<$175 12c24t server "build"

[ShadowChaser]

For those of you who want to dabble in home servers (looking at you, plex grrr) or just want to play around with cinebench, here's how to get started for a ridiculously low price. (Assuming electricity is a non-factor!!!)

This build does not include any storage, but hard drives are pretty much spare change if you spend enough time looking, or if you have a local computer shop.

The basic, basic idea is this: Server components from the 1366 era are cheap. Like, ridiculously cheap.

 

note: not that I would recommend you do this, if you have the money, buy something new. Or you could just be like me and want to screw around with plex encoding, in house streaming, and NAS stuff all in one.

 

Parts!

 

Motherboard: Any dual socket 1366 board should work, but for whichever one you find, make sure you read the manual and figure out what CPUs are supported! These are typically found for $40-$50 on eBay US. If you find one that comes with heatsinks, RAM, or other goodies, do factor that into the price!

 

CPU: If you need cores, the X5650 (2.66Ghz base, 3.06Ghz boost) gives you 6c12t in a 95W package. If you need clock speed, the X5677 (3.46Ghz base, 3.73Ghz boost) or X5672 (3.20Ghz base, 3.60Ghz boost) gives you 4c8t in a 130W or 95W package. Both can be had for $40/pair or sometimes less. I found a set of X5650s for $30 shipped and a set of X5677s for $44 shipped. If you need power efficiency, though, L series Xeons from this era are even cheaper, and they have a TDP of 60-80W. Expect to pay $15 to $20 for these puppies.

 

RAM: Nehalem Xeons support up to triple channel memory, so be sure to take advantage of that if you need it! 12GB or even 24GB of RAM (ecc or not, doesn't matter) should be relatively easy to find for $30, but if you have the budget, you can't go wrong with more, like, for a Minecraft server or something.

 

Heatsink: Ignore this if you found a bundle that came with heatsinks, but try to find either an aftermarket cooler, or at the very least a 2U (80mm) sized server heatsink. $12 apiece should get you something that isn't abysmal. What you REALLY need to make sure is that your heatsink 1. supports LGA 1366, and 2. Doesn't interfere with any components near the socket. I forgot about #2 and I found out the 20 pin atx power socket in right in front of one of my heatsinks.

 

Fans: Ignore this if your heatsinks came with fans. If you've got money to spend (which I doubt, considering you're reading this), noctua's 80mm fans are great! Otherwise, find the beefiest fans you can for $5-6 each. Cooler Master used to have some solid fans for $8, but I can't find them anymore :<

 

Case: Who am I kidding I have no budget for a case, especially if the motherboard if a proprietary size! Most dual socket 1366 boards are either E-ATX or proprietary, so your case selection will be limited, if not non-existant. If you are not comfortable running your system open air, try to find an all-in-one bundle that includes the server chassis.

 

PSU: This is where things can get messy. While it may be tempting to buy the cheapest PSU out there, don't. Power supplies have gotten much better at the low end, but do find one with two eight pin eps power plugs if you go with dual cpus. Try to find a used server psu if you need to save money, but the cx450/550 is a good choice for single cpus

 

With the right timing and/or patience, you can build a barebones but powerful server for under $200

 

Here's my config:

CPU: $30 - X5650 x2

Mobo: $40 - Supermicro X8DTU-F

RAM: $30 - 12x2GB DDR3 10600R ECC

Heatsinks: $22 - Supermicro 2U

Fans: $12 - Generic high CFM fans

PSU: $29 - AcBel 500w 80+ Gold PSU

Total for server only: $164

 

I'm assuming you have a keyboard + mouse, a monitor, and a spare fan or two for air circulation. You will need your own storage and corresponding cables, though, so the price will vary. Also, eBay is a dynamic market, so make those offers! I cut down the price of RAM from $48 to $30, the motherboard from $50 to $40, etc.

If you add some storage:

240gb ssd - $35

1tb hdd - $40

Still not that bad!

