Are CHEAP x79 Servers/Workstations Good In 2024?

[@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?

[@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.

[@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.

[@KiraSlith]

Yeah, that has always been the problem with older hardware. You are always either trading off either performance or power draw. The current sweet spot is actually Xeon Scaleable "Silver" 4114 or 4208. The 4208 costs a bit more, but it's the same perfomance with better power efficiency, more cores, and access to Optane DIMMs for a massive leap in effective RAM capacity or super low latency storage (I recommend using them for ZFS cache).

[@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:

[@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.

[@Josh-cw8by]

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

[@HardwareHaven]

@StringerNews1 buddy, just chill lol. And to answer your first question, there are plenty of examples where cpu can be the bottleneck during data transfer, especially with something like 10+Gb/s networking and when using flash storage. The CPU is also important for handling parity calculations. Considering Marco mentioned file storage, it's likely he was referring to Netwrok Attached Storage, which will usually be setup in some sort of RAID configuration requiring parity calculations. Those parity calculations are mostly single-threaded from what I understand. Not sure why you felt the need to go all redditor on someone in the comments.

[@shanent5793]

In practice the speed of light or electricity is anything but constant, it varies with the dielectric and frequency. Even with DMA, processing the data from I/O typically still generates interrupts which requires copies from kernel to user memory

[@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

[@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.

[@badoman5000]

How much ram did you get, how much did it cost and from where?

[@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.

[@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.

[@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

[@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.

[@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.

[@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.

[@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.

[@mp0011]

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

[@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.

[@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.

[@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

[@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

[@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!

[@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.

[@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.

[@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.

[@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

[@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.

[@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!

[@JayzBeerz]

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

[@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.

[@briccimn]

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

[@livtown]

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.

[@haroldfong8758]

Apart from the power draw they are still pretty decent.

[@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

[@DynMads]

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

[@nathan_tasker]

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

[@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!!!!

[@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.

[@WouterVerbruggen]

That screw hole "blocked" by RAM slots is actually extremely common and you see it on (small) boards from basically every manufacturer

[@PeterMensink01]

I got an old HP Z620 workstation with 32gb memory, a video card a few years ago. Replaced CPU with a similar 10 core CPU. And added an ssd and hdd. Power draw about 100 W while running Windows. Still runs fine.

[@OsX86H3AvY]

i have a Z600 that i've owned now for like 8 years that was used when I got it and just bought a Z840 because I love that one so much, now running both....im not an HP fan in general but I LOVE their Z-stations!

[@Reziac]

For comparison, I have a Lenovo workstation board x79 with Xeon 1620v2 and 64GB EEC and some random 2GB GPU, and it draws about 150W. Which is a lot better (and more horsepower) than the retired dual Xeon server I stole the RAM from... 450W idle, tho some of that is fans.

[@Coentjeeee]

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

[@jdbertel33]

I’m a cloud devops engineer obsessed with privacy and security. My main workstation runs Qubes OS. So everything’s in a VM. Probably 10 or more total concurrent VMs in my average workload. A pair of 8 core Xeon E5-2667v2s with 128GB of ram makes easy work of it. Single core performance is meh but it chews through the demanding workloads I put on it.

[@Scarsuna]

And you're telling Google about your setup? Not obsessed enough!

[@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

[@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.

[@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

[@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 ?

[@milescarter7803]

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

[@JordanPlayz158]

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

[@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

[@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

[@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.

[@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

[@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.

[@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...

[@Squash_Man]

Really enjoy your style of content. I slapped a Xeon in my X77 system about a year ago and it has been awesome.

[@TheManFrayBentos]

I started re-purposing old server motherboards a few years ago, with some dirt cheap 1366s and Supermicro m'bs. I'm currently using a pair of E5-2697s on an X9DRL-3F with 96GB and it's fine for me. I'm not a gamer but the multi-core performance is excellent for photo and video rendering, plus I run a couple of VMs on it. The presence of SAS on these boards led me to picking up ex-enterprise SAS drives at decent prices, too. My rule of thumb is to get the performance of a more modern system, but at much lower cost. There is a penalty in power consumption, but it's not on around the clock, and it heats the room in winter, as another poster pointed out.

[@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.

[@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!

[@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.

[@rdsii64]

My media server is running 128 gigs of ram and two 2697 v2's its in a 20 bay enclosure and I stream 4k content when I'm away from home. Its literally my own personal net flix.

[@ivanmaglica264]

My 2 cents... ZFS takes up to 50% of total memory. And it doesn't want to let it go easily. Learned that the hard way.

[@mttkl]

You can manually limit the amount of RAM ARC uses, it's all in the Proxmox documentation if I recall correctly. In my Proxmox cluster, for example, I've limited ARC to around 1 to 4GB only, since I use fast NVMe SSDs for my VMs and the storage capacity of each node is pretty low.

[@ryuk44-h8r]

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...

[@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!

[@ignasanchezl]

I was thinking, what would be a fun yet stupid use case for cheap high power consumption CPUs that you don't want to have running all the time? Maybe buying multiple of them and combining in some sort of small stackable cases with DC power supplies, for cost savings, running them all from a single AC power supply and only turning them on as an on demand render farm.

