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I think I screwed myself over...

Blucyrik
By Blucyrik
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Let's start from the beginning.

I sold my NAS/Media PC/Mini gaming system yesterday for the intension to buy something a bit more powerful from money I earned over winter break. Long story short, it didn't turn out the way I planned it.

After selling my system for $300, I jumped on over to Craigslist, and found myself a nice Dell PowerEdge 2950 2U server... (Dual Xeon e5345, 28GB RAM, 3TB storage) for $300... After poking around on Dell's site for information on the server, I just said "What the hell, I'll try it out and probably end up buying it. It seems like a great deal."

Oh boy was I wrong.

Sure, the 2x4 core Xeons sounds nice, but they don't have hyperthreading, and only clocked at 2.3Ghz... A dealbreaker if you're even gonna try to play games on it. The RAM? It's DDR2 (Not too much of an issue in general, but rather disappointing). And lastly, the "expansion capabilites", as he called it. The server doesn't have any extra PCIe cables from the power supply, so throwing something in like a GTX 760 was out of the question. Plus, the PCIe riser card that's necessary to have for a GPU to be attached to the back, is only a PCIe 1.1 4x slot!!! Bandwidth will be severely limited if I were to even try to throw in a GPU.

Don't even get me started about noise levels either.

Surprisingly, there is ONE thing I love about this thing... the drives are new-ish (2013), they're all hot swappable, and he gave me 6 of them, 500GB each. But honestly, that's about it.

So lesson learned here... Nobody says you have to buy something on Craigslist, or any other site, just because it sounds like a good deal. Please please PLEASE make sure you know what you're buying... otherwise you're just wasting your time.

(I'll be lucky to get $350 out of this thing, maybe I'll just resell it.)

 

EDIT: added photos of this thing so it's easier to understand what I'm talking about :)

post-294416-0-64127800-1453261810_thumb.post-294416-0-22968600-1453261797_thumb.post-294416-0-04299400-1453261771_thumb.post-294416-0-81647500-1453261784_thumb.post-294416-0-15271400-1453261824_thumb.

Want to build yourself a NAS? Check here!

 

 

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I can never recommend a dual 771 rig TBH

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yup.  know all the details before you buy kids :)

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Let's start from the beginning.

I sold my NAS/Media PC/Mini gaming system yesterday for the intension to buy something a bit more powerful from money I earned over winter break. Long story short, it didn't turn out the way I planned it.

After selling my system for $300, I jumped on over to Craigslist, and found myself a nice Dell PowerEdge 2950 2U server... (Dual Xeon e5345, 28GB RAM, 3TB storage) for $300... After poking around on Dell's site for information on the server, I just said "What the hell, I'll try it out and probably end up buying it. It seems like a great deal."

Oh boy was I wrong.

Sure, the 2x4 core Xeons sounds nice, but they don't have hyperthreading, and only clocked at 2.3Ghz... A dealbreaker if you're even gonna try to play games on it. The RAM? It's DDR2 (Not too much of an issue in general, but rather disappointing). And lastly, the "expansion capabilites", as he called it. The server doesn't have any extra PCIe cables from the power supply, so throwing something in like a GTX 760 was out of the question. Plus, the PCIe riser card that's necessary to have for a GPU to be attached to the back, is only a PCIe 1.1 4x slot!!! Bandwidth will be severely limited if I were to even try to throw in a GPU.

Don't even get me started about noise levels either.

Surprisingly, there is ONE thing I love about this thing... the drives are new-ish (2013), they're all hot swappable, and he gave me 6 of them, 500GB each. But honestly, that's about it.

So lesson learned here... Nobody says you have to buy something on Craigslist, or any other site, just because it sounds like a good deal. Please please PLEASE make sure you know what you're buying... otherwise you're just wasting your time.

(I'll be lucky to get $350 out of this thing, maybe I'll just resell it.)

Thats why you dont buy used servers when you dont know about them :P theyll get you :P

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Let's start from the beginning.

 

<snip>

So lesson learned here... Nobody says you have to buy something on Craigslist, or any other site, just because it sounds like a good deal. Please please PLEASE make sure you know what you're buying... otherwise you're just wasting your time.

 

Another one learns the lesson.

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Definitely learned my lesson here... here's what got me really going on this thing.

 

- Dual Xeon CPUs

- 28GB of ECC RAM

- 3TB Storage

 

It sounds like such a great deal... but then you realize that's it. There's absolutely NO upgrade path whatsoever. I kinda blame Dell on that one.

Want to build yourself a NAS? Check here!

 

 

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step 1) dont buy a server unless you know how to interpret server hardware specs

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Definitely learned my lesson here... here's what got me really going on this thing.

