Crunchy Dragon

And nothing of value would be lost.

Hi all,
 
Found this sweet deal on WD Red Pro NAS 18TB HDDs for $275 each on WDs website. Minimum purchase of 2 for the discount to take effect however. I bought 2 of them myself. They regularly go on sale for about $350 for a frame of reference.
 
Promo ends March 17th.
 
Link to deal: https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-red-pro-sata-hdd?sku=WD181KFGX

Not sure what Alphacool is referencing, but they all appear the same. Even if the components are slightly difference, placement and mounting holes are what matter here. 
 
Did you ask them what the differences were between the SUPER and non-SUPER? 

As long as the GPU, VRAM, and VRMs are all in the same places and the screws line up, it shouldn't be a problem.
 
The only real difference between a Super and non-Super GPU is the amount of Cuda cores and clock speed, if I recall correctly.

Not seeing anything out of the ordinary here.
 
CPU is a little older, but still plenty good and nothing wrong with it.

Upload it to a mc forum or something and let people explore

Document it in text and pictures, oldschool blog/website style.

Don't you worry I'm confined to status updates and questionable quality power supply threads both of which I enjoy

What are you using it for?
 
Make sure it has a HBA, not a raid card.
 
I'd probably keep the current CPUs for now if it was me.

Never realized this thread existed! Just helped my friend finish building his fully custom built AR10, chambered in 6.5 creedmoor. It's wayyyy too heavy for me, personally, but he loves it. 

Tore this thing down when I got home, and I am impressed with the build quality. Honestly if you gave me a $1k or $1.5k AR the differences would be hard to spot.
Now obviously I have not hit the range with this but the quality between the DPMS Oracle AR and this Wise Arms AR is no contest. Wise easily takes the cake.
When I do get out and put 100-300 rounds down range that will be the test of course, but I have a feeling this will be my new range AR.
 
BTW, if curious, I bought it for $565usd

I done did it. I made an impulse purchase today.  
Wise Arms B-15, on the lower end of the AR line up but its Definitely better than my DPMS Oracle, upper and lower fit is much tighter, and trigger is a world better. 
 
I haven't taken a pics yet but here is a stock photo.

 
 
 
 
 

It's only a good deal if you'll actually use it.
 
If you want an actual good deal, then that depends on what exactly you're doing with it. As noted you're probably better served with a mainstream platform unless you actually need 52 threads.
 
If you just want a Xeon server for the hell of it, then who am I to stop you. I use HEDT (basically Xeons but without some workstation/server features) for gaming because I think the platforms are neat.

I am in agreement with @da na and @Zando_, but I will also mention that a rackmounted system probably isn't the best first server around.
 
A tower server like a Dell PrecisionTower, Lenovo ThinkStation, some of the tower-style HP ProLiants, or even building your own server in a standard ATX case would be a more user-friendly route.

Those CPUs are 14 cores 28 threads each, so together you'll get 56 threads 64GB RAM for $450. Really great price there - just unless you're running very specific applications that actually use 56 threads, if you need just a server in general you could probably find a cheaper one. Single-core performance on these Xeons is not great - my 72-thread E5-2697v4 system has similar single core performance to a 2nd gen Core i5 chip - but all of those cores combined will still blow away a brand new CPU if used right. 
So, in short, good price but just make sure you really need all those cores before committing. 

^^^ For most home NAS/VM use a simple modern 4c/8t chip is plenty, NAS duties are single-threaded and many VMs can even share a single core, depending on the hypervisor you use and what they're doing. Or obviously you can run containers in the host OS or a VM and they'll share whatever resources are available.
 
If you do think you'll use all those threads, it is a solid machine, just keep in mind that it will pull a good chunk of power, and servers can be incredibly loud. Usually you can spin the fans down a lot though, without running into thermal issues.

TN is often the best option when response time is the main feature you need, as its typically better than IPS or VA here. You really only see TN in those super high refresh rate monitors, and esports games don't typically care about things like HDR, Contrast, Color accuracy, vieing angles and other aspects of the displays.
 
I'm guessing OLED is going to replace these pretty soon as it should be better with responce time, and 480hz and other very high refresh rate OLEDs are starting to come out.

If there is, it's not big enough to warrant caring about. 
 
Just use UEFI/GPT boot if you can, more so you get the added features like Secure Boot and Resizable BAR than for any miniscule improvements to boot time or anything like that. 

The "X" and knowing we're going to be seeing "X" on CPUs again makes me wish it would be "modern HEDT", but I know it won't be 😞

We're gonna need more info then that sadly. Can you try to get logs from the games that crash? In what way does it crash? Did they try uninstalling their GPU drivers with DDU and reinstalling them from the Nvidia site?

The best solution in my mind is graphics cards that are smaller and lighter, and/or more rigid and robust PCIe slots.

Yeah, you want bigger heatsinks with fans attached. That top one is a passively cooled 1U heatsink, cooling an E5-2697 v2 in open air is a big ask for one of those...

I'm with you on that.
 
I would still rather have a 3.5mm audio cable to play music and things through my car speakers.

Put a screwdriver or some other rigid object in the fans, to prevent them from spinning, an easy solution. 
 
Otherwise you have nothing to worry about. Happy spring cleaning!

My Bushmaster.