IBM System x3500 M4 as Gaming Server

[Ban DHMO]

G'day,

Hopefully I have posted this in the correct topic.

I've got an IBM System x3500 M4 from around 2012-3 with dual Xeon E5-2620 0 (6 Cores), 80GB DDR3 ECC RAM with two 750W PSUs (can run off both at once or just the one).

I was hoping to get some advice on whether installing a GPU such as a GTX 1650 would be a worthwhile endeavor to play Age of Empires 1, 2, 3 & 4 (definitive editions), as well as potentially Elden Ring and of course Extreme Tux Racer.

[Blue4130]

33 minutes ago, Ban DHMO said:

G'day,

Hopefully I have posted this in the correct topic.

I've got an IBM System x3500 M4 from around 2012-3 with dual Xeon E5-2620 0 (6 Cores), 80GB DDR3 ECC RAM with two 750W PSUs (can run off both at once or just the one).

I was hoping to get some advice on whether installing a GPU such as a GTX 1650 would be a worthwhile endeavor to play Age of Empires 1, 2, 3 & 4 (definitive editions), as well as potentially Elden Ring and of course Extreme Tux Racer.

2.5ghz max turbo is going to be pretty slow for anything more modern.

[mariushm]

It will work with video cards that don't need extra power. 

The power supply is proprietary and doesn't have pci-e connectors. 

 

If you have spare molex or sata connectors you could use a 2xmolex or 2xsata->pci-e adapters to give a video card extra power. 

 

But I'm not sure you have cables, I think you only have a backplane for sata drives, in which case you could hack your way by soldering the 12v wires to the backplane, on the traces that normally deliver 12v to the sata power connectors. Or, you could find a couple old broken drives just to solder the wires to the sata power connector and plug the drive in the backplane (you can disconnect the sata data part from the hard drive so it would not be detected by the operating system, if the drive is bad)

Alternatively, you would open the power supply and solder the 12v and ground wires from the 8 pin pci-e cable directly inside the psu.

 

 

[jaslion]

This thing is loud and has to be so it can cool it's internals I hope you are aware of this? Replacing the fans is NOT an option.

 

1 hour ago, Ban DHMO said:

I was hoping to get some advice on whether installing a GPU such as a GTX 1650 would be a worthwhile endeavor to play Age of Empires 1, 2, 3 & 4 (definitive editions), as well as potentially Elden Ring and of course Extreme Tux Racer.

A gpu without a pcie power plug will work in this server however this thing is old and slow.

 

Basically what if you were running a celeron g540 but it had 6cores and 12 threads. It's not gonna play elden ring well at all. Age of empires 1,2 and3 should be fine 4 wont be great.

 

 

[Ban DHMO]

Looks like it has a couple of 8 pin power cables floating around. Does the clock speed have that great of an impact on performance?

[Needfuldoer]

1 hour ago, Ban DHMO said:

Looks like it has a couple of 8 pin power cables floating around. Does the clock speed have that great of an impact on performance?

Yes it does.

 

That server is a decade old, and has two Sandy Bridge CPUs in it. It's nothing special by today's standards, and a modern desktop CPU like a Ryzen 5600 will wipe the floor with it. A couple cheap Xeon E5-2637s will give it a significant boost in per-thread performance (thanks to almost an extra gigahertz in clock speed), and updating the BIOS to support V2 CPUs would get a little more on top of that, but you're still at about half the performance of a modern CPU. (You cannot upgrade to Xeon E5 V3 or V4 CPUs; those are LGA2011-3 and use DDR4 exclusively.)

 

It would be fine if you wanted to tinker with virtual machines. Throw a pair of E5-2680 V2s in there and you've got a big sandbox to play in. But a gaming powerhouse it is not.

 

It's also going to scream like a banshee because severs use loud fans. You cannot swap these out for quiet desktop fans, because those don't generate enough static pressure to suck and blow air through a 2U server.

 

If you want to make a gaming machine using the parts from that server, get a barebones workstation and one of the higher-clocked LGA2011 CPUs to go with it.

[Ban DHMO]

17 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

Yes it does.

