Dual CPU old server hardware still acceptable in 2018?

[mrboof97]

CPU's with more than 4 cores is becoming more readily available to the main stream user, and allowing for some interesting prospects. however at the moment the price of a i9 Intel CPU is still in the regions only allowing for enthusiasts. however it isn't an old idea of having a CPU packing more than 4 cores, server grade hardware has been doing this almost from day one. The real question is, how does old server tech hold up to today's (2018) standards. for this little budget experiment i have decided to test 5 aspects of the build 
1) The performance difference between old and new hardware for gaming applications 

2) The performance difference between old and new hardware for server applications

3) The cost difference between old and new hardware 

4) The power consumption difference between old and new hardware 

5) Is it worth the head ache and lack of warranty to practically use this

So this projects actually started back October of 2016 where i purchased a ZT Systems Server SS-AMZ1FA09 (foxconn 02010he00-600-g Motherboard) server from Ebay for $80. this little puppy came with 8gb of ram and dual xeon E5506 CPU's

By pure luck from the seller when i went to pick up the server from the seller it turned out the guy was a warehouse stockist of IT equipment and just wanted the servers gone so gave me 2 for the price of one, i had originally intended to use it for my home PLEX media server and for my owncloud media storage but i faced a few issues that resulted in me packing the servers under my bed and ignoring them for 2 years, one issue was being that the servers were in 1U racks and were so bloody noisy it put me off using the buggers. time skip to December 2018 (2 days ago) I was sitting on my lounge watching Linus tech tips petabyte project when what should show up but a video titled Under $150 Budget Gaming 8 Core CPU, Motherboard & 16GB RAM 

After watching the video I thought, wait i have 2 identical servers laying around i could just play with it and see how it goes, like what could go wrong...

long story short, make sure you unplug a power supply before removing from a case.

so after a few singed hairs and a tingly feeling running up my arm I removed the motherboard and PSU from the 1U case and put it on a 500mm x 500mm peice of ply wood with plastic self adhesive PCB snadoffs. and ran the server, SUCCESS... until my CPU's began to cook, ok so back to the drawing board. So in try Australian spirit... cable-ties to the rescue, so i slapped some 80mm Ebay special fans ($10 for 4 fans) and cable- tied them to the top of the passive coolers for the CPU's 

After doing this i fired up the server once again and was able to fully install windows 7 without the board shutting off from over heating, my next issue was either the north or south bridge began to cook itself so once again cableties... but this time i used a old fan i had laying around... a really BIG! fan. and this fixed my issue. after doing this i installed a GTX1050ti low profile GPU i had laying around for testing.

So finally, everything works and i could run some tests. so my for my tests i decided on cinebench r15 for two reasons, i can test gaming performance as well as Server performance on the one platform. (im Australian, were lazy)

so what did this little puppy muster up... Drum role please..............

awesome... until i compared it to some other devices. in comparison my ASUS vivobook pro N580V with its i7-7700HQ and GTX1050 Ti graphics card. this server is crap!

so this is where we give up... until 4 beers into my gut and some late night Ebay scolling and wala. turns out the Xeon E5506 is one of their lower tier CPU's . so lets crank this puppy up shall we.

so in honesty this idea came from a reddit user called "seanmac2"

So i basically did exactly as seanmac2 did, i even purchased 2 Xeon E5620 CPU's for $12.50... then i had a few more beers and purchased 2 Xeon X5650 CPU's for $47.08 five minuets later.

now why did i do this, well i got excited... over 6 cores, these little puppies were housing. 6 cores and 12 threads. now times that by 2. 12 cores and 24 threads... thats got to at least get me somewhere on the scoreboards.

now i have not got either sets of CPU's yet and i dont know if the X series CPU is compatable with the motherboard. so until the CPU's arrive this is the end of this segment, and will pick back up when the hardware arrived. 

so i will be doing some more testing after the new CPU's arrive and test it and compare it to some modern hardware, but if anyone else has done something similar im want to hear your story. 

[FloRolf]

5 minutes ago, mrboof97 said:

the price of a i9 Intel CPU is still in the regions only allowing for enthusiasts

What about R7? You can get the 1700X for like $160 easily. Only thing rn that is holding new platforms back in price/performance against old Xeons is the crazy expensive dram. 

[suchamoneypit]

Around a year ago I built a 64 core opteron 6380 server for around $750. Before even ryzen was released. It was pretty impressive to me at the time (maybe I built it longer than a year ago?)

[mrboof97]

On 12/9/2018 at 8:53 PM, FloRolf said:

What about R7? You can get the 1700X for like $160 easily. Only thing rn that is holding new platforms back in price/performance against old Xeons is the crazy expensive dram. 

I would love to get my hands on some of the newer AMD stuff, but as you said the price of ram is really what's putting me off. I used to think my old AM3+ 8 core core was good. 

 

[mrboof97]

On 12/9/2018 at 8:59 PM, suchamoneypit said:

Around a year ago I built a 64 core opteron 6380 server for around $750. Before even ryzen was released. It was pretty impressive to me at the time (maybe I built it longer than a year ago?)

Now that would be interesting to see if PLEX media server could max out all those cores. My main reason for doing this was because my media server keeps bogging down because of users. If you don't mind me asking, did you run any cinabench scores on the rig. Interested to see how they fair up to today's market.

 

Also you have to send a pic of a rig like that.

[suchamoneypit]

2 minutes ago, mrboof97 said:

Now that would be interesting to see if PLEX media server could max out all those cores. My main reason for doing this was because my media server keeps bogging down because of users. If you don't mind me asking, did you run any cinabench scores on the rig. Interested to see how they fair up to today's market.

 

Also you have to send a pic of a rig like that.

I scored around 2723 in cinebench R15. You could alternatively use Opteron 6212s and they score around 1486 in cinebench. I'll see if i have photos stored somewhere. It was a rack server.

[suchamoneypit]

5 minutes ago, mrboof97 said:

Also you have to send a pic of a rig like that.

pictures when I had 2/4 CPUs installed just for testing.