprogrammed tp use UP TO half of the system memory. However the arc is maintained by the kernel through the zfs module, and will auto resize the arc based on historical and current usage, recency, as well as systemcalls from the kernel. The arc_maximum can be set with a single command-line instruction if you want it raised or lowered. Also each distro has the ability to change this setting before shipping so some may be slightly different, but the default and the standard are for arc_maximum to equal half the size of ram

[@fanshaw]

Cheap server components and stacks of PCIE lanes are the reason to do this. PCIE gen 3 SFP/QSFP cards are cheap. Brand new PCIEx16 gen 4 cards with 4/8x NVME drive cards can be dropped into a gen 3 slot while protecting your investment. You can also do 8xSATA cards with sata SSD's but I suspect that's a dead-end tech. I recently moved my i7-3930k to a 10-core xeon which upgraded the PCIE bus from gen2 to gen3 on my asrock x79 mobo. Along with power draw, heat output is significant. Beware non-standard tier-1 hardware manufacturers' systems, because you will need a case with better airflow than your standard workstation build, especially if you want to stack HDDs or a QSFP server nic you thought was cheap...

[@johncnorris]

I'm doing something similar with a retired CT scanner workstation. I went with the 64 GB of DDR4 RAM and a Xeon E5-2696 v4 CPU. You do have to keep an eye on the costs of the hardware and the power it will use but if you don't run it 24/7 that can be contained. I want to have a Proxmox virtual environment to experiment with various OS and software configurations, The learning will be worth the relatively low cost of ownership IMO.

[@powerpower-rg7bk]

I would have gone with a C600/602/604 motherboard as you can get dual sockets and some offer up to 12 slots per socket. I did a build similar to this and went the server motherboard route mainly because I got a bunch of 16 GB registered ECC DDR3 memory for free. I had to run them at 1333 GT/s but I had 256 GB in the end using eight slots per CPU socket. The catch is that registered ECC may not function as expected on x79 boards. Also going with C600 series board is that some model will offer some 3 Gbit SAS ports off of the chipset so really good for building a NAS using inexpensive, high capacity SSDs. In addition, the board I chose came with two 10 GBaseT networking ports and IPMI remote management. I'll also say that NVMe booting is a very hit or miss feature on this generation of motherboards. This is the era when NVMe was first specified. The NVMe drives generally will still work, they're PCIe devices of course, but just the boot functionality which requires BIOS/firmware support. Speak of BIOS/firmware, some X79 boards permit simplistic overclocking of these via their base clock. The good boards have multiplier/divider bus settings so that a stable 133 Mhz base clock can be used instead of 100 Mhz. Most of the time you're not going to be able to handle a straight 33% overclock so reducing the CPU multiplier balances things out to a higher speed. Workstation and server boards tend to shy away from overclocking but they do generally permit making the single core boost clock apply to all cores simultaneously. With good cooling and tuning (high power limits helps a lot), it is possible to get these 12 core chips to operate at 3.5 Ghz across all their cores without issue. The lack of AVX2 does hinder things a bit as these chips only support AVX1. These AVX1 only chips were on the market for about three years before AVX2 became a mainline feature so it doesn't surprise me that some newer software is dropping support in favor of the far more common AVX2 extensions.

[@abdullahalmuhaimin734]

Low power, minecraft server and storage serve..... I am doing my research on that. Also your video is helping me to understand some parts about server 😊😊. I am not building my own personal server now, need more infirmation then I will think.

[@kurtmuroki8763]

Machinist $37 motherboard with quad channel memory. Works great. Also I got a dell t620 dual processor with 6 hard drives, memory, and dual 750watt power for $400...

[@jarthurs]

Here in the UK energy is stupid expensive at the moment. Paying £0.30/kWh means that a 150W server is going to chew through £1.08/day. I had a server running on an old Proliant DL360 (Gen 6) Dual Xeon server (2 x 8 core, 16 threads), great for virtualization but really bad for my energy budget. I'm now just running my mail server on a dual Atom 330 box which runs at 30W flat out. But I'm seriously looking at an IBM ThinkCenter USFF PC as an upgrade so I can run Home Assistant and some other home automation too.

[@ProcessedDigitally]

thats if you are running at full load all day. are you?

[@jarthurs]

@@ProcessedDigitallyat 100% utilization a fully loaded DL360 (G6) can use >400W which is why they come with 700W PSUs. 150W was a machine running an archive NAS and hosting a couple of low traffic websites and a mail server under ESXi. The G6 runs at 120W idle.