 

That server is a decade old, and has two Sandy Bridge CPUs in it. It's nothing special by today's standards, and a modern desktop CPU like a Ryzen 5600 will wipe the floor with it. A couple cheap Xeon E5-2637s will give it a significant boost in per-thread performance (thanks to almost an extra gigahertz in clock speed), and updating the BIOS to support V2 CPUs would get a little more on top of that, but you're still at about half the performance of a modern CPU. (You cannot upgrade to Xeon E5 V3 or V4 CPUs; those are LGA2011-3 and use DDR4 exclusively.)

 

It would be fine if you wanted to tinker with virtual machines. Throw a pair of E5-2680 V2s in there and you've got a big sandbox to play in. But a gaming powerhouse it is not.

 

It's also going to scream like a banshee because severs use loud fans. You cannot swap these out for quiet desktop fans, because those don't generate enough static pressure to suck and blow air through a 2U server.

 

If you want to make a gaming machine using the parts from that server, get a barebones workstation and one of the higher-clocked LGA2011 CPUs to go with it.

Looking at the E5-2600 V2 series processors, would a couple of Xeon E5-2667 V2s be a worthwhile upgrade (8 Cores 16 threads each, base clock 3.3GHz, max turbo 4.00GHz TDP 130W). I'm not too bothered by the fans I have run it a few times and after the initial take off it seems to stay about as loud as a gaming laptop when under load (matrix multiplication in Octave). If it got bad I could stick it in another room and stream to my laptop via Sunshine and Moonlight.

 

Also might I ask where you found this information as I have been unable to download the manual from the IBM website and the Lenovo website describes a server with PCI (non-express) slots.

[NelizMastr]

7 hours ago, Ban DHMO said:

Looking at the E5-2600 V2 series processors, would a couple of Xeon E5-2667 V2s be a worthwhile upgrade (8 Cores 16 threads each, base clock 3.3GHz, max turbo 4.00GHz TDP 130W). I'm not too bothered by the fans I have run it a few times and after the initial take off it seems to stay about as loud as a gaming laptop when under load (matrix multiplication in Octave). If it got bad I could stick it in another room and stream to my laptop via Sunshine and Moonlight.

 

Also might I ask where you found this information as I have been unable to download the manual from the IBM website and the Lenovo website describes a server with PCI (non-express) slots.

Yeah the 2667v2 is one of the best options if you want a “gaming server”. Elden Ring is kinda tricky but the rest should be okay.

[Needfuldoer]

7 hours ago, Ban DHMO said:

Also might I ask where you found this information as I have been unable to download the manual from the IBM website and the Lenovo website describes a server with PCI (non-express) slots.

I literally just threw "x3500 M4" into Google and got this Lenovo press release:

https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/tips0852-system-x3500-m4

 

Any knowledge I have about the Xeon v2 family is from tinkering with Dell R620s and R720s.  

[NelizMastr]

2 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

I literally just threw "x3500 M4" into Google and got this Lenovo press release:

https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/tips0852-system-x3500-m4

 

Any knowledge I have about the Xeon v2 family is from tinkering with Dell R620s and R720s.  

I can recommend the youtube channel MyPlayhouse if you want to see Lenovo X-server shenanigans

[Ban DHMO]

Thanks everyone for your advice, I'm going to try it with either a 1650, 1050, 1060 or whatever's cheap. If I find the processors to be a pain I will upgrade to two E5-2667 V2s. Wasn't expecting anything amazing since I got this for free, hopefully it will do better than a Quad-Core Ryzen laptop with integrated graphics

[Ban DHMO]

Here's an update for anyone that is interested or looks at this in the future.

 

We bought a GTX 1660 Super and installed it - the BIOS couldn't render with it so we had to remove it and change the video settings to use the onboard video adapter, then reconnected it. The server has 2 8-pin PCIe power connectors (1 of which was used for the graphics card) so there is some room for another graphics card for another VM.

 

For the software we installed Proxmox VE onto a RAID-10 with 8 disks that came with the system this was significantly more performant than a SATA SSD getting 4.4GB/s random read speeds in the GNOME Disks benchmark tool from a Fedora Workstation 37 VM.

 

Gaming performance is much better than the Ryzen 7 laptop we were using before however it was limited by the CPU as predicted by some earlier posts in this topic. We are planning on upgrading them to two E5-2667 V2 which should hopefully be a substantial boost.

