Show Off Your Server!

[victorc777]

Well, my workstation project isn't as awesome as most of the rigs here, but I still want to share my progress. I am building a picture frame workstation case with an ASUS KFSN4-DRE/SAS, 2 Opteron 2358SE's Quad Core 2.4GHz, Firepro V3900, 16GBs DDR2-667 RAM, 750 Watt PSU, and 4 RAIDed 36GB 10K SAS HDD's. Total cost under $300. I am still waiting for the drives, PSU, and SAS cables, they are in transit now. I will start my own thread with all my progress as soon as I get my hardware in.

[mattkosem]

Well, my workstation project isn't as awesome as most of the rigs here, but I still want to share my progress. I am building a picture frame workstation case with an ASUS KFSN4-DRE/SAS, 2 Opteron 2358SE's Quad Core 2.4GHz, Firepro V3900, 16GBs DDR2-667 RAM, 750 Watt PSU, and 4 RAIDed 36GB 10K SAS HDD's. Total cost under $300. I am still waiting for the drives, PSU, and SAS cables, they are in transit now. I will start my own thread with all my progress as soon as I get my hardware in.

I'm working on a <$300 budget rig myself, should have pretty close perf to yours except for seq disk transfers. I went with an Intel Dual S1366 board, 16GB of ram, a 120GB SSD (refurb), and pair of Xeon EC3539s. Shopping mostly on Ebay, but with the SSD, case, and CPU coolers coming from Newegg, I'm at a total of $382 including shipping. I had a spare PSU to use with it, and spare spindle disks, so those costs aren't included. Just waiting for the last parts (the mobo and SSD) to arrive so I can spin it up. Hopefully it'll work out well. Mine is going to be crammed into a pretty small mid tower ATX case once I get the mods done.

--Matt

[victorc777]

I'm working on a <$300 budget rig myself, should have pretty close perf to yours except for seq disk transfers. I went with an Intel Dual S1366 board, 16GB of ram, a 120GB SSD (refurb), and pair of Xeon EC3539s. Shopping mostly on Ebay, but with the SSD, case, and CPU coolers coming from Newegg, I'm at a total of $382 including shipping. I had a spare PSU to use with it, and spare spindle disks, so those costs aren't included. Just waiting for the last parts (the mobo and SSD) to arrive so I can spin it up. Hopefully it'll work out well. Mine is going to be crammed into a pretty small mid tower ATX case once I get the mods done.

--Matt

Well, I would say your rig will be higher spec'ed than mine. I am limited to DDR2 which is a bummer for me. Also I would like to benchmark our systems once their done, I believe even though your CPU's are lower clocked, they will perform better and they are lower TDP as well, 65 watt XEON to my 137 watt Opty's. I would like to also see how quick your rig boots compared to mine. I'm sure mine would still be a slouch but I can't see myself running SSD's yet. The affordable ones have mixed reviews and the expensive ones are, well, expenisive. Doesn't help that I already bought an SSD 2 years ago and lasted me an afternoon before it dissapeared. Out of all my rigs, this is the first time I have attemped using SAS HDD's, I hope it turns out good for me. Hope your rig does work out well! keep me posted, there is not enough people building dually's just for their home PC, we are far and few in between.

[mattkosem]

Well, I would say your rig will be higher spec'ed than mine. I am limited to DDR2 which is a bummer for me. Also I would like to benchmark our systems once their done, I believe even though your CPU's are lower clocked, they will perform better and they are lower TDP as well, 65 watt XEON to my 137 watt Opty's. I would like to also see how quick your rig boots compared to mine. I'm sure mine would still be a slouch but I can't see myself running SSD's yet. The affordable ones have mixed reviews and the expensive ones are, well, expenisive. Doesn't help that I already bought an SSD 2 years ago and lasted me an afternoon before it dissapeared. Out of all my rigs, this is the first time I have attemped using SAS HDD's, I hope it turns out good for me. Hope your rig does work out well! keep me posted, there is not enough people building dually's just for their home PC, we are far and few in between.

I guess we'll see. The board I ended up with, due to cost constraints,only has a pair of memory channels for each processor. The SSD is a refurb'd Corsair F120GB2. It's definitely not as good as any of my other SSDs, and sort of a wildcard for reliability, but hopefully better than the spindle disks I have laying around. These chips also only have 2.5 GT/s QPI, which probably sets em back a bit.

I'm down for some bench runs. I'm not sure what I'll be using is box for quite yet, but it'll probably end up becoming my dev workstation if it works out well.

--Matt

[DaveB]

Well I don't build, need or use any of the high-end servers I've seen in this thread, but have always liked building and using duallie workstations. Here's a compilation of photos duallies I've built over the years that I found on various hard drives. This is probably 2/3 of the systems I've had over the years. I built all of them except the Compaq which I got cheap on eBay with some 1.7 GHz Foster Core Xeons that I replaced with 2.6 GHz Prestonia Core Xeons. I don't have a photo of my first duallie build back in 2000 which was a Rioworks PDVIA dual slot 1 with dual PIII 700 Coppermines OC'd to 933 MHz mounted on Asus S370-DL slotkets. The slotkets provided core voltage adjustment to get the OC stable. Even though it had low memory bandwidth with that VIA chipset, it ran real sweet and I got hooked on duallies. There were other MSI K8T Master2 FARs, Asus K8N-DLs, Iwill ZMax DPs, and Supermicro XDAL-Es that I can't find photos of.