Edited October 26, 2018 by ShadowChaser
Formatting + part incompatibility

[Cereal5]

I've always wanted to do this... Then throw my 1080 on it and see how it games LOL. But I always want a server/NAS. One day. X58 (or LGA1366 in general) is so cheap you can do just about anything you want with it.

[.Ocean]

Buying old enterprise rackmount servers off of ebay is also a good route

[ShadowChaser]

2 minutes ago, .Ocean said:

Buying old enterprise rackmount servers off of ebay is also a good route

Yes, but getting hands on is a good way to get into servers, not to mention save a little cash >.o

[.Ocean]

20 minutes ago, ShadowChaser said:

Yes, but getting hands on is a good way to get into servers, not to mention save a little cash >.o

What exactly do you mean hands on? Buying an old enterprise server is pretty hands on, if you mean messing with the guts of a system everyone gets that experience building their desktop.

[mariushm]

A single x5650 has about as much processing power as a single Ryzen 3 1200

Two of them won't give you twice the performance due to memory issues and communication between sockets etc .. a single Ryzen 5 1600 will have more raw processing power than those 2 xeons together, because of DDR4 use and so on...

 

Yeah, it's ~ 160$ (for ryzen 1600 which includes cooler) vs ~$55 in cpu+heatsink costs, but it's also 1 x 65w TD cpu vs 2 x 95w TDP ... so assuming 24/7 use at full load, you're saving around 150w per hour or 3.6kWh per day which is what... 0.3-0.5$ at an average price of 0.12$ per kWh ... so you're potentially wasting 15-20$ a month if you use it at full load?  If you make something like this for rendering or video encoding, in 3-4 months you'd recuperate the cost of the Ryzen by not paying so much on your power bill.  We're not even mentioning air conditioning because at full load that server would heat your room during summers.

 

Oh, and you're dreaming if you think you're gonna run that Supermicro board with a 400w power supply - you need a psu with two EPS connectors, so at least a 650w one unless you go around hacking cables. And, at full load, those two xeon cpus could get close to 250-250w, while that 400w psu can only output 360w on 12v.

 

With two sockets you're gonna get mess with NUMA and crap, some games won't handle it and will only allocate threads on one cpu out of the two, and you're only gonna have 6 GB and when game uses more then it may slow down etc etc hassles.

[Spotty]

What are your plans to do with this system? What's it for?

 

 

1 hour ago, ShadowChaser said:

PSU: EVGA 400 N1 - $25 (Buy new, warranties are good)

Please do not put that PSU in to anything. It's just about the worst PSU with a brand name that you can buy. As @mariushm has rightly pointed out, in addition to being an absolutely awful unit, it's also not compatible with the system.

Take your own advice...

1 hour ago, ShadowChaser said:

PSU: This is where things can get messy. While it may be tempting to buy the cheapest PSU out there, don't. Power supplies have gotten much better at the low end, and for a few extra bucks you can get a 400-500W PSU for $20-$30. EVGA and Corsair's budget offerings are pretty good for the money, from personal experience.

[ShadowChaser]

17 hours ago, Spotty said:

What are your plans to do with this system? What's it for?

 

 

Please do not put that PSU in to anything. It's just about the worst PSU with a brand name that you can buy. As @mariushm has rightly pointed out, in addition to being an absolutely awful unit, it's also not compatible with the system.

Take your own advice...

Have they changed anything recently? Corsair’s CX series has many of the same components and it’s recommended for many, many budget builds. 

 

I will change the PSU though, I have each 4 pin plugged into a different socket and it is not recommended but doable. I never said this was a recommended build or anything.

[ShadowChaser]

17 hours ago, mariushm said:

A single x5650 has about as much processing power as a single Ryzen 3 1200

Two of them won't give you twice the performance due to memory issues and communication between sockets etc .. a single Ryzen 5 1600 will have more raw processing power than those 2 xeons together, because of DDR4 use and so on...