[@matthewhanson498]

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

[@makouille495]

still rocking a 1650v2 here ! these lil' CPUs still pack a punch tbh if you're not into 1440p ultra settings gaming, even paired with the best GPU they wouldnt be able to deliver enough potential for the GPU to deploy its full power, but if you do some casual gaming at 1080p high with as i have a RX 5700 XT or similar GPUs, it will do the job flawlessly, pro workload wise the lack of some instructions set can be a bit of a pain in the azz tbh but they still work fine for Blender 3D ! the only downside i have to point is the horrible IOMMU groups management on my specific mobo (Asus Rampage IV), but i guess this is less of a issue if you can find a combo with a workstation/server mobo that are often designed for that kind of tasks ! So in the end if you can find a good deal on a Mobo + CPU + RAM kit, you can still get a rly good time on a cheap PC that will run top of the line hardware from 10 years ago without a doubt !

[@CheapSushi]

Curious, why not move up to the 1680V2? seems pretty cheap now days for a bit of a boost while still on that platform. I was using a 1680V2 overclocked for a while.

[@makouille495]

@@CheapSushi that's true! Ii would like to do so, but i don't have the money for that rn unfortunatly. On the other hand it would be a rly decent upgrade core wise to be at the same count as recent plateforms such as AMD Ryzen 7. The 1650v2 i have is luckaly a decent bin that i can overclock decently, i have no clue if going on a 1680v2 would give me the same headroom tbh, again i agree it would be a rly great upgrade to push that plateform to perform a bit longer in time !

[@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

[@anothersiguy]

Practical or not sometimes it’s just fun to breathe new life into enterprise grade gear that you never could have afforded new

[@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).

[@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.

[@kensutherland5270]

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

[@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

[@GeoffHalsey]

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.

[@autohmae]

The irony is these probably had the best (still some what affordable) single core performance you could by at the time.

[@TheSlyMouse]

Phill's computer lab has reviewed some older parts for gaming mostly he has some interesting info on older server cpus.

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

Phil's Computer Lab for the win!

[@darthkielbasa]

10:27 does not compute. Need more input on sunshine and moonshine. One of the reasons I enjoy your channel. You mention tools or methods I’ve never heard of and I go into rabbit holes until 3am. That’s why I’ll do later…

[@HardwareHaven]

Well I said moonshine but meant moonlight lol It's pretty simple to install and run

[@resistnonexist]

Lots of refurbished CAD workstations available for similar setups. I snagged a Z420 with a 10 core Xeon, 64GB DDR3, Quadro K4000, 1TB SSD for around $300

[@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.

[@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.

[@gacikpl]

I have a system with two 2690v2 xeons. It was running Monte Carlo nuclear calculation with 512gb for years. Now we use it for pv farms modeling and power prediction. It is now quite expensive to run because of power usage. But taking a lot of time to reconfigure software on something newer is just cheaper to use just more power..

[@husamrabie8816]

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

[@JaikrishnaAdithya]

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

[@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.

[@brekkurz]

The v3 and v4 xeon platforms are also getting pretty cheap, with a decent drop in power usage.

[@HardwareHaven]

Yep, that's why I recommended that at the end of the video haha

[@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!

[@spork8655]

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

[@JV-io3nn]

That compaq was the very first PC that I've owned. I still remember the deal I got on it: $175 out the door with all peripherals and monitor back in 2010. Oh that single core sempron and my complete lack of PC knowledge....

[@96indashade]

I always thought the sound in your intro was you vacuuming a case! Now, I know...

[@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.

[@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.

[@kandym3478]

I had a similar rig with dual quad core cpus for a total of 16 cores but I found it limiting. I recently upgraded to a ryzen 5900 and yea it's a bit more but the IPC makes a huge difference on my virtual machines. They used to feel sluggish and my power draw is significantly less

[@GewelReal]

2x4=16?

[@Looser_23]

@@GewelReal he probably means threads

[@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

[@GroovyDrifter]

Sometimes with the X79 xeons people gets blinded by the high core count models, BUT there are two models that are worth trying: the E5 2667V2 and the E5 2673V2

[@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 ❤

[@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.

[@stickmenwithrayguns]

@7.00 Not a standard mATX case! This is called a BTX case. 😉 These are rare nowadays. The BTX was offering better cooling than ATX, but sadly it never caught on. One of the best BTX case for PC-builders ( back in 2006 ) was the Lian Li V600. BTW. If you want to play around with older but high-end Xeon's I recommend you buy a used HP / Dell / Fujitsu Workstation with C602/C612 chipset. This will give you 8 memory slots + allow you to run Registered ECC memory, which can be had for cheap.

[@haszoka]

I have a X99 i7 with plenty of ECC. With my use I have absolutely zero performance issues and considering the price point I'm even happier. However idle is 82Wh so definitely not the cheapest to run.

[@KabukiStarship]

I am running a Lenovo P520 6-core Xeon W-2135 for $120 on eBay and I put 64GB DDR4 2933MHz, a 2.5G PCIe Gen3 x8 networking card and threw in two hard drives and the ThinkStation P520 HDD Bracket Kit. I don't have any NVMe, but I have one GPU and I can still put 5 more NVMe. While the W-2135 is not very power efficient at full draw, it has low idle current and it's rarely ever using much power.

[@chromerims]

Kudos for the informative content on x79 xeons in 2023😎

[@nullx8]

i run two workstation running on E5 CPU's and i was never happier, they are stone-cold at all times, can run 9 instances of Eve Online, and do all normal "workstation things" at ease ... those CPUS did cost up to 2grand new .. i spend just 250 for each system. the real challenge you run into is finding a Motherboard. 9 ran with Chinese Boards with Terrible IO ... they were brandnew but performed just really bad, but besides that, this was a overall win.

[@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.