[@ProcessedDigitally]

thats a lot at ilde@@jarthurs

[@soniclab-cnc]

i have been using the E52690 v2 with 128 gigs of ecc on an Asrock rack ATX board as my proxmox server for several years. Really solid.

[@hipster2283]

I'm running E5 2690v4 machines, around $300 into a ThinkStation P710 for 28c/56t of Broadwell and 128gb of RAM, $150 into a Dell T5810 with one CPU and 64gb

[@jambatvee3803]

How’s your power bill?

[@hipster2283]

@@jambatvee3803 The P710 draws 95w from the wall with 6 disks and a few PCI-E cards. It's really not much worse than my AM4 build (R5 1600af). The T5810 draws about 65w from the wall with two Quadros in it, which is the same as my AM4 build with one RX570. I have little i5 4670 SFF H87 machines around that draw about 20-25w at idle, so considering the sheer core count, memory capacity, and number of PCI-E lanes, the Broadwell workstations are not bad at all

[@DigBipper188]

I love old X79 / C620 gear. You get a lot for your money, especially with the E5 and E7 2000 / 4000 series chips if you're after setting up a dual or quad socket workstation / server. My current virtualization server is a dual Xeon E5-2640 system with 96GB RAM... Consumes less power than the X58 systems I had prior even including the 8 disks it's running in two VDEVs.

[@mrz80]

My main linux box right now is an X58 with an x5690 and 48GB (tho for some reason the BIOS insists there's only 32 😞). I'm gonna push it shortly to an X99 with a E5-2690v3 and DDR4. CPU is a touch slower, but I expect overall performance to be better with more cores and quad channel DDR4 vs three channel DDR3.

[@Emboar57913]

I think a great option for high core count would be with Skylake X chips, the 12 core 7960x goes for about 100-150 right now and you can get a MB for around the same if not sub 100. They werent really the best at launch but 250 isnt a bad deal.

[@Coentjeeee]

I wanted to complain about the power but you was faster😅 but great video again

[@JayzBeerz]

I got a 2660V4 for $6.00 and a 2650V4 for $4.00. I love these budget chips for the X99 boards.

[@t0mn8r35]

Good review.

[@CodyShell]

i coworker of mine gave me his old server that he hasn't used in years. tunned out to be a supermicro board with dual Xeon L5640s and 100GB of ram! Beefy but ancient. Must have cost a fortune when new

[@goofystinkygoblin]

I used to have a different flavor of that specific compaq, I miss that computer

[@3D_foos]

i just build a Dell Precision Tower 7810 with 2x E5-2683v4 totaling 32 core 64 thread and 128G of ddr4 ram and a 1070 for video encoding. added 3ea HDD's SSD's and m.2 NVME for 3 ZFS pools with 1 additional NVME on a 4xm.2 to pcie adapter for truenas install. all in, minus the drives i was at $270. hard to beat this performance for that price.

[@Marc_Wolfe]

Some of the X79 era dual socket boards can be had pretty cheap. Like the X9DRH-7F from Supermicro, which has 6 x8 slots and 1 x16. All the x8s are open ended. Lots of expansion options. Mostly standard shape board. I have mine in a Dell T320 case. Currently running 3 GPUs, a USB 3 card, and an SB1040 sound card.

[@TryPr0x]

YAY! New video!

[@darnellreyes571]

well time for me to save up to build a servers :) thanks a lot

[@OsX86H3AvY]

holy crap im using that SAME case right now - my grandmother had a compaq 5000 something or other - thats too funny, i have an MSI B250M with an i7-7700 with 32G as a NAS with 5 drives in it....I had to buy the removable drive cage for the front of the inside off of ebay since hers didn't have it but the slots for it were there.....thats fantastic

[@benberkayozdemir]

I really enjoy whatching your videos even if i dont really get why should i have home server for myself. I want one but i really dont know what to do with it. Like what you do with those VMs? or ways to use home server effectively. Can you make a video on it for complete beginners?

[@aaronstern302]

that x99 set up is awesome specially with haswell cpus

[@haroldfong8758]

Apart from the power draw they are still pretty decent.