 

Yeah, it's ~ 160$ (for ryzen 1600 which includes cooler) vs ~$55 in cpu+heatsink costs, but it's also 1 x 65w TD cpu vs 2 x 95w TDP ... so assuming 24/7 use at full load, you're saving around 150w per hour or 3.6kWh per day which is what... 0.3-0.5$ at an average price of 0.12$ per kWh ... so you're potentially wasting 15-20$ a month if you use it at full load?  If you make something like this for rendering or video encoding, in 3-4 months you'd recuperate the cost of the Ryzen by not paying so much on your power bill.  We're not even mentioning air conditioning because at full load that server would heat your room during summers.

 

Oh, and you're dreaming if you think you're gonna run that Supermicro board with a 400w power supply - you need a psu with two EPS connectors, so at least a 650w one unless you go around hacking cables. And, at full load, those two xeon cpus could get close to 250-250w, while that 400w psu can only output 360w on 12v.

 

With two sockets you're gonna get mess with NUMA and crap, some games won't handle it and will only allocate threads on one cpu out of the two, and you're only gonna have 6 GB and when game uses more then it may slow down etc etc hassles.

Did you read? I never recommended buying heatsinks outright. This is not for gaming (like what? Really?) try to see if you can find a 200w space heater. They don’t do much. I will change the Psu tho as it does only have one 8 pin.

 

now, I’m not saying you’re wrong, but have you seen ddr4 prices? They’re still insane, and a kit of 16gb can cost more than the entire build

[ShadowChaser]

18 hours ago, .Ocean said:

What exactly do you mean hands on? Buying an old enterprise server is pretty hands on, if you mean messing with the guts of a system everyone gets that experience building their desktop.

Fair point, I just haven’t found any for a good price.

[mariushm]

46 minutes ago, ShadowChaser said:

Did you read? I never recommended buying heatsinks outright. This is not for gaming (like what? Really?) try to see if you can find a 200w space heater. They don’t do much. I will change the Psu tho as it does only have one 8 pin.

 

now, I’m not saying you’re wrong, but have you seen ddr4 prices? They’re still insane, and a kit of 16gb can cost more than the entire build

If it's not for gaming, then what is it for?  The only other use this would be good for would be video encoding, albeit at horrible performance per watt.

 

If you want a youtube watching machine (or even gaming machine depending on cpu) or even server (you don't need ecc for serving movies though plex or whatever and the performance is good enough), you can easily make something super cheap. For example, get

 

 MB: 33$ + (potentially free) shipping : a LGA1156 board (or another at 39$ plus shipping) from eBay (with q57/p55/p57 chipset which allows up to 4x4 GB or 2x8 GB DDR3)..  you can find 40-50$ H55 boards but those are capped at max 2 x 4 GB DDR3 sticks,

CPU: 5$  intel G6590 (dual core with integrated graphics)  or

~30$ gets you a quad core i5-760  (though performance wise its about half as fast as an AMD 2200g and about 10-20% slower than Athlon 200ge) .. there's higher end cpus like i7 860/870/880 but they're still expensive at around 60-80$. 

RAM: ~37$ for a 8 GB DDR3/DDR3L stick (cheaper if you go with 4GB sticks and a board that has 4 slots, can live with just 4 GB for a couple of months or so if you're that poor)

CLR: ~10-20$ for  heatsink/cooler

 

so 33-50 mb + 37 ram + 5-30 cpu +10= ~85-130$   ... spend 100-120$ on a GTX1050 and you can actually play modern games at 1080p medium-high.

 

 

 

 

[ShadowChaser]

6 hours ago, mariushm said:

If it's not for gaming, then what is it for?  The only other use this would be good for would be video encoding, albeit at horrible performance per watt.

 

If you want a youtube watching machine (or even gaming machine depending on cpu) or even server (you don't need ecc for serving movies though plex or whatever and the performance is good enough), you can easily make something super cheap. For example, get

 

 MB: 33$ + (potentially free) shipping : a LGA1156 board (or another at 39$ plus shipping) from eBay (with q57/p55/p57 chipset which allows up to 4x4 GB or 2x8 GB DDR3)..  you can find 40-50$ H55 boards but those are capped at max 2 x 4 GB DDR3 sticks,

CPU: 5$  intel G6590 (dual core with integrated graphics)  or

~30$ gets you a quad core i5-760  (though performance wise its about half as fast as an AMD 2200g and about 10-20% slower than Athlon 200ge) .. there's higher end cpus like i7 860/870/880 but they're still expensive at around 60-80$. 

