You should look into the x99 side of this idea. I recently got a dual x99 system running, been using it for game hosting services and for sub 350$ it's crazy what you get.

A few months ago, I was absolutely blown away at the low prices on some business-aged Xeon E5-2695 v3 workstations. Ended up buying a dual CPU machine with 256 GB RAM. Replaced the stock CPU coolers and this thing has been off to the races. Troubleshooting old hardware sucks, but with performance this strong, it's worth it. The power cost is another story, though. Very cool video, though. I love exploring this hardware that's not often seen outside of business uses.

I really love the sound of the pc sartup with the fan on each video, I don't know, the sound is so familiar and brings comfort of times spent using hardware

If I am going to build budget build a server for file storage, I think it's better to go for stronger cores than many cores because transfer speeds are often single threaded.

Those old Xeons are solid chips. Their only downside is power draw really. My current NAS runs a pair of 2620v2 chips and is plenty fast enough with 64gig of memory. For a proper server like your demo setup, a goodly number of cores is important, especially with ZFS as parity calculations are multi-threaded, and you're also using them for the VMs as well as the base OS.

Love old X79/X99 content. Crazy how cheap you can go. I rock a E5-2683 v4 for my server and it's awesome. Just upgraded to 128GB ECC for dirt cheap. Haswell/Broadwell also have AVX2, so that's a nice add.

Fantastic video as always, keep up the excellent work. Looking forward to seeing the x99 build.

I have a rather unique perspective on why I built an x79 (socket 2011) system. For me, I managed to start with a WHOLE BUNCH of FREE RAM. To be exact, I was gifted 384GB of ECC DDR3 RAM. So for me, it was a no brainer that x79 was the way to go. Otherwise, as you stated, it would not have been nearly as worthwhile. Even with the single core restrictions you noted, I managed to find a couple of E5-2690's (8 core 16 thread at 2.9GHz turbo to 3.5GHz) and an old barebones Dell Precision T5600 and it virtualizes great. If you stick with a T3600 (single socket) system, you can seriously find some really great deals. I found one of these for, no kidding, $39 (+$19 shipping) basically complete with no hard drives. So if you have the budget for electricity, I think it is worth the price. These are solid systems.

Great video!!! Your presentation is getting better and better so keep it up!!

NIIIICE!!!! I love this kind of tinkering! I started doing this stuff most likely before you were born... 😀

Would be intresting to do a side by side with a similar spec'd new components and their powerdraw, would be a intresting graph to show how long it takes for the "cheap" system to become the more expensive option.

So creative as usual.. tnx a lot 4 sharing .. can't wait to see u next time

Awesome video! I would love a video of you making VMs in unraid cause I have been experimenting it but have been having small strange problems like screen tearing and Linux mint not using my GPU when I try to install drivers. I am sure your ability to make things simple would help me and a lot of people.

Pretty good video. Shame about the unfortunate purchases, but nice saves all around given the situation.

I've been using Sandy/Ivy Bridge Xeon servers for the past 3 years for my gaming community. One game super benefits from high core counts and is a ram hog so dual Xeon 2670's was the cheapest option out there with 128gb of ram and still running strong. My hardware is nothing I could recommend for a beginning, tinkering, or apartment dweller. It's not for the faint of heart. I wish there was a video like this one back when I got the idea to buy used servers instead of renting servers. Your experience parallels my experience. Now that my electric company charges a "Time of day" rate and increased rates overall I'm finding myself close to shutting down servers. I can't recommend my solution to people wanting to do public game servers at home anymore. Its still fun to work with and I'm not trying to make money it. Great video, liked and subscribed.

This was an interesting first vid for YT to show me, reminds me to get around to taking the pair of X99/i7-5820K systems (both with 64GB (8x8GB) DDR4-2400) I got at home and building them for like a NAS rig and a game server rig. Heck, one of them used to be my main gaming rig with a pair of 980Ti's under EKWB TitanX waterblocks, so I just need some fresh tubing (maybe a new X99 block for the second i7-5820K as that was under an AIO) and I can get them both operational and kept nice and cool all the time.

Fun video! I was building gaming systems back in 2016 with the 1680v2 CPU's pulled from MACS on X79 boards. Great Over clockers and gaming setups.

x99 is also a solid platform. I have a hand-me-down 6800k rig that I'm planning to get a xeon upgrade. Might be a great video idea in the future!

You know in the front part of that case those key sharp cut outs are for slide tabs from a metal tray add on for more hdds. I have only had a few machines with that but I've seen them with 2-4 bay expandable space.

A lot of the xeons are cheap, the boards are often...too expensive though.

