A lot of comments suggesting I "replace the old thermal paste". This came to me as a barebones server. The thermal paste is brand new Arctic MX-4. As I said in the video, dual 135W TDP chips are a strong ask of servers like this. I'd recommend sticking to 95-120W chips, or installing this server into an air conditioned rack ;-)
Might be a good idea to make a custom shroud that better directs the airflow across the CPUs, and put the fans on rubber grommets, should help cut the noise.
Would dual e5-2690v2`s be pushing it? At 130 rated they´re a bit high but they also usually over-estimate the draw for insurance. I´d guess for intermittent processing they would be OK but for 24/7 work they´d be frying in there.
well, I think it won't qualify as a white noise machine. The spectrum will show plenty peaks instead a flat one. Nevertheless, your comment is funny ;)
Yep by default this server is very noisy... But I was able to mod the top cover to add one 80mm fan as extractor for each processor, that brings down the temperature alone and instead of the default 5 front fans just took out 3 and left 2 there.
This is the kinda shit I love. So hard to find people doing budget server builds. Even if they are the "best", I don't need/want a $5000 home lab. Keep it up man!
"Of course since it's a Craft Computing video, something had to go wrong" I don't think I've ever seen a server build go perfectly smooth on RU-vid so don't feel too bad.
you know shockingly, my dell poweredge tower loaded up extremely easily, including setting up IDrac. i was really impressed. now i have a 16 thread tower with 72gb ram and two chips, a slew of pcie 4, a pcie 16, onboard quad intel gigabit, and 8 hot swap sas bays. its a beast!
Great find. Nothing like snagging a solid server for cheap (or free). Some of my favorite memories from my IT MSP days would be onboarding new clients and taking a tour of their server room and seeing decom'd equipment still in the rack powered off. That would usually be followed by a conversation something along the lines of: us: [Heavy Breathing] "do you... do you uhhh want us to get rid of this old crap for you? No charge" them: "yeah sure whatever i don't care this stuff was here before i started working here" us: "o-ok... we will get a trailer and some guys out here to clean this up for you" [internally rejoicing at the upgrade our lab stacks would receive]
Ah I see...so you started a youtube channel just so you could buy stuff and give the boxes to Rambo? IT ALL MAKES SENSE... Loving the videos man, keep it up!
I bought one of the Chenbros. Kinda surprised they didn't sell-through faster. But then it makes sense because of the size. If you don't have a rack (I don't), where can you put it? Mine hasn't arrived yet (it's been two weeks), but I'm considering hanging vertically on the wall, using a 4U wall bracket.
A quick note: Intel VT-X is the general function for virtualiziation from Intel (Which pretty much every CPU hast). It has nothing to do with passthrough. For passthrough your CPU and Mainboard need to support Intel VT-D. This is less common and usually only found in Xeon and HEDT (and i think some weird i3s....) Cheers!
Dude. The idea of this sever, the beer, and that sweet tech wreath... I love your channel. Thank you for all the great ideas! I made some CPU ornaments years back from some ewaste pc's at work and brought them home (Pentium 4's and D's). Wife only let me use 4 out of the 30ish. I salute you sir.
@@isaackvasager9957 Should put dual E5-2648Lv2, put in ssd, 128gb ram, and it will happily run a LOT of vm especially in not-so-demanding workload environment. So no, it is not useless. But yes, it does not fit in processing power scenario. We cannot talk about cheap and processing power in the same place, I think.
@@CraftComputing could you do a video on updating the bios? There is an updated bios from supermicro. I have no idea if the updated bios will fix the pci problem. But I hope it does. I have the same server, and want to install a 10g pci card. However with the card in the slot, the server will not even boot up. Card is an HP NC523sfp / QLE3242-HP
What timing - I have 2 of those coming in tomorrow with 2650V2’s. Didn’t realize the board had iSCSI built right in though - that’s awesome, I will put the 2 x 240GB SSD’a I bought to boot them up into the NAS. Thanks for the vids, Jeff - you’re doing great work!
You would love the area that I live in. We have a property disposition center that is part of the local university. There they sell off all the old office/lab/computer equipment. 1 or 2 generation old servers, computer and equipment are all there. Pretty darn cheap as well, all in good condition and I've never gotten a bad item. =)
New video - it's a good day. Then crushed when they don't ship internationally. Any plans on a video with a medley of the tasting reviews? I look forward to the bonus at the end. Always makes me smile watching your expressions after first tasting.
I was thinking about the same thing with the fans. Are the headers on the motherboard 3pin or 4pin? My desk is right next to my server rack, so I don't want to hear loud fans. How did the noctua change out end up for you? Is this thing quiet then?
