IBM x3650 M4 NOS eBay score! 256GB RAM, but can this file server game? :) 

Same lol

haha, like a bloody jet engine!

That sounds like a good option, thanks

@@Epictronics1 I had to same problem trying to load windows on older Laptop. You have to re make your USB windows installer and in Rufus 3.16 choose Extended windows mode this will by pass TPM and secure boot and enable Legacy Bios support.

If you don't pay your own power bill :P

@@Nukle0nAbsolutely

Wish they were power efficient.. they sure must consume a lot (which is no problem with solar and batteries) or where energy is cheap (relatively).

@@pr1sm55 Yes - certainly no good choice for a home server. I only fire them up sporadically for fun or to blow dry my hair ;-)

​@@pr1sm55 that much memory consumes way more power. That much nearly requires as much power as the processes

The secret with noisy machines is to poke a hole through a wall that provides enough sound deadening. To anyone that actually tries this: good luck not getting yelled at.

I remember my dad getting a few cheap servers years ago. They were so loud the neighbours complained

I used a 2U HP DL380 G8 as a workstation for about 2 years. I put it in the basement, drilled holes through the floor, and ran DisplayPort and USB through the floor. Having 256GB of RAM was great, but it was always a basketcase. I had a quadro in it with 4x DisplayPort connections. The post would only go through the onboard VGA

I actually had a solution like this. My VP6 back in 2000 was a bit to noisy to keep in the room. I drilled a hole in the wall and feed the VGA, and PS/2 extension cables trough the wall :)

yeah, same thing here. The post did not show up through the Geforce

You could just put it in another room.

Oh, that never crossed my mind. I'll check! thanks

Seems too new to have used MBR

Neither.

Thanks!

@@Epictronics1 My main PC (Ryzen 9 5950x) is using proxmox 8 which has rebar support. It is a dual gpu system split to 2 vm's. My main is manjaro with the rx 6800 xt passed to it for general usage and the secondary is a ubuntu server with rtx 3080 for AI usage. The best thing about proxmox 8 is that you dont really need extra config for the passthrough unlike previous versions. Might be a fun idea for a future video to build a multi gpu processing powerhouse .

you should've tried windows server datacenter or Workstation

@@SuperDav1995 AI Usage? Are you possibly planning to take over the world?

@@Slow.S55 More for self research. When you work with machine learning model it usualy takes most of the gpu usage. This machine configuration allows me to run it in parallel to my main vm and do other stuff like gaming. Main drawback is that the 16 lanes are now split to 8 for each gpu.

Windows 10 supports Legacy boot.

I tried Server guide with windows 2012, same problem unfortunately

@tiepup Sounds... disgusting. I bet an SSD connected to the "tape drive" SATA has less bullshit in the way. There are also modded BIOSs people come up with for NVME boot on the X79 era stuff, which this is.

yeah, I noticed when I did the edit. That part of the video sounded a bit like an outro

I can't find any info in the bios, but the machine never had an update in its life. I guess we can also check the drives if I can find the matching diagnostic software. It doesn't really matter but I'm curious :)

@@Epictronics1 most machines in datacenters which are not hyperscalers wont ever get firmware updates. They are firewalled and shouldnt be connected to the internet directly. Also, people are lazy 😅. But this is a nice server. Lots of ram and nice ssds. Going to use zfs for the fileserver?

@@TheShellshock67 I haven't looked in to zfs. Right now I'm shopping for a better controller. The included controller only has raid 1/0/5 When the hardware is sorted I'll have to figure out the best software setup.

Lol.

If it wasn't for the noisy fans, I'd be using this M4 as my office PC :)

IBM's whitepaper on the server says that it was available with Windows Server 2008-2012 R2, SuSE Enterprise Linux Server 11 and RHEL 6. I suspect that their own proprietary Unix, AIX was also available in some configurations.

@@GGigabiteM That's interesting.

@@GGigabiteM No, i don't believe current versions of AIX will run on x86-64 (a early version of AIX was available on PS/2 machines) The amount of disks in it - some type of ZFS box ? Those boxes was probably intended for: windows server/linux or vmware. The USB port inside will take a boot image for vmware and so allow the user to manage the disks using ESXi.

I second using ProxMox.