AMD Duallies








Intel Duallies





My current duallie is in my sig, an mATX Supermicro X7DCA-L with 2xL5408 Xeons tape modded to 2.66 GHz, 24GB Crucial DDR2-667 Reg/ECC, an Intel 80GB SSD boot drive, and a single slot width PowerColor HD 7750 Video card. It's kind of a reprise of one I built back in 2008 in a Lian Li mATX case. With the low voltage xeons it runs very cool and virtually silent - the PSU is a Rosewill fanless modular 500W Silent Night which adds to the silence. I bought the mobo and 8GB of the RAM at anoher forum for $165 shipped as a combo with a pair of 2 GHz E5405s but swapped them out for a pair of L5408s I picked up on eBay for $12 shipped. Here are photos of the initial setup to get it running with a GTX 430 video card I had laying around. And, believe it or not, I got it up and running using an Enermax 270W SFX mATX PSU!





I forgot how loud those Dynatron fans are at boot up, so I replaced them with some quieter 80mm 2,500 RPM fans I had laying around.



Finally I put it in this Xigmatek GIGAS mATX Cube Case. The case comes with four 120mm 1,000 rpm fans - two in front and two at the rear. I'm using a fan controller that came with the case to turn down the CPU fans and the two front fans to keep it almost dead silent.



Here are some graphs showing how power efficient the L5408s (running @ 2.66 GHz like the L5430s shown in the graphs) actually are when running on a San Clemente (5100) chipset motherboard (no FB-DIMMS). The graphs are from this review



The Xigmatek GIGAS two mountings just for SSDs and another 6 for hard drives. I added a $12 USB 3.0 PCI-e x1 card to activate that front panel USB 3.0 port and installed a 3.5 inch media reader I had laying around with a 5.25 inch front panel bay adapter. I picked up 16GB more of Crucial DDR2 667 Reg/ECC for $60 to get the RAM up to 24 GB and got the single slot 7750 so I could use the adjacent PCI-e x8 slot for a RAID card in the future. But it's been running for a couple of months now and what started as a trip down memory lane has yielded a really nicely running, compact, inexpensive, quiet 8-core system.

[bearcatrp]

Nice systems. Have built 4 duallies in the past 4 years. 2 harpertown rigs and 2 westmere rigs. Crunched with them until they sold. Here is what I currently have:
2 intel X5670's westmere processors
48 GB ram
Saphire HD7950 GPU
Corsair HX850 PSU
256 SSD, 500GB and 2 TB drives
Corsair 800D case.

Will post some pictures when I move it back where it belongs. Just finished transfering from a smaller case. This case was worth the money.

[2cpu]

I dint want to retired him but the scsi disk"s hard to found in big capacities.
So retired but operational . : )

http://i.imgur.com/TdVET0u.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/zR7T1oa.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Ri1uQJ5.jpg

[Movieman]

ahh, we're doing oldies!
This is sitting downstairs on a desk just as you see in this pic..Identical with 4-Intel 700MHz slot one "xeons" in it with 16-1 gig sticks of PC-100 ECC REG..Try and find those today! LOL
Weighs 102lbs and when it was delivered UPS sent two guys!
I even have all the manuals and diskettes that came with it.
I heard this was over $22,000.00 when new..I got it off ebay years ago for $125.00 and $208.00 shipping from California to me.
AND..Yes, it does still work!..
http://www.supermicro.com/products/s...0/sys-8050.cfm

[bearcatrp]

MM, anyway to use todays parts for that case? Man, that would be one hell of a server using todays xeons.

[DaveB]

ahh, we're doing oldies!
This is sitting downstairs on a desk just as you see in this pic..Identical with 4-Intel 700MHz slot one "xeons" in it with 16-1 gig sticks of PC-100 ECC REG..Try and find those today! LOL
Weighs 102lbs and when it was delivered UPS sent two guys!
I even have all the manuals and diskettes that came with it.
I heard this was over $22,000.00 when new..I got it off ebay years ago for $125.00 and $208.00 shipping from California to me.
AND..Yes, it does still work!..
http://www.supermicro.com/products/s...0/sys-8050.cfm

We put in a system for the IRS 20 years ago that has been through two major HW "refreshes" and we're now planning #3 for next year. But we still have a Dell powerEdge 2400 dual PIII 400s running Solaris in the system - with massive 9 GB SCSI drives! Every site has 3 of them and they are basically no trouble at all - just beginning to slow things down a bit.

[Andreas]

ahh, we're doing oldies!