@@mattscheurman1616 MUCH more quiet. What a difference! Only thing is, you will need to adjust fan speeds in the IPMI or have some air from a standing fan blowing on or around it since the fans run pretty slow speeds at idle. Even then, the noise is practically non-existent. They only fan not replaced is the power supply fan which upon further investigation, is wired pretty far into the unit. Not going near the death caps lol. That one is decently quiet. The fan connectors are 4-pin.
Power consumption at idle and under indicated load would be a nice addition. A Kill A Watt meter makes easy work of it. Or some of those little smart outlets have energy meter built in. So it gives you power draw at any given time and a remote power off/on if needed.
VT-x is hardware virtualization support. PCIe passthrough requires *VT-d*. Some hardware that has VT-x is missing VT-d, especially 1st and 2nd gen Core era parts.
I know that feel, last year bought a used server for 300 euros including shipping to other side of EU HP ProLiant DL360 G7 with Dual X5690 CPU's and 144GB DDR3. tossed out the sas drives and put in used Samsung SSD 840 Pro drivesi had laying around. Best 300 euros i have spent on ebay purchase. hosting mail/web and game servers with VMware ESXi
So I have a few of these and decided to check out the video because the nice blue color caught my eye. I personally ran everything from 2630L v1 to a 2695v2 and never really had much of an issue with heat on more intensive workloads. That said, my rack is in a basement that gets to about 70f in the summer. I wanted to upgrade to v3/v4 chips so I grabbed a pair of X10DRD boards and it was a near perfect swap. The back IO was a little off going from RJ45 to SFP but still worked fine. Having downsized my setup for efficiency I can say the with the limited capacity of the board, going to the X10 series let me increase the density ALOT. 256GB of ram, e5 2640v3 and a ssd for boot, only idles at 70 watts.
Great channel! I have the same server and I have replaced the fan with 5x Noctua NF-A4x20 PWM (you can control the fan speed - the FLX model doesn't allow you to do so), and it is nearly silent. I need to change the one in the power supply and it is super quiet. Keep up with the excellent job! Ciao!
I have fun with old server stuff. My actual media server is a dual socket Xeon X5677's with 24gb of RAM. I used to keep it in a 4U chassis, but actually moved it to a Cooler Master HAF lanbox. Since I host things like Minecraft, I need server processors that are fast, and it's still hard to find affordable upgrades beyond what I have at the moment.
I used to pick up older HP DL300 models from a local school on eBay. G5-G7, sometimes as little as a couple dollars. Usually with at least most of the parts. Not all would have two CPUs or coolers, some with RAM, some without, always PSUs but never drives. Made some decent cash off them after tinkering and setting them up. I used a few for game servers a while and still made a profit. I still actually have one with a pair of 6c/12t and 32gb of RAM collecting dust.
If you dropped the CPUs to more low power ones and replaced those fans with something like Noctua’s 40mm it might be usable in a home setting. The base kit on eBay would make a pretty decent firewall if you don’t do VMs
Put a 10gig or 25gig NIC in that open slot and that thing would make an OK secondary virtualization server connected to a fast NAS. although I would prefer a 2011-3 platform.
As overkill as this would be I'm sure this server would make a great firewall/router box ala pfSense/opnSense. I run a QOTOM MiniPC for my OPNsense needs and it works great, but having more power would be nice too. haha. Great video Jeff!
I came across a free Craigslist Special Barracuda Web Filter 310. I've been in the process of setting up pfSense. Having come with 2 Intel Gigabit nics this will work pretty good for replacing my primary router. I had originally planned to configure an old computer (6-core amd FX6100) as a router with 3Com Giganics, the Barracuda will offload the OpenVPN, firewall, and various other basic things. That way I won't have to worry about goofing up the server and shutting everything down. It's been a struggle configuring, mostly due to my lack of knowledge of setting up pfSense, but getting there.
Hp dl380p, e5 2660 v2(10c/20th, 2.2ghz), 64gb 12800r(4x16gb), 2x250gb sas drives. $150 Hp dl385 g8, dual 6328 opterons(they're kinda crap, but useable), 64gb ddr3(8x8, 12800r). $150 Dropped an additional 50 for the secondary risers and cages. 3 risers and 3 cages. Stupidest deal I've ever gotten on servers was a dl360 g6. Dual 5550, 72gb of ram(10600r, 18x4 sticks) $60. I just bought it for the ram.
I would love to have a text label edited in, whenever you mention those long part names like E5 2698. Maybe even for all parts? I tend to pause the video and need to listen twice or listen very carefully the whole time... which i usually dont do. Anyways: love your content. I really enjoy these budget server builds
I bought one of these jet engines a year ago. Only complaint is the sound. It's great for Proxmox and the best price to performance ratio I could find.
regarding that psu - your alternative would be buying any fitting one and using an 300€ molex crimp tool to crimp the connectors yourselve - yes the tool costs money, but having one myself, it just does what it is supposed to do, not like 12€ ones...
