LGA 775 server build thread

[Shaner2015]

Hey guys, first post here so I will try and keep it short and sweet and stay within the forum guidelines. I recently won an eBay auction for an older dell PowerEdge t300 server motherboard socketed for the LGA 775. The board came with a xeon 3323 cpu for $32 Canadian shipped to my door. With this in hand, and having to happen to have some spare 16gb ddr2 ECC ram I thought it was a good time to tackle my long awaited multi media server. Essentially on a budget of roughly $300 Canadian I plan to put this machine together to be able to stream movies and music as well as have a massive amount of hard drive space for all my needs. That being said, I don't know much about server hardware. I know this board takes 24 pin ATX and 4 pin cpu so that's not a problem, but there are a few connections I don't recognize ( see zoomed in picture of large blue plug on the top right above the ram slots). Also, can anyone point out if there are SAS hard drive connection points on this board? It was an option from the factory but I am not sure if this one has it and don't know how to identify them. Either way, more to follow in the coming weeks, hope to have it running Ubuntu by Christmas 

[mariushm]

It's floppy drive connector.

 

See page 168: https://downloads.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_ser_stor_net/esuprt_poweredge/poweredge-t300_owner's manual_en-us.pdf

 

Anyway, sorry, but the performance of these ancient processors and motherboards is really low and they consume a lot of power.

 

If you check the  Motherboard+ CPU combo listings on eBay, you'll find much more powerful processors bundled with motherboards for 30-50$

For example 60$ plus shipping(cpu, mb, ram, graphics) : MSI FM2-A55M-E33 MicroATX Motherboard w/ AMD A4-6300 APU, 8GB Ram HX318C10FB/8 : https://www.ebay.com/itm/MSI-FM2-A55M-E33-MicroATX-Motherboard-w-AMD-A4-6300-APU-8GB-Ram-HX318C10FB-8/254412472924?hash=item3b3c2a425c:g:7KsAAOSw6IVdwhnH

 

here's another example, i5-750 and 4 or 8 gb of ram and a video card (gt330 1gb), for around 60$ in total (if you include shipping , 30$ without) : https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Precision-T1500-Motherboard-XC7MM-2-67GHz-Core-i5-750-8GB-Memory-GPU/153723762570?hash=item23caa6778a:g:GkMAAOSwvchdwEQB

 

[Shaner2015]

Hey thanks for the reply!

I have fudged around quite a bit with the LGA 775/1151/1156 platform and for some reason I'm addicted to trying to make shitty machines decent again. So although I am aware there are better deals for better boards with faster chipsets etc, I really enjoy socket 775 and wanted to try my hand at server building. Probably a waste of money for most people but it brings me joy!

[Olaf6541]

According to Passmark cpu benchmarks it has about the performance of Gemini Lake SoC's while those things only consume 1/4 of the power (or even less). If you are going to run this machine 24/7 power costs could become a significant factor and it could be cheaper in the long run to use something else...

 

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+X3323+%40+2.50GHz&id=2280

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+Silver+J5005+%40+1.50GHz&id=3144

 

Anyway, if youre sticking with this board i guess a pcie 8x SAS controller would work, how many drives do you want to hook up?

Also do you have a cooler already?

[Shaner2015]

I'm hoping to run 4x3 TB SAS drives with a PCIe controller, and yes I already have a cooler, ECC ram, an OS hard drive and a few other bits. You guys are probably right about the machine taking up too much power to run 24/7, but I had the idea to essentially run it certain weekends or days I want to game with friends on a dedicated server for Minecraft, stream a Lord of the rings marathon without buffering or have the ability to store massive amounts of data off my main PC. For the price of the board plus the fact that I already had most other parts around made it worth it to me to use an old server that isn't as power efficient or strong as a newer board. 

[Shaner2015]

Just a quick update, found a couple more decent deals that fit in my budget and parts requirement. I got the 750w non-modular psu for $30 CAD plus shipping, and an evga GeForce GTX 560 ti 1gb graphics card to handle movie streaming for $25 CAD plus shipping. So far for the PSU, 2xCPU, GPU, motherboard, 16gb of ram and a 160gb HDD for the OS has cost roughly $120 Canadian with shipping. Not too bad if you ask me, so I should come in right on budget or under!

[tatte]

I'm confused. Aren't those x8 slots, and the GPU you bought looks like a normal x16 card?

 

But hey, that's still far more power efficient than my Mac Pro 1,1! Old hardware is fun, I hope everything goes well with your project.

[mariushm]

Yeah, they're pci-e x8 slots.

 

The beautiful thing about pci-e slots is that they're "modular", as in you can put a x16 card into a pci-e x8 slot and the card will just work at pci-e x8 speed.

 

He'll have to use a sharp blade to carefully cut the end of the slot plastic and he should cover the edge connector that's just hanging in the air with some insulator (kapton tape, a bit of paper etc, so it won't touch the stuff on the circuit board.

 

@Shaner2015

The last pci-e x8 slot is usable, you may have to remove the spring from that heatsink by the 2 pci-e x8 slots and maybe cut/desolder the small rings that hold that spring.  You can use some double sided adhesive thermal tape to hold the heatsink down without the spring.

The first pci-e x4 slot is also very usable, if you desolder the battery holder and put the battery on a separate battery holder with some wires or something, the motherboard won't care.

 

You should also replace some capacitors, i see one small by the pci-x slot, probably filtering 5v for the pci-x so probably the old psu went bad or those capacitors are simply from a series with known problems.

There's two with some black market by the atx 24 pin which are sketchy.

 

I'm repeating myself but it really would make more sense to just give up and use something more modern.