I recently built both a new workstation/gaming machine and a server using the slightly newer X99 architecture Xeons. And so far both have been great. They also support that instruction set you were missing which limited your Adobe version. Also bumping up to DDR4 was an added bonus. Being a long time fan of Craft Computing as well as your channel I had seen the light early on with these retired enterprise CPU's with Chinese motherboards. My server idles around 110w but i've got 6x 3.5" spinning drives in there as well and haven't really messed with C-states in proxmox at all. It's honestly pretty good. with 64gb ram i'm able to run a 60tb ZFS pool and all my services in Docker under an Ubuntu based Cloud-Init image. And it'll transcode in Jellyfin without issue.

Nice video, i hope i get this quality in the futur!

i bought an HP Z840 a few months ago along with 256GB of mem, a bunch of cheap SSD's and 10G networking...I think I'm all in like $700 or so but it runs everything I need it to and is just rock solid...i have an HP Z600 as well it was meant to replace i now use as a backup....5-8yr old xeons are just SOOO much fun to mess around with, especially with all those cores and threads!

This was a lot of fun, and was useful in showing how processor (and the tech that surrounds it) has progressed over a decade. Nicely done - and I'm glad I' went for the i5-6500 myself instead of the "cheaper" Xeon :D

I enjoy this kind of repurposing old hardware, but it has to make sense and be usable in the long run. I think you nailed it in the intro that this video started as a series of bad purchase decisions, as this video sort of exemplifies the curse of sunken costs when everything is tallied up. Great content none the less, and as a small time homelabber and tinkerer I really enjoy this kind of retrospective reviews to find out if a build would suit my applications. Keep it up! :D

I'm currently using an HPGen8 with dual 8c/16t xeons. I was using ESXI but gen8 support is lacking. I have a Server22 license so i use that now. 16c/32t. 384gb ram, 22 1tb SFF 7200rpm SAS, 2 300GB 12000rpm SAS, 1 256gb Agility 2 (yeah old) SSD for the host OS. Works great. I have one 2950L v2 and i'm ordering another to upgrade to 20c/40t at lower TDP but lower clock speed. The clock speed does cause some performance issues when trying to do something like owncast. ESXI limiteded me though. havent tried with hyper-v yet. Drives where the expensive part. paid ~10-15$ each, the gen 8 with CPUs and 128gb of ram was about $250 and adding more memory about another 80$ If I had to do it again, I would've gotten a system that took 3.5 drives as larger capacities are cheaper in that format.

I've built 5 so far of the "AliExpress Special" kits and not had a single issue, I'd recommend one of those over mixing/matching as you can be assured all of it works together. Last one was a 2650V2 with board, 16GB of RAM, and nice RGB cooler for $66 shipped. Added another 8GB of RAM, RX580, 1TB NVME and a nice $40 case with 3 RGB fans and the grandson's bestie had a PC that could play his Ark and GTA V above 60FPS for less than $350, can't beat that.

Try P520 or P520c. Only 120 150 for a whole rig, and it's Skylake Xeon

built out a E5-2670 V3 workstation a couple of months back with a HUANANZHI X99-QD4 Motherboard and cpu combo that I picked up off Aliexpress along with two 8GB DDR4 ECC ram sticks. combined with a cheap 1tb nvme gen 3 drive and a Sapphire Radeon RX-5600XT video card it makes for a very nice machine for gaming at 1080P, scoring just as well in every aspect as my current gaming machine that has a ryzen 5800X3D cpu, 32GB of ram, and a RTX 3070 8GB video card. gets a lot hotter, but with a good tower cooler with proper thermal compound application in a well ventilated case it never gets close to the high temperature range that would cause it to shut down.

I bought a Dell T3600 off eBay cheap, then bought RAM for it and the best Xeon processor it supported. Runs great as my VM host.

I appreciate you sharing you mistakes, we all go through a learning process. its refreshing to see

Kudos for the informative content on x79 xeons in 2023😎

5 years ago I had the pleasure to be working on a HP Z-something with the Xeon cpu. I bet it was pretty much maxed out, cause 5 years later I still haven't experienced the same smoothness and flow in Adobe's programs ... even on the newest Macs.

During winter the wattage does not go to waste at least. My pcs cut my heater use. Power is never wasted its just converted.

Awesome channel bro, I own a PC repair business and I literally just launched that exact Compaq tower into my trashcan! I would like to save towers like that but aint got no room. I run this biz from my house and my wife says im a computer pack rat. Someone gave me their sons old gaming computer. Asus z97a (or something like that) motherboard and its a sick glass case with blue LED's and its using 32GB DDR3 and its a dam beast! I run so much off of that computer and keep it on 24/7. DDR3 can still be very useful!