I suppose it'd make more sense to go dual 2650v2 on there. Decent clock speeds, easier to manage heat output. In virtualisation, the CPU is rarely the bottleneck. Heck, even the E3 class E2136 in my Dell T140 will do fine, beating the Xeon Silver 4110 in multi core.
you can possibly test the new bios version is BIOS revision: R 3.3 on the supermicro website for the mainboard! pass through maybe for graphics card work
Another great video. What you call a server addiction I call another video for our vewing pleasure. As for the Beer. I love a good Coffee/Chocolate Stout/Porter beer. To me the color looked great and the bitter and sometime sweet notes(depends on how the Brewer decided to make) is one of my favorite styles of beer. You should try High Tower Brewery Coffee Stout brewed with real coffee beans its really good and almost feels like a meal in a glass.
I had 3 of these, one of them was as loud as jeff's and i couldn't figure out how to quiet it down, but the other two ran near silent. Each of the servers had a pair of E5 2697 v2 cpu's and 8x16gb ddr3 ecc ram. Maybe its something with the v1 chips. I was also able to get a quadro k2200 passed through in esxi 6.7 u1
Thanks for this. I was oh so close to ordering one of these servers. My rack is next to my desk in my home office. I cannot imagine competing with those fans on conference calls. I will continue to look for other budget rack alternatives. I have a small (depth) rack so I need short servers. Might just have to build my own with new desktop gear. I wanted a 2 cpu build so bad. Thanks!
I picked one up just recently, mainly to use as a third system in a Proxmox cluster just to play around with cluster/HA abilities. Two L-series CPUs and 64GB ECC RAM. I 3d printed my own adapters to swap out the fans for Noctuas. If I was really pressing the CPUs then it really wouldn't be enough, but at the minimal use I put on it they work fine. Mine had the drive cage, but had to buy the riser and rails separately. The main nuisance is the outdated IPMI relying on the garbage Java console.
Hi, I just ordered this a few hours ago after watching this video. The 1U server and the rails However, not sure if the seller will include the riser card I plan to use 2 x E5-2650L V2 cpus which would plenty for my use case I'm trying to buy the RAMs too From your video you've mentioned DDR 3 Registered Any further info about the RAMs I'd appreciate much. I'm from Singapore I've ordered this through my friend in SFO and he'll ship it to me in SG Sadly the seller does not ship to SG I plan to install the latest Ubuntu and use it as a sandbox Thanks
Some cases did have "air guides" to push the air into needed locations. if you need that full spee, maybe a makeshift "air guide" woudl improve temps on that second CPU. Still, that is one nice ifnd. I'm guessing your rack is in a different room, but do you think replacing the fans with Nocuta fans would proivde some benefits? or would that be a dissaster on temps?
You should try getting the latest BIOS from SuperMicro's website and installing it. Sometimes these rebranded servers have custom BIOSes modded by the resellers even though it looks normal and features can be disabled. I've had a few of these before.
Yep by default this server is very noisy... But I was able to mod the top cover to add one 80mm fan as extractor for each processor, that brings down the temperature alone and instead of the default 5 front fans just took out 3 and left 2 there.
Would be cool to use this as a pfSense machine. Also it would be cool if we could see some content on blade servers. I have always wanted to play with them and see how they work.
@@CraftComputing yeah, they can be hard to find. I recently bought a dell r720xd and a whole bunch of drives for it. Installed Truenas on it from your video. I also just ordered 4 SSDs, 2 nvme, 2 sata, and a sata controller and 2 nvme, and sata m.2 adapters. Planning on using the sata drives as mirrored boot images, and the nvme as cache drives. I'll keep you updated on if I get it working or not.
Lmao within the first couple minutes of this video I got notifications from eBay for a couple servers I had in my watchlist from this seller telling me that they're almost gone.
I really like your videos man! You show the low budget side of things. Thanks to you I’ve build a pretty dialed truenas machine. I was just wondering if you checked the thermal compound on those CPUs. Given the temperature delta between the 2 I would just double check for peace of mind.
Question, I have bought a server rack that is identical to the one that you had before your current one, and I need to mount 3x 4U servers on it, but they didn't come with a rail and I am unsure how to buy one that fits them. Nice video mate!
Please keep in mind that a modern low end Destop system will peform better in any task you can throw at it at significatly higher power efficiency. Old DDR3 Servers are a fun hobby project not a wise investment. Especially if you run it at home 24 and are paying consumer electricity prices. I know that because I own one.
Power efficiency, generally yes newer desktops will be better. But for performance, this is hands-down better! Jeff's setup here has sixteen cores. Considering the improved performance per thread of newer CPUs you'd probably need a modern 12-core CPU to compete. What modern low-end desktop has a 12-core CPU and 64-128 gigabytes of RAM? Please tell me, I'd like to buy one. When I looked a month ago the best value I could find I was a 6 core CPU with 8GB of RAM at a similar price point.