[@CheapSushi]

I'm huge on X79 and X99; I have a ton of different boards including Chinese ones. I'm still using 2 x ASUS dual CPU workstation boards X99 with E5-2690V4s for NAS & messing around with VMs and an single socket X99 workstation for my main editing rig (i7-6950X). I just don't think they're worth it anymore in 2023 in terms of used hardware especially if you're not interested in a lot of PCIe slots with lots of PCIe lanes. There's a ton of cheap used hardware out there way past Broadwell up to first and 2nd gen Ryzen/Threadripper; stuff from 5 years ago is cheap enough now. And often higher IPC less cores can beat out a ton of cores from an X79/X99 systems, even some i3's. The power efficiency is there too. Even X299 for Intel is more worth it because you get a huge range of HEDT chips. I'm guess I'm talking to US audiences. It might be way different for people in other countries. No doubt it's dirt cheap but for not that much more, especially for most use cases I think it's worth going from something used from 4-5 years ago instead of 9-10 years ago. EDIT: sorry, finished watching your videos and you make it clear that it's for fun and the are other options for cheap, so I wasn't meaning to say you were wrong or anything like that

[@kensutherland5270]

That junk box, always helps out, the old is new approach if it delivers the desired outcome

[@yiannisskyriotis2825]

Keep going bro

[@lawrenwimberly7311]

I upgraded an old core 2 quad dell xps... same backwards and upside down setup that you showed here.... processor was 2650 v2... my son is running starfield with an RX570 and the same memory at around 30 fps with no overclock

[@ellenorbjornsdottir1166]

ESXi having dropped support apparently, the (X99) 18-core, 2.3 base-2.8 all core-3.8GHz single core e5-2696v3 is going cheap as chips (although still solidly a premium chip).

[@anatolklops]

I recently had the opportunity to use an old server/workstation from IBM, built on two Xeon processors, with an additional GTX graphics card. Its only drawbacks were the 300W power consumption during heavy work and the fact that, although it looked almost like a regular computer from the front, it was 80cm deep. During everyday work, or even playing Minecraft without graphic mods, it was impossible to notice that it was a set from 2009, thanks to the total of 16 cores it had and 12GB of 3-channel RAM for each processor (24GB in total). Only in heavy operations or more specific applications there were noticeable performance problems in single-core operation.

[@IanBPPK]

My lab's main machine is an HP Z620 with E5-2640v2's and 192GB of RAM, and two quadro K4000's, though I could slap in a P5000 I have at some point. I also have an R620 for offline archive, a Hyve Zeus server, and 2 freebie HPE DL360p Gen8's, plus 2 ToysRUs R330s sitting offline, mostly for noise reasons.

[@edwardscrase6136]

I have been running ivy Xeon for years. Supermicro and the Asus z9pa are good boards. I currently have a dual 2687wv2 with 128gb of ram and a 3070. This fits in a fractal north as Asus do the z9pa d8 as ATX. Need to print some better air flow guides but still pretty good.

[@stefannilsson2406]

Dude... poor 3070... I can't imagine it ever gets close to even 80% utilization.

[@edwardscrase6136]

@@stefannilsson2406 it's a workstation. Also if I do game on it my only concern is hitting 60 locked on a 1440 ultra wide with good settings.

[@awesomeprofile1337]

i love your videos on refurbishing trash into homelab, /w current trend on the mid-low class : we're getting less and less, doing more /w less is a necessity ❤

[@mrz80]

Last fall my old faithful "8-core" FX-8350 bit the dust. I had an older machine I'd bought just for the fancy case with an older i7 on an EVGA 132 mobo, and after shuffling around some hardware had my workstation up again. Too slow. So I went online and found the biggest fastest CPU that would work on the EVGA, a Xeon x5690, and threw some more RAM at it. It's doing a much better job than the much newer FX it replaced, handling linux audio production without any of the annoying audio glitches, xruns, and other problems I'd been having. So I've been quite content going the old-Xeon route.

[@dkNian]

Great video. Im also thinking to resurrect my i7-3930k as my old motherboard strike by lightning (ADSL connection) around 5 to 6 years ago. Been looking on aliexpress as well on buying a new x79 board. Just that im not sure the power consumption will impact me or not. Maybe someone can highlight me on this? Main focus of the build will be running NAS and jellyfin (i had one asus GTX680 laying around as well). Maybe setup proxmox with some vm running system to share around the network too. Is it really worth the shot?

