Old server into gaming machine?

[madaday]

Hi all!

 

So I recently saw the LTT video on making a Server gaming PC and was looking at ebay at some cheap offerings to play around with. I know that they can be loud, and you are really limited with expansion, but I could move from gaming on it, to hosting game servers on it with relative ease?

 

I found this HP ProLiant DL160 G6 Rack Server Twin Quad Core Xeon L5520 2.26GHz 24GB DDR3 RAM and I am out of my depth. I don;t mind paying for an OS and drives, but would love to know any tips on them. It does have a 1x PCI-Express x16 expansion slot according to the blurb so I'm guessing a small gfx card would fit, and maybe a non power hungry one! Its all up in the air right now and its not a desperate thing to do, was just browsing late one night and stumbled into this world!

[Hans Christian | Teri]

If that thing runs that's a freakin' steal!

[GER_T4IGA]

That looks like a 1U chassis. I don't know how you are going to get a normal sued GPU in there without doing some ghetto modding to the top cover or removing it all together. Maybe there is enough space with a riser card  

i am not familiar with setting up game servers but that thing sure sounds powerful enough to do the job. 

[FilipSebik]

Get it now

[madaday]

3 minutes ago, GER_T4IGA said:

That looks like a 1U chassis. I don't know how you are going to get a normal sued GPU in there without doing some ghetto modding to the top cover or removing it all together. Maybe there is enough space with a riser card  

i am not familiar with setting up game servers but that thing sure sounds powerful enough to do the job. 

Yeah I was guessing that I would need a riser, I'm not sure if there is a slot at the back for a card io though?

[madaday]

8 minutes ago, Hans Christian | Teri said:

If that thing runs that's a freakin' steal!

Haha is it a good one? I'm guessing the G6 means its 6th gen? Server tech is all over my head!

[QFA350]

2 minutes ago, madaday said:

Yeah I was guessing that I would need a riser, I'm not sure if there is a slot at the back for a card io though?

ghetto mount the gpu to the front or side of the chassis

[madaday]

This is starting to sound like a fun project! I might have to look into it after the weekend! 

 

I'm also guessing I would have to acquire some server HDD or would I be able to bodge some normal consumer ones in. I'm not overly worried about setting up RAID to begin with (unless I have no choice to)

[manikyath]

for those that never seen servers go that cheap, i'll explain:

 

sometimes datacenters upgrade their old infrastructure, leaving them with literally hundreds of machines like these that are old, inefficient, and worn out to the bone.

 

since throwing them in the garbage costs money (even if only paying for the container to dump them in) datacenters found an amazing trick: they (or a middle man) toss them on the internet for dirt cheap prices and flip them to whoever wants one.

"selling is cheaper than throwing them away" kinda deal.

 

when turning these into gaming rigs - which you totally can - theres a few things to keep in mind:

- first off the easy one: room. a 1u chassis isnt gonna fit a GPU.

- power supply wattage, and availability of pcie power connectors. some servers do, and some servers dont have the necessary equipment to hook up a GPU.

- cpu setup: a lot of these (especially the cheaper ones) have more slower cores, over less faster ones, creating a recipe for bottles and necking when trying to game on them. especially something to note when going for the less muticore-optimized games.

[Mr.Meerkat]

I remember I resisted the temptation for a dualy intel quad core server off ebay as well (almost the same config actually, my 3570k was struggling to host the server while giving me good fps ) almost a year ago but instead bit the bullet and bought a i5 2300 and a h61 mobo for my game server with 8GB of RAM...forward 3 months and I installed my ol' 560 into it as I found it sitting in it's box with no love...forward another 6 months and I bought it a few nice 2TB drives to go along with the 128gb sandisk SSD that I shoved in there so it's both a back-up PC, NAS server and game server...

 

I guess from this experience, I'm always going to go with slightly older consumer hardware over server stuff if I'm going to build a server for general purpose (this includes 24/7 game and TS servers which my current server is doing right now with me dumping not used but useful files onto it) as it gives me more options in the future to be able to do other stuff with the PC...(I could literally right now, install the aircooled 290x&PSU and take out the hard drives and be left have a very powerful LAN machine as it's micro ATX so it's only 1/5 of the weight and is a lot smaller compared to my primary dual AIO ATX computer  ).

[madaday]

That's a good idea - I would probably mainly just use it as a file server, media and hosting some games. It wouldn't really need a heavy duty gfx card at all, and I could just buy a cheap barebones to hide in a wardrobe all the time. That's a good idea! I must have been blinded by the server gods like Linus has!

[legopc]

Please dont... you are going to need to put way to much effort into it for what you actually get out of it. Server stuff is actually different in a lot of ways and it wont be as easy as throwing a gpu in a server chassis. 

[Mark77]

21 hours ago, manikyath said:

sometimes datacenters upgrade their old infrastructure, leaving them with literally hundreds of machines like these that are old, inefficient, and worn out to the bone.