RAM: ~37$ for a 8 GB DDR3/DDR3L stick (cheaper if you go with 4GB sticks and a board that has 4 slots, can live with just 4 GB for a couple of months or so if you're that poor)

CLR: ~10-20$ for  heatsink/cooler

 

so 33-50 mb + 37 ram + 5-30 cpu +10= ~85-130$   ... spend 100-120$ on a GTX1050 and you can actually play modern games at 1080p medium-high.

 

 

 

 

a G6590 would take forever encoding 1080p video, and this is coming from a guy who has a dual 771 server in the closet

For $5 I'd rather get a quad core Xeon.

$37 gets you 24GB of ecc ram (Which is why the server board is a good choice, ecc memory is stupid cheap)

I really don't understand why you are trying to undermine this "build", heck, it's in the name. It's for ppl that want server grade hardware without server grade cost. Even on my 7600K plex can easily eat up all my cpu cycles if I'm not careful, and I personally intend to use the system as a NAS, media storage + plex, and MC server for my friends, as well as many, many more things I can't have running amok on my main PC. For $170, that kind of value is really hard to beat, and I do invite you to try and prove me wrong!

 

I don't need a gaming server - the idea in itself is rather ludicrous, though Linus's home server does look nice  - as I have a pretty decent desktop already. It's for the tasks that my current server (8c8t 771) and my desktop cannot handle.

 

Yes, it's niche, but now this niche has been filled, and that's a win in my book  

 

If we were talking about LP servers like you suggested (which we were not), a raspberry pi for $35 is the way to go. Seriously.

[mariushm]

26 minutes ago, ShadowChaser said:

a G6590 would take forever encoding 1080p video, and this is coming from a guy who has a dual 771 server in the closet

For $5 I'd rather get a quad core Xeon. 

 

But I wouldn't use the G6590 processor to encode an 1080p video. With the money I save I can buy a GTX1050 or RX550/RX560 and use nvEnc/AMF to do hardware encoding at up to 100-200 fps (depending on quality thresholds). I also don't need the server to be capable of doing things real time for most content, it can be encoded over night using the hardware encoders on video cards.

 

A RX 550 is only 76$ on Newegg : https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814930001&amp;cm_re=rx_550-_-14-930-001-_-Product

 

Oh and RX series (including RX550) has hardware HEVC encoder and decoder, besides h264 that's normal to find... it's fast enough to do 1080p at 30fps I think. Try encoding hevc with those Intel processors in software and see how fast they are.

 

Quote

$37 gets you 24GB of ecc ram (Which is why the server board is a good choice, ecc memory is stupid cheap)

But you're missing the point that it's across TWO cpu sockets, 12 GB belongs to one CPU and 12 GB belongs to another CPU.  If a thread on one CPU needs to access memory from a thread that runs on the other CPU, that memory transfer would be much slower, more latency... and if the applications are not NUMA aware, they may not even go outside a single cpu socket, so they'd only "see" half of your memory. Other than well written apps that are NUMA aware and use lots of threads, like x264 for example, most apps would not be aware of that memory.

 

Memory is not power hungry, but it's not nothing, and it's not something that can be put on sleep or stand-by so it uses power all the time... let's say it's 1w per stick, 24 GB will be 12w or rounded up to 15w to include VRM's inefficiencies and assuming 12 sticks x 2 GB to fill all th slots... running 24/7 that's 15w x 24h x 31 days = 11160 w or 11.1kWh .... at 0.1$ a kWh that's 1$ a month in electricity just to have 24 GB.

 

Maybe you're just a kid who doesn't have to worry about power bills, but others do.