 

I thought that I would get used to the fans... they are indeed quite loud but I've pulled one apart and found that they are just a standard 4-pin with some extra wires for detecting the fan and the light on them so hopefully we will be able to replace them with something quieter - on the other hand there isn't much dust in there.

[LIGISTX]

1 hour ago, Ban DHMO said:

the software we installed Proxmox VE onto a RAID-10 with 8 disks that came with the system this was significantly more performant than a SATA SSD getting 4.4GB/s random read speeds in the GNOME Disks benchmark tool from a Fedora Workstation 37 VM.

Really should instal the hypervisor on an SSD, as well as VM’s. Even a SATA SSD will have an order of magnitude lower latency, which for most everything means a lot more then consecutive read speeds. If there is a workload you have that requires consecutive reading, have that data live on the RAID array. But for most home user workloads an SSD would be a much better bet. 

[ryd994]

Stop beating the dead horse. The electric bill will quickly makeup the price for a newer system with same or better performance.

 

And it's a rack server. You sure know how loud is that, right? How much does your hearing worth?

 

Ok if you still insist:

- for the same hardware generation, I recommend you sell the server and buy a Z420 or T3610 for ~$100.  They can support Xeon v2 Ivy Bridge

 (may need BIOS upgrade using SPI programmer).

 

E5-2667 v2 costs ~$20 right now, it's the best single core/4 core performance at reasonable price for this generation.

 

E5-1650 v2 is about the same price, less performance, but overclockable. 

 

E5-1680 v2 has the best performance, but forget about it. Price is ridiculous.

 

- for slightly more at $150-$200, you can get a fully loaded Z430 or T5810. They support Broadwell, E5 v4, and DDR4 memory. That's a huge improvement over Ivy Bridge. 

 

- all above are workstations, they are not loud. Maybe quieter than some desktop builds.

 

- At the end of day, for gaming, a latest generation desktop can run circles around these old Xeons. These workstations with mining GPUs are good value budget build, but the CPU will bottleneck any mid to high end GPU.

 

Good for productivity system or casual gamers. Not for serious gamers.

 

[Ban DHMO]

On 4/21/2023 at 6:16 PM, ryd994 said:

Stop beating the dead horse. The electric bill will quickly makeup the price for a newer system with same or better performance.

 

And it's a rack server. You sure know how loud is that, right? How much does your hearing worth?

It's actually a Tower server which can be converted to a 5U Rack - maybe I have a better idea as to how loud it is than you.

Also we have Off-grid Solar setup up with plenty of battery backup so this is costing me nothing to run.

 

The thing is I'm just doing this more for fun and as an exercise, I am by no means a 'serious' gamer. The server was free anyway

[ryd994]

5 hours ago, Ban DHMO said:

It's actually a Tower server which can be converted to a 5U Rack - maybe I have a better idea as to how loud it is than you.

Also we have Off-grid Solar setup up with plenty of battery backup so this is costing me nothing to run.

 

The thing is I'm just doing this more for fun and as an exercise, I am by no means a 'serious' gamer. The server was free anyway

 

Because you asked about some of the recent titles, including elden ring, I assumed you must be looking for decent fps in action games. And I might have misread your post to think you have a Nehalem Xeon or so. Nehalem should be in the grave already. Sandy/Ivy Bridge is like in the coffin, but the lid is not nailed yet.

 

For a casual gamer and since electricity cost is not a issue, then it will work. I recommend upgrading to E5-2667 v2, as I mentioned earlier. Your system should be compatible.

 

I don't recommend higher core counts such as 2690 v2. Due to the cache layout, high core count Xeon v2 (> 8 cores) have significantly worse single core performance. Thus not good for gaming 

 

I have a Z420 with GTX 1080, and I'm casual gamer (if I game on PC at all). It was well enough to play older games. But I always turn it off when not using. Not a good choice to be always on.

 

For long running servers, I suggest at least update to haswell. They idle at lower power consumption. 

This generation seems fixed the scaling issue. High core count Xeon v3 still have decent single thread performance. The performance scales about proportionally to the core count.

 

 

Sorry didn't read the whole thread before posting. I seem to be reiterating what you already know.