Bought a roughly $2500 dual Xeon computer from 2012 for $50, what should I do with it? pics and specs below

[shactheorb15]

The case is a massive Lian li Pc-p80 which holds an EVGA Classified SR-2 motherboard with two Xeon E5620s cooled by two Noctua tower coolers. It has 1 gtx 480 but the 1200w Thermaltake power supply makes me think it had multiple at one time. I have replaced this however with a less power hungry gtx 970 for now. It also has 32gb of HyperX DDR3 memory.

 

Obviously someone spent a lot of time, money, and care on this thing a long time ago, and I'm very excited to play with it. What should I do with it?

[JDMFTW]

Id say turn it into a cool server but thats going to chew through power for what its doing lol. it looks beautiful tho.

[BondiBlue]

That's a nice find! IMHO it's too old for 24/7 operation as a server (it'll be quite power hungry, even at idle), but there's still plenty of room to upgrade it further. I think that board supports dual X5690s, and those coolers should be able to handle the heat. Upgrading to dual Xeon X5690s would bring it up to a total of 12 cores and 24 threads. You might be able to get up to 96GB of RAM working, though that would probably be a bit tricky. 

 

Even though it's older that's still a pretty damn capable system for a lot of things. I'd love to see what you end up doing with it. 

[Touch My Hamm]

I remember the EVGA sr2 o man that was my dream back then to own that board. I remember the old video of NCIX having 4 of them in a pc which I wanted them to use this board with 2 cpus and do a full cooling loop with 2cpu and 4 gpu. I miss parts like this.

[shactheorb15]

1 hour ago, BondiBlue said:

That's a nice find! IMHO it's too old for 24/7 operation as a server (it'll be quite power hungry, even at idle), but there's still plenty of room to upgrade it further. I think that board supports dual X5690s, and those coolers should be able to handle the heat. Upgrading to dual Xeon X5690s would bring it up to a total of 12 cores and 24 threads. You might be able to get up to 96GB of RAM working, though that would probably be a bit tricky. 

 

Even though it's older that's still a pretty damn capable system for a lot of things. I'd love to see what you end up doing with it. 

Definitely enough cooling, even under an artificial stress test I could barely get a single core above 40c. My current plan is to use it as a testbed for a 1080ti that I'm fairly sure has a mining bios loaded onto it and isn't displaying anything

 

[Montana One-Six]

Pretty cool stuff but performance wise it has a bit more performance than an i3-8300 in multi-thread (in single-thread the i3 will wipe the floor with it) while also using almost 3 times as much power. So it doesn't make much sense to use it for anything other than playing around for fun.

 

4 hours ago, BondiBlue said:

Upgrading to dual Xeon X5690s would bring it up to a total of 12 cores and 24 threads.

Which would bring it to i7-8700 multi-threaded performance (on single-thread it will not even be close to the i7) but also use 4-5 times as much power. Still wouldn't make much sense to use it on a daily basis but would be a very cool machine to own.

[BondiBlue]

20 minutes ago, Montana One-Six said:

Which would bring it to i7-8700 multi-threaded performance (on single-thread it will not even be close to the i7) but also use 4-5 times as much power.

Oh trust me, I'm completely aware. I still run a couple LGA 1366 Xeon systems, including one with a single X5690. Their raw performance is not what they're used for these days, so the power consumption isn't a big deal as long as you aren't running them 24/7 or anything. For something that needs to run all the time it makes more sense to go with something newer that uses less power. 

 

But still, for 11 year old CPUs they're still pretty impressive. 

[cmndr]

Best use case I can see for it is setting it up as a backup server. Toss a bunch of harddrives off ebay (go for SATA, SAS requires an extra controller, unless the board already has one) in it.

Schedule the server to be on for like 12 hours a month for data transfer purposes and then power off.

 

Other than that, the case and heatsinks are probably worth more than $50.

 

 

As an FYI the raw CPU power in that is likely comparable or lower to what you'd get in a $400-500ish Dell or HP system with an i3-12100. The i3 system likely idles at 15W, the server likely idles at 200W.

