Pushing past design spec

[Radium_Angel]

So some time last year, I was given a mostly complete Dell PowerEdge 2900 (model III, the tower) with the following specs:

 

2x Xeon 5430 CPUs

8GB DDR2 FBDIMMs

146GB SAS hard drive (15k)

and a bunch of broken fans

 

Initially I just wanted to get it working, so I ordered a new set of fans and fired it up.

A little loud (common with an old server) but pretty neat.

 

Looking around, I thought I might be able to bump it up for not much money. So, off to eBay for more ram. Now it has 32GB because, why not?

A bunch of 15k SAS drives were given to me, so I have two RAID (perc 6/i) set ups, one for the OS with a pair of 146GB SAS in a mirror and 6 300GB 15K drives in a RAID 5 for data.

So far, neat. I tossed in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS for the OS because I was working with RNNs at the time (Recurrent Neural Networks. Machine Learning) and I thought this would be a cool machine to do it on.

 

Well, turns out I was wrong. While the quad-core Xeons provide plenty of kick, RNNs are written for GFX cards, not CPUs.

Therein was the first stumbling block. The slots on the motherboard are only x8 slots, which obviously won't fit a standard video card. Hunting around eBay I picked up a GT 710 in x8 configuration. Yeah, don't laugh, the card works fine for 1680x1050 resolution for my twin 32" LCDs. 

 

I picked up a PCIe wireless card which worked right out of the box, a Sound Blaster X-Fi Extreme Audio, again, working out of the box, an ancient 4 port USB card and a 4 port NIC.

Pretty cool I thought, and proceeded to play around with the system for fun. Steam, some RNN now that I had a video card, and so forth.

 

But I didn't really have a purpose for the box. Overall, I'd dropped maybe 50$ into it. It became a curio at most. With the big screens it was nice to play DVDs on it however.

Then it occurred to me, why not see what I can really push it to do? Well past the design spec the creators intended....

 

This is where the fun began.

 

First up, was the floppy port. Mounted vertically just underneath the CD-ROM, was a slot for a floppy. Well who uses floppies anymore? Surely it can be put to better use, correct?

Well yes, yes it can. I got one of these:

https://www.amazon.com/iStarUSA-BPN-2535DE-SA-Hot-Swap-Drive-Black/dp/B00F3A5RVO

A perfect fit. I had a pair of 500GB Western Digital laptop spinners laying about unused, so in the went. But I encountered a problem, it needed a single SATA power, but two SATA data jacks. The internals of the server, as large as they are, are lacking in expansion options. So off to eBay again for a dual port SATA card. Lovely little device, worked with Linux OOTB too. 

The backplane in the PE 2900 provided ample power from the floppy connector (converted to SATA with an adapter) and with some quick testing, I confirmed it was doing as I wanted. I will swap out the spinners for some SSDs just as soon as I can find a matching pair for cheap.

 

A blu ray player fell into my lap and that proved quite troublesome to make work. It'll burn fine, and play DVDs no issue, but actual blu rays are an entirely different beast, but that goes beyond the scope here.

The final piece of the puzzle was a real video card.

The x8 slots only provide 25watts of power, so any more would have to come from elsewhere, and there's still the issue of getting the card to fit.

 

After much reading around the web, it turns out you can cut off the parts of the video card interface that don't fit, and power it from the power supply. WSell I have twin 900watt power supplies here, so power won't be an issue, but routing it will.

From the second floppy power connector (courtesy eBay once again) and a few adapters, I got it to be a 6pin connection, and just today arrived my GTX 550Ti video card.

 

Holding my breath, and the dremel carefully, I filed off the unneeded parts of the interface, and modified the bracket to fit. Dropped it in the server, in place of the GT 710, closed it back up and crossed my fingers.

Worked fine, first time.

I fired up War Thunder (as it has a native linux port) and stress tested the card. Worked flawlessly. Experiment confirmed I can now put in a much better card.

 

My final goal here, is to get a NVMe drive to work. I have the PCIe adapter, just need a cheap nVME card and we shall see what I can do.

 

General thoughts:

 

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS boots in about 5-8 seconds, from init screen to desktop. Not bad for a bunch of spinners.

Modding the video card bracket was a monumental PITA, as the server slots were never designed to hold a dual slot card, and everything was getting in the way.

Routing cables around the internal fans was also a PITA.

 

The system will support a max of 48GB of ram, and I'm sorely tempted, even if I can't figure out what to do with it all (yeah, I'm running several VMs, including Windows 9. Yes, that's a real product)

When I get daylight again, I'll post some proper pics.

 

[williamcll]

Well, I heard kingston released a cheap NVME drive recently, but I feel like the GPU could be better.

[Radium_Angel]

1 minute ago, williamcll said:

Well, I heard kingston released a cheap NVME drive recently, but I feel like the GPU could be better.

Oh I'm certain the GFX card could be better, but as an experiment, I didn't want to chop up an expensive card on the outside chance I mucked it up, or the info I read was wrong.

Now that I know it does work, I'll have to decide what nVidia card to replace the 550Ti with...