I upgraded an old core 2 quad dell xps... same backwards and upside down setup that you showed here.... processor was 2650 v2... my son is running starfield with an RX570 and the same memory at around 30 fps with no overclock

great video as always!

i have a old Lenovo c30 its a dual xeon 6 core 2.3ghz 64gb ddr3 1866 ecc i paid 230 off ebay over a year ago . love it does what i need to for casaos, jelly and my arr programs

The linux implementation of zfs os preprogrammed tp use UP TO half of the system memory. However the arc is maintained by the kernel through the zfs module, and will auto resize the arc based on historical and current usage, recency, as well as systemcalls from the kernel. The arc_maximum can be set with a single command-line instruction if you want it raised or lowered. Also each distro has the ability to change this setting before shipping so some may be slightly different, but the default and the standard are for arc_maximum to equal half the size of ram

Interesting, Crafty, will need to check it out, I use pterodactyl which is good but I'll see what Crafty has to offer

Old Zeons are great. My server is a Dell R710 in my garage, I got it for free. Sure it's DDR3 and power hungry, but 8 cores and 72GB of RAM is nithing to scoff at. It runs my Jellyfin, Minecraft server, Satisfactory server, and Nextcloud with no issues.

I am still on my HP z420. 64GB, e5 2667v2, NvME ssds... Works just great.

I'm doing something similar with a retired CT scanner workstation. I went with the 64 GB of DDR4 RAM and a Xeon E5-2696 v4 CPU. You do have to keep an eye on the costs of the hardware and the power it will use but if you don't run it 24/7 that can be contained. I want to have a Proxmox virtual environment to experiment with various OS and software configurations, The learning will be worth the relatively low cost of ownership IMO.

Nice video. I got a Lenovo P700 free from work when it was being tossed out due to it's age It has two E5-2620 v3s in it. 128GB of ECC DDR4 and I tossed in a 128GB PNY SSD with truenas scale installed. Two 8TB Ironwolf NAS drives. Using plex and pi hole on it.

I've been running x58 and x79 since they came out and they are both still running. The x59 box just runs all my backups and syncing which is pretty good since the board has 2 x16 slots (Gen2 so 8gbs), but the x79 w/ a 2680 (these OC pretty well, 3.5ghz), 64gb of ram that runs 10 VMs, Plex w/ a 1070ti, and has all my storage. Both the x58 and x79 boards have tons of features because back then people had "workstations". The 58 has firewire, 6 sata 3, 2 sas, dual nics, x16x16x4 or x16x8x8x4, but tri-channel memory which is silly. The 79 has gen 3 x16x16x2x1 or x16x8x8x8x2x1 with 4 sata 6 and 2 sata 3, 2 esata 6, dual nics, bt, and USB 3.0. Yea the power sucks, but honestly I don't forsee my newer systems lasting this long and really don't see any reason to migrate. Granted, if it wasn't for Icydock I probably would have migrated by now... lol

Cheap server components and stacks of PCIE lanes are the reason to do this. PCIE gen 3 SFP/QSFP cards are cheap. Brand new PCIEx16 gen 4 cards with 4/8x NVME drive cards can be dropped into a gen 3 slot while protecting your investment. You can also do 8xSATA cards with sata SSD's but I suspect that's a dead-end tech. I recently moved my i7-3930k to a 10-core xeon which upgraded the PCIE bus from gen2 to gen3 on my asrock x79 mobo. Along with power draw, heat output is significant. Beware non-standard tier-1 hardware manufacturers' systems, because you will need a case with better airflow than your standard workstation build, especially if you want to stack HDDs or a QSFP server nic you thought was cheap...

I really enjoy whatching your videos even if i dont really get why should i have home server for myself. I want one but i really dont know what to do with it. Like what you do with those VMs? or ways to use home server effectively. Can you make a video on it for complete beginners?

big fan of your videos, keep up the good work. I think I found a broken link in your recording gear - ► Microphone - Shure SM7b

Having to power cycle the capture card after doing all that troubleshooting is so typical. It's always the thing you didn't think to check. So frustrating. I feel your pain.

Apart from the power draw they are still pretty decent.