185W for 24 hours/day 365 days/year at 20cents per KWH = $324.12/year of extra power.

[Beerzerker]

The motherboard itself is worth a pretty penny these days - The seller either didn't know or care about what they had.
You can easily get your money back just from the board's value alone or even more than you have in it all now.

There are plenty of things you can do but smart money is now that you've got it, keep it and at least give it a chance.
One of my teammates has such a setup and it's used as a daily driver too, the entire setup is more capable than many give it credit for.

I'm also gonna shoot you a PM.

[khuffmanjr]

I think you should buy my p2200 and use that beast for a plex server.  

[wseaton]

I still don't get what the facination is with these old servers. Seriously...plug in a skill saw and run it instead. About the same noise level, heat generation and CPU power.  The 5620 has a per thread benchmark of 1100. That's roughly half my i7 2600 which is like 10 years old and can be found refurbished for less than $100.

 

The reason this series of Xeon was so popular was because companies were retiring Netburst based P4 Xeons which were utter garbage. When you were running ESXi on P4D's you were pretty desperate.

 

 

[BondiBlue]

1 hour ago, wseaton said:

The 5620 has a per thread benchmark of 1100. That's roughly half my i7 2600 which is like 10 years old and can be found refurbished for less than $100.

I know it's not a completely accurate comparison, but here's the PassMark numbers for these CPUs:

Xeon E5620 (what OP currently has): 3597 @ stock speeds

Core i7-2600 (Sandy Bridge QC): 5343 @ stock speeds

Xeon X5690 (best CPU OP can install): 6904 @ stock speeds

 

The Xeon X5690 isn't a very expensive upgrade, and you can get two of them for ~$80 or so. Also, keep in mind that the scores I've listed above are for single CPU machines, and OP would be running two of them. The i7-2600 is limited to single socket boards. I know everything doesn't scale linearly, but dual X5690s will absolutely outperform a single i7-2600 at stock speeds, and this board can overclock them. That's what this board was designed for. 

 

But yes, they do draw a lot of power, and they do generate a fair amount of heat. For a lot of people that makes these types of machines worthless junk, but to others they're still useful. I'm sort of in the middle - I use a few systems of this age during the winter months (which means I run my furnace much less), but I can't stand using them in the summer months. 

[Pickles von Brine]

That isn't just a server you have an SR2 motherboard. That board is RARE. Like stupid rare. What a hell of a find you got. You could build that into a kick ass plex server, run a bunch of VMs all kinds of things. Hell, it wouldn't make the worst gaming computer either. Only issue is some games may not run due to lacking certain instruction sets. Regardless the sky is the limit. 

I would create a truenas server, install pfsense and rock plex. 

[dilpickle]

On 7/22/2022 at 1:18 PM, wseaton said:

I still don't get what the facination is with these old servers. 

 

I don't get the fascination with old hardware in general. It's literally e-waste. The fact that it sold for 0.02% of its original cost should tell you that. 

 

Nostalgia is best left in the past. Best thing to do is find some sucker who is willing to pay for it being so "rare". This thread seems to have plenty. 

[BondiBlue]

8 minutes ago, dilpickle said:

I don't get the fascination with old hardware in general. It's literally e-waste.

Different people have different opinions about older hardware. Who could have guessed that? Same thing about the e-waste comment. 

 

Not everyone cares about the latest and greatest hardware. It's simply not interesting to some people. Some would rather mess around with something like the board OP has - that's an extremely nice board for what it is, and there's a reason they still sell for several hundred dollars. OP was lucky to get one for so cheap. 

[Needfuldoer]

On 7/22/2022 at 2:18 PM, wseaton said:

That's roughly half my i7 2600 which is like 10 years old and can be found refurbished for less than $100.

That's why I retired my PowerEdge R610s, and now I won't touch anything under Xeon v2 (Ivy Bridge). Nehalem Xeons chug power for what they are.

 

At least 16 gig DDR3 ECC DIMMs are cheap.

[Blue4130]

1 hour ago, Needfuldoer said:

That's why I retired my PowerEdge R610s, and now I won't touch anything under Xeon v2 (Ivy Bridge). Nehalem Xeons chug power for what they are.