Ok, Thanks

Thanks!

Ok! thanks

Or XCP-ng! I'm messing around with it lately and it's pretty good imo. Idk if I'd switch over my whole proxmox setup. But if I was ever building another server I'd definitely try it out first.

Titan X rocks! What the heck was it doing in a server?

Thanks! That was a GTX 970 4GB

@@Epictronics1 awesome, thanks!

​@@Epictronics1best GPU

Ok, thanks!

Sounds great. I want to get back to this project again. What software did you use?

Thanks :)

yeah, I went for w10 because I thought it would be easy... :)

@@Epictronics1 I think the problem with Windows is always the backward drivers compatibility. A new Windows version mean change all your printers, and other devices. Since we still can use an old parralel printer with Linux/BSD. The goal is selling new stuff.

Ok, thanks. Do you know what the fastest CPU is that these servers can take?

@@Epictronics1 any E5-2600 xeon and none xeon.

Okay, I'll keep an eye out for a spare PSU and check those drives, thanks!

Hi Johnny, Have you checked if the card has sufficient power?

Yes! It's a GT 1030 gforce, it doesn't even have a power input. But I got it my friend. I will explain my story to you. When I got this server I couldn't even format it until I discovered for myself that I had to put the FAT32 system on the pen drive for older servers. Then came the incompatibility with the video card, there was a brief moment when I was able to display video on Windows 10 but when I restarted the PC the graphics card crashed and went back to the server's onboard VGA. I went to the device manager and the graphics card had one (!) so I had the idea of ​​installing Windows server 2012 to see if it would work, the same thing happened. So I thought that every time I shut down the server or restart it, I would disable the graphics card in the device manager so as not to get an error when starting the system. But then the "solution" came when I spent all night updating the system, I believe something was updated in the BIOS because today I restarted the server and forgot to disable the graphics card beforehand. the server worked normally! So I immediately got an SSD and played Windows 10 and everything went fine now the server is working and the graphics card is working normally. I will even exchange this graphics card for a better one and buy another Xeon X5675 for more performance. I want to thank you for your attention and you gave me the strength to keep trying, it was very difficult and I had already given up. thank you brother.

@@JhonnyRoyale Glad to hear it all went well!

I already had a Xeon E5-2643 V2 installed, so I ordered a second one. Don't know if that was a good choice really

@@Epictronics1 will probably be enough. I barely use mine. Rendering is better on a GPU these days anyway.

And my board doesn't like to boot off most it's SATA ports. I have 2 low hassle free ports, the rest are obnoxious.

Yes, this is a bit silly, but also a really fun way to learn and explore this machines

@@Epictronics1 That is true. There are many things that are different on a server than on a PC. I do this for a living, so I have no need for that. I can play with the older models as well as the latest and greatest all the time. 😎

Ok, thanks!

I'll check it out, thanks. What's the fastest CPU it will take?

@@Epictronics1 Ask Chatgpt to tell you in a table format the CPU's, cores and power consumption. I chose the low power ones that have the L suffix. Great channel good luck with it!

@@callmebigpapa Thanks!

Sounds like a fun project :)

Similar to how this server behaves. It switches to the Geforce after about 30 seconds

Yes, it was a real bargain. But it was also a gamble :)

So many companies will destroy the disks instead of just writing zeros to them. It's such a shameful waste. He got lucky.

@@Epictronics1 I think you are right about it being a redundant server, looks unused and the fact the disks were in it adds even more weight to that belief. That said why would anyone have a backup DB server with no DB? Who knows! great server though

@@lemagreengreen yeah, a very lucky score indeed! Unfortunately the raid 6 feature is locked out with a soft key. Let's hope Lenovo is nice enough to send me one

I'm sure it will. I'm gonna go with Windows 2019 to make it easy on me

I'll try that, thanks

Haha, adventures in incompatible windows versions!

I have actually already bought new CPUs for this project and planning to make another video.

I'll check, thanks

It's 64 GB of RAM.

I tried it. Unfortunately, It didn't help

Did you install it in windows like I tried for w2008?

@@Epictronics1 actually installed Windows 2000 Server!

That is the reason why you should run serious not sorry OS No version of Windows is really geared for servers They may have Server in name, but Windows in general is joke OS