I like these budget videos. great work. Have you ever thought about a 2009/2010 MacPro ? They're super cheap now. and usually have 2x CPU's most people have upgraded to X5680 CPU's. have 4 Sata bays. 6 if you use the DVD bays. they make the perfect Proxmox Box. Dual Xeons, 128GB Ram, GPU Encode/Decode Hardware acceleration. For me I spent $250 for a beast of a system.!

i have been using the E52690 v2 with 128 gigs of ecc on an Asrock rack ATX board as my proxmox server for several years. Really solid.

i'm still running a E5-2650LV2 with 128GB ECC on a Supermicro X9SRI-F as a TrueNAS Scale Server with Plex and an extra VM for some docker containers. Still satisfied. The onboard controllers handle 10 drives and i threw in a quadro p400 for transcoding in plex and a 10GB NIC. Sure.. it's not fast but with most of my machines connected through 1 and 2.5 gbit ethernet the server delivers either up to the networking limit or the drives limits, which ever comes first. For WS use i'd recommend an E5-1650V2 which is overclockable. I'm running one an a Huananzhi X79 Board.

I'm running E5 2690v4 machines, around $300 into a ThinkStation P710 for 28c/56t of Broadwell and 128gb of RAM, $150 into a Dell T5810 with one CPU and 64gb

I think a great option for high core count would be with Skylake X chips, the 12 core 7960x goes for about 100-150 right now and you can get a MB for around the same if not sub 100. They werent really the best at launch but 250 isnt a bad deal.

ESXi having dropped support apparently, the (X99) 18-core, 2.3 base-2.8 all core-3.8GHz single core e5-2696v3 is going cheap as chips (although still solidly a premium chip).

I prefer to buy a DELL Precision workstations for around $200 max with the E5 CPUs ... and a good amount of memory. They work well for my work which includes 3D Modeling software. The DELL approach to no tools designs works well for me. Thanks for demonstrating what you can do with one of these X79 systems. 👍

Great video. Im also thinking to resurrect my i7-3930k as my old motherboard strike by lightning (ADSL connection) around 5 to 6 years ago. Been looking on aliexpress as well on buying a new x79 board. Just that im not sure the power consumption will impact me or not. Maybe someone can highlight me on this? Main focus of the build will be running NAS and jellyfin (i had one asus GTX680 laying around as well). Maybe setup proxmox with some vm running system to share around the network too. Is it really worth the shot?

Low power, minecraft server and storage serve..... I am doing my research on that. Also your video is helping me to understand some parts about server 😊😊. I am not building my own personal server now, need more infirmation then I will think.

Thanks to all these videos you’ve been posting, I’m buying a desktop mobo, ram, and cpu with these parts. asus prime Z270-P motherboard. - 15-7600K 3.8GHZ 4 cores 4 threads. - Nvidia geforce gtx 970 4gb VRAM. - 2 gskill ripjaw ddr4 RAM 3200MHZ 8gb. (16gb total) - Cooler master cpu cooler. All for $150. I’m going to salvage my old psu if I can to see if it’s any good, and reuse that case, and I just need to scoop up some drives down the line when I get more money, and maybe double my ram. Going to run my Minecraft, beammp, and fivem servers off of it! Thanks Hardware Haven!

ooh, you so need to slap in a 4x NVME drive bay on that PCI slot and do a passthru! Very cool build but will get the stuff done..I love those ICY Dock 5.25" bays...just need to get you a few 2TB SSD's! Oh I found that assigning the VM's in PROXMOX on older hardware (I have an I7-3770), give it ALL the threads, so 24 for each machine...PROXMOX will autobalance them and unless you have a VM that is literally using all the cpu power (which is very rare) PROXMOX will balance very well and all the VM's will be snappy and much faster. Keep em coming!!!!

i coworker of mine gave me his old server that he hasn't used in years. tunned out to be a supermicro board with dual Xeon L5640s and 100GB of ram! Beefy but ancient. Must have cost a fortune when new

Here in the UK energy is stupid expensive at the moment. Paying £0.30/kWh means that a 150W server is going to chew through £1.08/day. I had a server running on an old Proliant DL360 (Gen 6) Dual Xeon server (2 x 8 core, 16 threads), great for virtualization but really bad for my energy budget. I'm now just running my mail server on a dual Atom 330 box which runs at 30W flat out. But I'm seriously looking at an IBM ThinkCenter USFF PC as an upgrade so I can run Home Assistant and some other home automation too.