 

At least 16 gig DDR3 ECC DIMMs are cheap.

Agree. I was looking for an older low end server and saw so many r210 and r220, but at this stange, it's just better to go with a r230 as the minimum in my opinion. They are near the same price as the r220, but have more longevity in them. 

[Rocketdog2112]

Of course... for all those foo fooing these old boards, a modern version is available for a rock bottom price of $1699.

 

 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/125446829569?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=adPvFaB-S6q&sssrc=2349624&ssuid=nlJKGxRFQwu&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

[thrasher_565]

On 7/25/2022 at 6:10 PM, Pickles von Brine said:

That isn't just a server you have an SR2 motherboard. That board is RARE. Like stupid rare. What a hell of a find you got. You could build that into a kick ass plex server, run a bunch of VMs all kinds of things. Hell, it wouldn't make the worst gaming computer either. Only issue is some games may not run due to lacking certain instruction sets. Regardless the sky is the limit. 

I would create a truenas server, install pfsense and rock plex. 

there not rare any more i seen atlest 6 sell off ebay in the last 2 moths and was biding on a few of em. the x58 platform has sentimental value to me even thoe it would make a nice windows xp system... 2 cpus is just cool. is it practical no not at all...

 

On 7/21/2022 at 9:16 PM, cmndr said:

Best use case I can see for it is setting it up as a backup server. Toss a bunch of harddrives off ebay (go for SATA, SAS requires an extra controller, unless the board already has one) in it.

Schedule the server to be on for like 12 hours a month for data transfer purposes and then power off.

 

Other than that, the case and heatsinks are probably worth more than $50.

 

 

As an FYI the raw CPU power in that is likely comparable or lower to what you'd get in a $400-500ish Dell or HP system with an i3-12100. The i3 system likely idles at 15W, the server likely idles at 200W.

185W for 24 hours/day 365 days/year at 20cents per KWH = $324.12/year of extra power.

arnt new systems today use more power? 3090 using something like 600w?

[TunTuri]

That's a fine LANparty server.

 

Throw in a quad nic, instal proxmox, pfsense, a couple of ubuntu linuxes (for redundant piholes) and use that as lanparty router. In addition, you can run some game servers within their own virtuals and maybe a truenas too, if you would have need for that. High power consuption shouldn't be a problem, if it is on only during the installations and during the weekend event.

[cmndr]

25 minutes ago, thrasher_565 said:

arnt new systems today use more power? 3090 using something like 600w?

You can mostly ignore top end video cards since they don't matter for NASes and most home server use cases. It is true that a new video card, which is something like 10-50x faster than 2 old video cards working together, draws about as much power as 2 old cards did.



A NAS spends 95-99% of its life with the CPU largely idle, doing nothing. If you're not doing encryption or compression, the CPU will BARELY do anything. My NAS seldom has the CPU spike during reads at all. (though it does somewhat slow down my write performance as I'm compressing the data)

A budget NAS might draw 10-20W, not counting the drives. It has super low performance parts but that's fine since the CPU doesn't matter very much.

Your server draws something like 300W.
Using a 285W difference, at 20 cents per KWH and plugging into THIS - https://www.rapidtables.com/calc/electric/energy-cost-calculator.html

 

Your "budget" server costs $500/year extra to run compared to something like this - https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS418-Diskless/dp/B075N17DM6

That extra $500/year is why companies basically throw these servers away. Today, one server can do what used to take 20 (so maybe $700/year in electricity vs $10,000 before factoring in air conditioning/cooling costs) and this doesn't even get into software licensing costs (this can be tens of thousands of dollars per server up to millions).

 

The more power efficient version of your CPU appears to consume around 220W (I'm assuming your version will consume a bit more AND the GPU will probably ramp it up a bit as well).

 

[thrasher_565]

10 minutes ago, cmndr said:

Let's ignore video cards since they don't matter for NASes. It is true that a new video card, which is something like 10x faster than 2 old video cards working together, draws about as much power as 2 old cards.