Compaq Proliant 6000
4 x Xeon 450 MHz
4 GB RAM
18 x 9 GB SCSI disks, connected via 3 SCSI buses 40 MB/sec each. Max I/O rate = 90-100 MB/sec




Andy

[Buckeye]

Good grief what a monster !

I bet that kicks out some heat & noise when running

[Kain665]

Keep the oldies coming!

I know some of you XSers ran DP AXP setups, Show me one cooled by a pair of Big Typhoons!

[paulbagz]

lol if we're doing oldies then I will dig up my Compaq ML330 G2!

Had 2x P3 Xeons, 4GB RAM, boatloads of Hard Drives, multiple Sound/VGA/RAID cards the works.

Even had to do a custom PWM solder job for the case fan so that I could run it quietly in my college room under my bed (ran the CS etc servers for Uni).

-PB

[Andreas]

Good grief what a monster !
I bet that kicks out some heat & noise when running

Heat is ok, as the CPUs in those days didn't use too much power. But the noise level is deafening, nothing for the home office room.

wrt to size, the biggest of those Compaq ProLiant servers in my collection is the Proliant 8000. 8 Xeons connected by a proprietary ProFusion chip. 16 GB in 1998 costed a fortune and total weight with 21 SCSI drives is approx 240 pounds. Triple PSUs provided decent failure protection.

Bought it last year for 80 $ - found it in a barn ....

Andy

[s0lid]

Something in my collection


Quad PPro board which supports up to 4GB of SDRAM

[victorc777]

ahh, we're doing oldies!
This is sitting downstairs on a desk just as you see in this pic..Identical with 4-Intel 700MHz slot one "xeons" in it with 16-1 gig sticks of PC-100 ECC REG..Try and find those today! LOL
Weighs 102lbs and when it was delivered UPS sent two guys!
I even have all the manuals and diskettes that came with it.
I heard this was over $22,000.00 when new..I got it off ebay years ago for $125.00 and $208.00 shipping from California to me.
AND..Yes, it does still work!..
http://www.supermicro.com/products/s...0/sys-8050.cfm

You know, we were posting about are older yet capable dually's with 2+ Ghz, quad core's+, and capable of using 1TB hdd's. Now all of a sudden these systems are being categorized along with these massive, power hungry, prehistoric calculators!

Kudos though for keeping those from the scrap heap though! I hate to see people discard their old PC just because they have something newer, unless you discard it into my hands, then I forgive you. LOL

[victorc777]

Compaq Proliant 6000
4 x Xeon 450 MHz
4 GB RAM
18 x 9 GB SCSI disks, connected via 3 SCSI buses 40 MB/sec each. Max I/O rate = 90-100 MB/sec




Andy

I would LOVE this case!! Every time I buy a new drive I would just throw it in to this rig. I can see me have 50TB in one case. :P

[Andreas]

I would LOVE this case!! Every time I buy a new drive I would just throw it in to this rig. I can see me have 50TB in one case. :P

The case is great. The noise and power level is less than stellar.

My current homeserver has 72 TB, uses 150 watt with all disks spinning and an E3-1245v2 plus 32GB RAM for a few VMs.

And the noise level is very low.

Andy

[NKrader]

The case is great. The noise and power level is less than stellar.

My current homeserver has 72 TB, uses 150 watt with all disks spinning and an E3-1245v2 plus 32GB RAM for a few VMs.

And the noise level is very low.

Andy

jesus!

you have more money in drives in that rig than ive spent on all computer parts in my entire life.

[MadHacker]

Andreas what kind of case is that?
how may harddrives, are they hot swappable?

[2cpu]

Keep the oldies coming!

I know some of you XSers ran DP AXP setups, Show me one cooled by a pair of Big Typhoons!

Yes sir !
Not with big typhoons but watercooled



Actually this system is not anymore watercooled cos replace my frend family pc.

[lowfat]

Only thing Xtreme about my server is its size. It is just for my own personal use, mostly just downloading and mass storage.

G555 Cele
P8H77-I
LSI 9211-8i HBA
8GB KVR 1333
40GB X25-V boot drive
25TB Drive Bender storage pool.





network transfer speed

[Andreas]

Andreas what kind of case is that?
how may harddrives, are they hot swappable?

This is the Lian-Li 343B Servercube. It has 18 x 5,25 inch slots, which I filled with 6 LianLi HD cages (4 drives per cage, hot swappable).
The E3-1245v2 is extremely efficient, less than 2 Watt when idle. I use the built in graphics unit for additional power savings.
Raid controller used is the new Adaptec 7 series with 24 ports and a flash memory based "battery backup system"
Disk drives are 24 x WD Red 3TB, two Raid0 SSDs for the OS.
Network connection via teamed 4xGbit which sustains ca. 450 MB/s for read and write to the server.

Normally between 4-6 Virtual machines are active for various functions. One VM hosts WHS which keeps daily backups of all machines at home.
Disk deduplication is turned on, which saves in my case ca. 30% disk capacity

I think the cube is discontinued, the new server case is the D8000

Andy

[paulbagz]

I still want to know what Andy does for a living

-PB