 

Yup.  Data centers have what is known as a "PUE" or "Power Usage Efficiency" rating.  When you add in air conditioning, distribution/transformer losses, etc., a datacenter may very well use twice as much power overall than an actual server itself uses (ie: PUE = 2.0).  So as Intel and the storage vendors are able to make their equipment more efficient, it often becomes very economical to throw away perfectly good and not even "worn-out" equipment away just to upgrade to newer more power-efficient stuff. 

 

Even in this forum, I have pretty much a rule of thumb in the server section, and that is, unless the machine is Sandy Bridge or newer (or some very low power solution), its probably not worth using as a 24/7 server.  Yes, I know, I've probably broken the hearts of a few people who thought they got some great deal on a 6-year-old dual Xeon system, but Sandy Bridge (and the corresponding E3-12xx chips) are so extremely and profoundly "ahead" of the stuff previous that it makes little economic sense to keep using them.  The value of that equipment is literally less than zero for 24/7 use. 

[manikyath]

12 minutes ago, Mark77 said:

 

Yup.  Data centers have what is known as a "PUE" or "Power Usage Efficiency" rating.  When you add in air conditioning, distribution/transformer losses, etc., a datacenter may very well use twice as much power overall than an actual server itself uses (ie: PUE = 2.0).  So as Intel and the storage vendors are able to make their equipment more efficient, it often becomes very economical to throw away perfectly good and not even "worn-out" equipment away just to upgrade to newer more power-efficient stuff. 

 

Even in this forum, I have pretty much a rule of thumb in the server section, and that is, unless the machine is Sandy Bridge or newer (or some very low power solution), its probably not worth using as a 24/7 server.  Yes, I know, I've probably broken the hearts of a few people who thought they got some great deal on a 6-year-old dual Xeon system, but Sandy Bridge (and the corresponding E3-12xx chips) are so extremely and profoundly "ahead" of the stuff previous that it makes little economic sense to keep using them.  The value of that equipment is literally less than zero for 24/7 use. 

well, theres other factors as well, like the amount of numbercrunching you can slap into a single rack. theres datacenters like online.net that take this to the extreme, and have setups like these:

where every ethernet cable is a dedicated 8-core server. (low power, mind you)

 

but for home use... the old stuff is more than good enough as a hobby.

 

EDIT: should add, this picture contains about 2520 dedicated servers,

or a total monthly income of €22680.

[Mark77]

6 minutes ago, manikyath said:

but for home use... the old stuff is more than good enough as a hobby.

 

If you don't leave it running 24/7, sure.  But for 24/7 operation, the old stuff is worthless junk.  Perhaps even worse "in the home" than in a datacentre as at least datacenter servers tend to see higher utilization.  "At home" is basically idle probably 95% of the time.  And that's where Sandy Bridge (and subsequent architectures) shine. 

[manikyath]

4 minutes ago, Mark77 said:

 

If you don't leave it running 24/7, sure.  But for 24/7 operation, the old stuff is worthless junk.  Perhaps even worse "in the home" than in a datacentre as at least datacenter servers tend to see higher utilization.  "At home" is basically idle probably 95% of the time.  And that's where Sandy Bridge (and subsequent architectures) shine. 

eh, having a wattmeter hooked up to my i3 560 machine.. the two hard drives i use for storage seem to make more of a difference than the actual processor...

its kinda like when you have hundreds of them, those 5 watts matter bigtime.. if you have one sitting idle... eh.

[mragapigc]

On April 23, 2016 at 6:01 AM, madaday said:

Hi all!

 

So I recently saw the LTT video on making a Server gaming PC and was looking at ebay at some cheap offerings to play around with. I know that they can be loud, and you are really limited with expansion, but I could move from gaming on it, to hosting game servers on it with relative ease?

 

I found this HP ProLiant DL160 G6 Rack Server Twin Quad Core Xeon L5520 2.26GHz 24GB DDR3 RAM and I am out of my depth. I don;t mind paying for an OS and drives, but would love to know any tips on them. It does have a 1x PCI-Express x16 expansion slot according to the blurb so I'm guessing a small gfx card would fit, and maybe a non power hungry one! Its all up in the air right now and its not a desperate thing to do, was just browsing late one night and stumbled into this world!

I am doing the same thing but using a 2011 HP ML150G6. i am still waiting for the PSU options, since mine comes with 450watts.  I order a PSU thing that measure the power to make notes and see if i can get a better PSU in order to add a more demanding one. I have to strip it, take the raid card and caddy since have 1 2.0 pci port and add a GPU. the nice thing even that these 1366 chips are old, i can get a top of the line one. and try if i can get 2 por 60USD and watercool these suckers. But first is the PSU. So if someone have ideas in the mean time let me know. BTW the windows 10 works ok here. I will try to get the license today or tomorrow. since i all ready going to finish the trial period.