A NAS spends 99% of its life with the CPU largely idle, doing nothing.
A budget NAS might draw 10-15W, not counting the drives. It has super low performance parts but that's fine since the CPU doesn't matter very much.

Your server draws something like 300W.
Using a 285W difference, at 20 cents per KWH and plugging into THIS -https://www.rapidtables.com/calc/electric/energy-cost-calculator.html

 

Your "budget" server costs $500/year extra to run compared to something like this - https://www.amazon.com/Synology-bay-DiskStation-DS418-Diskless/dp/B075N17DM6

That extra $500/year is why companies basically throw these servers away. Today, one server can do what used to take 20 (so maybe $700/year in electricity vs $10,000) and this doesn't even get into software licensing costs (this can be tens of thousands of dollars per server up to millions).

but the sr-2 was not ment to be a real server... it can oc thats the point of it... unless im missing something?

no idea were you got a nas from? a nas can be made out of anything? why would you even compare that to this... this is not a nas mb...

[cmndr]

1 minute ago, thrasher_565 said:

but the sr-2 was not ment to be a real server... it can oc thats the point of it... unless im missing something?

no idea were you got a nas from? a nas can be made out of anything? why would you even compare that to this... this is not a nas mb...

Well, the OP was asking for use cases for the system.

It's pretty dated as a desktop (slower than an i3 12100 system) so you'd be looking to use it as a secondary system of some sort.

That's why I noted that you might only want to run it for around 12 hours a month as a secondary system to backup files. This also has the advantage of being a bit more resistant to crypto-highjacking.

[LAwLz]

It's crap.

Some parts might have some value, like the coolers and chassi, but that's about it. My advice would be to try and sell it as parts and recoup your 50 dollars.

 

The GPU is bad.

The CPUs are bad.

The memory is bad.

The motherboard is bad.

 

Just because it was high end once upon a time does not mean it is good today. Just because it has Xeon processors or whatever does not mean it is good or that OP should make a server out of it. A cheap i3 system would probably run circles around this, and use 1/10 of the power, and function better.

 

 

Also, just because something is rare does not mean it is valuable or good. I got a CD from a Swedish computer magazine from the 90's in my bookshelf. It's most likely very rare because few people subscribed to PC magazines at the time, and those who did probably threw the CDs in the garbage a long time ago. Does that mean that the CD is worth something? No. It's probably worth less than a blank CD because it's just full of crap.

 

 

 

By the way, let this be a lesson to everyone trying to "future proof" their PCs by buying absurdly expensive parts. That PC most likely cost ~5000 dollars when it was new. Now, 10 years later, it's worth 50 dollars. 

 

Spending 1000 dollars every 2 years would have resulted in the buyer having a worse PC for the first 2 years, but then the remaining 8 years would have been way better.

[thrasher_565]

15 hours ago, LAwLz said:

It's crap.

Some parts might have some value, like the coolers and chassi, but that's about it. My advice would be to try and sell it as parts and recoup your 50 dollars.

 

The GPU is bad.

The CPUs are bad.

The memory is bad.

The motherboard is bad.

 

Just because it was high end once upon a time does not mean it is good today. Just because it has Xeon processors or whatever does not mean it is good or that OP should make a server out of it. A cheap i3 system would probably run circles around this, and use 1/10 of the power, and function better.

 

 

Also, just because something is rare does not mean it is valuable or good. I got a CD from a Swedish computer magazine from the 90's in my bookshelf. It's most likely very rare because few people subscribed to PC magazines at the time, and those who did probably threw the CDs in the garbage a long time ago. Does that mean that the CD is worth something? No. It's probably worth less than a blank CD because it's just full of crap.

 

 

 

By the way, let this be a lesson to everyone trying to "future proof" their PCs by buying absurdly expensive parts. That PC most likely cost ~5000 dollars when it was new. Now, 10 years later, it's worth 50 dollars. 

 

Spending 1000 dollars every 2 years would have resulted in the buyer having a worse PC for the first 2 years, but then the remaining 8 years would have been way better.

its not worth $50... its worth $400 to $700...