 

Your configuration is not that cheap, because your $170 is still calculated with a shitty power supply that would never work... and you yourself admit finding a case in which to shove a server 2U board (e-atx or custom) would be difficult, and then I'm not even getting into "quality of life" issues like how much noise a system like this would make with 80mm fans and two cpus encoding videos.

 

And I'm repeating myself, but if you sit down and do the math on how much power will be consumed with your scenario, you may find out that it makes more sense to "borrow" a few dollars and make more expensive built from the start because instead of paying money to the power company, you'll just pay back the money you borrowed. These servers are discontinued for good reasons, because they no longer have a good performance per watt, that's why they're so cheap.

 

My LGA1156 is cheap for other reasons, mainly because it's basically a dead platform, Intel no longer makes lga 1156 processors and even the top processors are now weaker than cheapest Ryzen... but at least they have high enough frequency per core they would not throttle (much) video games, if user for some reason may want to play games at some point.

 

With your configuration, user locks himself into a single use, one purpose, that of being a cumbersome server, noisy, power hungry, etc ..with my suggestion at least user can resale the hardware as a regular desktop machine or use it for other things if he no longer needs a server, it's a multi-use configuration.

 

These days you can achieve server reliability with regular desktop hardware, don't really need ECC if all you're doing is streaming files (worse case scenario if a bit is flipped, you'll get a corrupt frame when streaming a movie so would you really care... nah)

 

 

[ShadowChaser]

1 minute ago, mariushm said:

-snip-

While I did say I was using two cpus, I never went into detail as to how the hardware is allocated (giant rabbit hole). Yes, I'm a relative noob to VMs, but that doesn't mean I'm not capable of using them. I might live with my parents, but the fact that you assume kids don't pay bills is just wrong personally (unless your family is rich...I suppose? No idea) If you bought a bare board then yes, finding a case would be difficult, but hey, this ain't a guide. There are many listings on eBay that are server chassis based, but you'd be surprised at how many people run PCs out of cardboard boxes and how awesomely efficient they are!

 

Yes, electricity costs money, I concede that, but why would a system be running 24/7 if it's not needed 24/7? In my case, yes, it'll be running 24/7, as it has NAS function built in, but why people leave their computers on over night w/o a good reason still baffles me.

 

Of course there's a ratio between old hardware vs new hardware in cost vs performance and power consumption. 1366 seems to ride the line, as 771 is too power hungry for the same (if even the same) performance, while 2011 still has a relatively inflated price. 1156 is kinda weird as it has much of the same architectures from 1366 (Nehalem, Westmere, Lynnfield, etc) with similar power consumption for high, mid, and low end.

 

As for the PSU, do you really think someone in need of cheap performance would be able to buy an 800W Gold PSU? I'm merely including an example of a psu, as I cannot account for local market volatility. Yes, it's bad by modern standards, but so is everything else about the build, so I see no point being made there. I have a spare evga supernova psu, but that costs $100 by itself, so no, I don't see why anyone on a shoestring budget would want to buy a high end PSU. For single socket, any PSU will do just fine, and realistically, splitting the EPS plug isn't that bad either, unless the cables are spaghetti. PSUs made in the last few years have many protections in place, so a PSU blowing up is either bad luck, exceptionally poor QC, or bad cables (Unfortunately, I have experienced all 3, but never has it been a fault of the PSU itself, per se)

 

I still think you missed the point of ECC ram (Or maybe I'm just misunderstanding?) More ram = better in my scenario, it's different for everyone. I just listed what I'll be doing with my setup. I can't possibly account for all the different setups as that'd be a nightmare.

 

You mention quality of life issues regarding noise/heat. As much as I love/hate the joke of servers being jet engines and/or space heaters, most servers past the P4 era have been astonishingly quiet under load, maybe 35dba max for a 2U, and 43dba for a 1U. This is all from what I have personally seen and heard, and many of these servers had 130W chips in them to boot. 

 

Reliability was not the purpose of this build, it was to off load tasks from a regular desktop that would otherwise be taking up valuable cycles, resources, etc.

 

Like I said, niche product for niche people  Perhaps it works for my workflow and not for yours, which I totally understand.