- Dual Xeon CPUs

- 28GB of ECC RAM

- 3TB Storage

It sounds like such a great deal... but then you realize that's it. There's absolutely NO upgrade path whatsoever. I kinda blame Dell on that one.

Lol. You are not Dell's target customer for that product. Dell deserves absolutely no blame.
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why would you try and game on a server ? its meant for file transferring and storage,and long term reliability . not blazing speed and wicked performance.  

Please quote me or tag me if your trying to talk to me , I might see it through all my other notifications ^_^

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may you all rest in peaces in the giant pc in the sky

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Lol. You are not Dell's target customer for that product. Dell deserves absolutely no blame.

 

 No no no... That's not what I blame Dell for... I blame Dell for not designing a better upgrade path for this thing.

 

- You're limited to PCIe 1.1 8x and 4x slots.

- The max capacity for each hot swap tray can hold is 750GB.

- I'm pretty sure this is the highest end CPU combo you can use.

Want to build yourself a NAS? Check here!

 

 

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Definitely learned my lesson here... here's what got me really going on this thing.

 

- Dual Xeon CPUs

- 28GB of ECC RAM

- 3TB Storage

 

It sounds like such a great deal... but then you realize that's it. There's absolutely NO upgrade path whatsoever. I kinda blame Dell on that one.

 

It's not SUPPOSED to have an upgrade path other than CPUs, hard drives and maybe the network.  It's a 2U server, it's not a gaming PC, it was never designed to be a gaming PC, you wanted a gaming PC.  This is like trying to blame Freightliner because you bought one of their dump trucks and you're finding out that it's a terrible family car for picking up groceries or the kids at soccer practice.

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Dude it's a freaking poweredge 2950... what did you expect (I need one so bad)

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Dude it's a freaking poweredge 2950... what did you expect (I need one so bad)

 

I'll sell you mine :P

Want to build yourself a NAS? Check here!

 

 

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Also, this is ENTIRELY your fault.  You are entirely to blame because Dell has COMPLETE documentation online for their hardware.  You could have researched every aspect of that thing by downloading the appropriate PDFs and known what you were getting into.  Instead you decided to buy a 2U server thinking you could slap some fat ass GPU into it like it was an ATX box. That machine was NEVER designed with adding high end desktop graphics into it and it's customers never had that intention either.

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This was my original idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epIlB49SNTI

that works ok , but not that great. (on paper) 

Please quote me or tag me if your trying to talk to me , I might see it through all my other notifications ^_^

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 Achyls: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/TheGingerKid/saved/D4z9cf

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the current list of dead cards is as follows 2 evga gtx 980ti acx 2.0 , 1 evga gtx 980 acx 2.0 1600mhz core 2100mhz ram golden chip card ... failed hardcore , 1 290x that caught fire , 1 hd 7950 .

may you all rest in peaces in the giant pc in the sky

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nah this Server you got is pretty much great for running VMs, NAS, and server stuffs

 

i bet you can make 4 vitrual machines out of the server

 

so you have 4 PCs in one U2 server rack

Budget? Uses? Currency? Location? Operating System? Peripherals? Monitor? Use PCPartPicker wherever possible. 

Quote whom you're replying to, and set option to follow your topics. Or Else we can't see your reply.

 

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Also, this is ENTIRELY your fault.  You are entirely to blame because Dell has COMPLETE documentation online for their hardware.  You could have researched every aspect of that thing by downloading the appropriate PDFs and known what you were getting into.  Instead you decided to buy a 2U server thinking you could slap some fat ass GPU into it like it was an ATX box. That machine was NEVER designed with adding high end desktop graphics into it and it's customers never had that intention either.

 

Jeez man, chill...

 

The whole reason I bought this thing was to replace my Media Server/Mini Gaming rig. Of course I would use it for storage and such, but what I liked about the one I sold was that I could also play some older games on it.

 

Here's what I was planning to do (or something similar):

 

Want to build yourself a NAS? Check here!

 

 

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Jeez man, chill...

 

The whole reason I bought this thing was to replace my Media Server/Mini Gaming rig. Of course I would use it for storage and such, but what I liked about the one I sold was that I could also play some older games on it.

 

Here's what I was planning to do (or something similar):

 

 

Linus didn't use a compact rack unit in his video, did he? :P

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Linus didn't use a compact rack unit in his video, did he? :P

 

No, no he did not. But the principal is very similar. It's just unfortunate I didn't go too in depth on details of the server.

Want to build yourself a NAS? Check here!

 

 

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No no no... That's not what I blame Dell for... I blame Dell for not designing a better upgrade path for this thing.

- You're limited to PCIe 1.1 8x and 4x slots.

- The max capacity for each hot swap tray can hold is 750GB.

- I'm pretty sure this is the highest end CPU combo you can use.

It's a server not some gaming pc.

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You should've made a post on the forum asking whether or not this was a good buy,

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