[@ronrose1656]

Stumbled on first a Dell 5600 and then a Dell 7800. Dual Xeon 10 core CPU, SSD Primary with 1TB data drives. Dusty as hell, but here's the kicker $30.00 each! One had the original M4000 Quadro card, the other I had to add a video card to. Neither had power cords, but those are a dime a dozen. Not a bad haul!

[@rteune2416]

Wouldn't use it as a proxmox cluster and have it on 24/7, but as a desktop PC lots of fun. Fast web-browsing, multiple screens, multitasking and on a few hours per day is not burning thru a lot of power. Using Intel NUC 12-i5 as my proxmox cluster, I love this box!

[@TrTai]

One other thing, if you're in to x79 for the up front cost, if your power bill and space/noise constraints allow it, look for full systems vs parting them out. Standalone motherboards are hitting the point that they're starting to increase in price a bit again, and you can definitely still find good deals on parts from that generation, but even a couple years back you can get a full server/workstation with a decent amount of memory for

[@user-ug1eo4xb7z]

Recently put together an x79 system for Proxmox. No name Chinese motherboard £56 with a NVME gen3 x4 slot, 6 sata ports, 5 pcie slots, 3x 16 and 2x 1. E5-2690v2 10-core £8, 64GB reg ram £18. Everything else I had laying around. As a just for fun homelab project it's pretty good. Half the cost to run per-day than a coffee from a well known outlet. Now thinking x99.

[@7MBoosted]

Do you have a link to the 4 port 2.5gbps nic you showed when you took the gpu out?

[@ahwx]

I got into big servers by buying a DL380p G8 with dual Xeon E5-2630L v2's and 128GB of RAM. Bought a second node with the same RAM and dual E5-2650's and built an X99 based custom build with an E5-2650 v4 and 128GB again. Total is sitting at about 384GB of RAM and 88 threads for the main nodes. The DL380p's cost me about 250 euros total, including the upgrades to their "final" specs they're on now. Need new and faster CPU's, however. The X99 system was another 300 in total I think. I actually use about 150GB of RAM and about 10-40% CPU. What I'm trying to say is: there is very great value left in these machines, especially if you go the used enterprise gear route (and for DL380p G8's, you can modify the firmware and achieve near silent operation using some fan control scripts (that also ramp up if needed so no hardware gets burned).)

[@bricefleckenstein9666]

A DL380 isn't a big server. Try something like a SuperMicro 6047 (same generation, 72 hot swap drives PLUS a couple of internal 2.5 boot drive spots not hot swappable). I prefer to avoid HP in that timeframe as their raid controllers don't play nice with LINUX, you pretty much have to disable the raid function and pretend all your drives are individual RAID0 to make them usable - not an issue on Dell or Supermicro. Those E5-2630L V2 are not bad on power usage, and quite good in their timeframe for their performance, and ECC DDR3 is almost dirt cheap any more given how many of those older servers are getting retired for newer gear. For faster CPUs, I'd recommend the E5-2680 v2 as the best performance for the buck in higher-end CPUs right, any of the 269x are even higher performance but are still a little expen$ive and draw more power. Your existing heatsinks should work fine, HP like Dell and Supermicro tended to have ONE heatsink model for any given server model and it was always sized for the highest-power CPUs that server was designed to work with.

[@r_owbot]

nice video!

[@spork8655]

Gives me pleasant flashbacks to my 3930k rig... What a great CPU for the time

[@fteoOpty64]

You got the fan backwards ?!!!. Very funny!. explains the noise eh ?.

[@fteoOpty64]

I got a 2697 V3 14-core that turbo at 3.6Ghz, It Fast!. My second machine is a 2680 V4 that turbos to 3.3Ghz but it suck way way less power. Both having problems with wifi after like 8 hours of use. Wifi chip just powers off, so unplugging the usb and pushing it back retores it.

[@_Hasboa_]

Talking about power draw i ran a Amd fx server for a week and i took it down because it was loud,hot and ran slow. It would be fun to experiment with more old Amd cpu-s

[@markbooth3066]

When running Proxmox with ZFS, the Memory usage graph is pretty pointless. Since the ARC will discard cached data if that memory is needed elsewhere, it would be far more useful if the Summary page plotted ARC size separate to other memory usage as that would be a far better proxy for 'free memory' than mentally subtracting memory usage from total memory size.

[@clockbench]

The top motherboard screw location placement is very common amongst a lot of brand name motherboards as well. Just use a stubby to get at it.