Building a Home Server on a budget.

[Dorfink]

I am building a small home server but i don't want to spend to much so my thought process was to use hardware i have laying around unused.

 

I have a Xeon E5-1650 6 core, 4x4gb ram, 128gb ssd for booting truenas, 2 2TB HDDs.

all im concerned about is finding an LGA 2011 compatable board for cheap. any suggestions?

 

[Hackentosher]

There's some chinese lga 2011 boards that seem pretty good, linus did a video on one of them. The only thing is that FreeBSD can be a little picky with hardware, so I would look for a thread on the Truenas forum for the specific board you're looking to use. Otherwise I would go to ebay and pick up a 2011 board, preferably a server board. 

 

[KingTdiGGiTTy]

29 minutes ago, Dorfink said:

I have a Xeon E5-1650 6 core

Is that a V2 chip or the sandy-bridge chip?

 

I used to run a (sandy-bridge) E5-2680 in my main rig using an old Thinkstation S30 motherboard. You can probably still get them for cheap, and they are actually pretty well featured compared to the cheap chinese boards. Be careful of revision # and Ivy-Bridge support on these.

Similarly used legitimate X79 motherboards support Xeons in that generation and even support overclocking on the E5-16xx skus most of the time.

Used server gear is a good option, as long as it is a standardised board and doesn't use proprietary power connectors.

28 minutes ago, Hackentosher said:

There's some chinese lga 2011 boards that seem pretty good

I personally cannot recommend those.

[dkoudijs]

You could look for a used HP server that can take the CPU/ram you got.

I think the g7 would work, which should be purchable for a few hundred or less.

[Hackentosher]

On 1/12/2022 at 10:19 AM, KingTdiGGiTTy said:

I personally cannot recommend those.

What was you experience like? I'm pretty curious, but I usually dismiss them in favor of platforms with more modern features and lower power consumption.

[KingTdiGGiTTy]

2 minutes ago, Hackentosher said:

What was you experience like? I'm pretty curious, but I usually dismiss them in favor of platforms with more modern features and lower power consumption.

Compared to even OEM boards the BIOs are not fully featured. 

They might have options that are labeled as if they do something, but they don't. And generally the features that you might expect are not guaranteed to work.

 

So in most cases you'll get better (good in some regards) compatibility from used OEM parts

The colors and VRM heatsinks may make the chinese boards look more performant, but in reality they are usually worse than OEM stuff.