I would have gone with a C600/602/604 motherboard as you can get dual sockets and some offer up to 12 slots per socket. I did a build similar to this and went the server motherboard route mainly because I got a bunch of 16 GB registered ECC DDR3 memory for free. I had to run them at 1333 GT/s but I had 256 GB in the end using eight slots per CPU socket. The catch is that registered ECC may not function as expected on x79 boards. Also going with C600 series board is that some model will offer some 3 Gbit SAS ports off of the chipset so really good for building a NAS using inexpensive, high capacity SSDs. In addition, the board I chose came with two 10 GBaseT networking ports and IPMI remote management. I'll also say that NVMe booting is a very hit or miss feature on this generation of motherboards. This is the era when NVMe was first specified. The NVMe drives generally will still work, they're PCIe devices of course, but just the boot functionality which requires BIOS/firmware support. Speak of BIOS/firmware, some X79 boards permit simplistic overclocking of these via their base clock. The good boards have multiplier/divider bus settings so that a stable 133 Mhz base clock can be used instead of 100 Mhz. Most of the time you're not going to be able to handle a straight 33% overclock so reducing the CPU multiplier balances things out to a higher speed. Workstation and server boards tend to shy away from overclocking but they do generally permit making the single core boost clock apply to all cores simultaneously. With good cooling and tuning (high power limits helps a lot), it is possible to get these 12 core chips to operate at 3.5 Ghz across all their cores without issue. The lack of AVX2 does hinder things a bit as these chips only support AVX1. These AVX1 only chips were on the market for about three years before AVX2 became a mainline feature so it doesn't surprise me that some newer software is dropping support in favor of the far more common AVX2 extensions.

Interesting video as always

Talking about power draw i ran a Amd fx server for a week and i took it down because it was loud,hot and ran slow. It would be fun to experiment with more old Amd cpu-s

My lab's main machine is an HP Z620 with E5-2640v2's and 192GB of RAM, and two quadro K4000's, though I could slap in a P5000 I have at some point. I also have an R620 for offline archive, a Hyve Zeus server, and 2 freebie HPE DL360p Gen8's, plus 2 ToysRUs R330s sitting offline, mostly for noise reasons.

Keep going bro

i just build a Dell Precision Tower 7810 with 2x E5-2683v4 totaling 32 core 64 thread and 128G of ddr4 ram and a 1070 for video encoding. added 3ea HDD's SSD's and m.2 NVME for 3 ZFS pools with 1 additional NVME on a 4xm.2 to pcie adapter for truenas install. all in, minus the drives i was at $270. hard to beat this performance for that price.

I'm huge on X79 and X99; I have a ton of different boards including Chinese ones. I'm still using 2 x ASUS dual CPU workstation boards X99 with E5-2690V4s for NAS & messing around with VMs and an single socket X99 workstation for my main editing rig (i7-6950X). I just don't think they're worth it anymore in 2023 in terms of used hardware especially if you're not interested in a lot of PCIe slots with lots of PCIe lanes. There's a ton of cheap used hardware out there way past Broadwell up to first and 2nd gen Ryzen/Threadripper; stuff from 5 years ago is cheap enough now. And often higher IPC less cores can beat out a ton of cores from an X79/X99 systems, even some i3's. The power efficiency is there too. Even X299 for Intel is more worth it because you get a huge range of HEDT chips. I'm guess I'm talking to US audiences. It might be way different for people in other countries. No doubt it's dirt cheap but for not that much more, especially for most use cases I think it's worth going from something used from 4-5 years ago instead of 9-10 years ago. EDIT: sorry, finished watching your videos and you make it clear that it's for fun and the are other options for cheap, so I wasn't meaning to say you were wrong or anything like that

I used to have a different flavor of that specific compaq, I miss that computer

I wanted to complain about the power but you was faster😅 but great video again

I had a similar rig with dual quad core cpus for a total of 16 cores but I found it limiting. I recently upgraded to a ryzen 5900 and yea it's a bit more but the IPC makes a huge difference on my virtual machines. They used to feel sluggish and my power draw is significantly less

When running Proxmox with ZFS, the Memory usage graph is pretty pointless. Since the ARC will discard cached data if that memory is needed elsewhere, it would be far more useful if the Summary page plotted ARC size separate to other memory usage as that would be a far better proxy for 'free memory' than mentally subtracting memory usage from total memory size.

Some of the X79 era dual socket boards can be had pretty cheap. Like the X9DRH-7F from Supermicro, which has 6 x8 slots and 1 x16. All the x8s are open ended. Lots of expansion options. Mostly standard shape board. I have mine in a Dell T320 case. Currently running 3 GPUs, a USB 3 card, and an SB1040 sound card.

I love old X79 / C620 gear. You get a lot for your money, especially with the E5 and E7 2000 / 4000 series chips if you're after setting up a dual or quad socket workstation / server. My current virtualization server is a dual Xeon E5-2640 system with 96GB RAM... Consumes less power than the X58 systems I had prior even including the 8 disks it's running in two VDEVs.

Stumbled on first a Dell 5600 and then a Dell 7800. Dual Xeon 10 core CPU, SSD Primary with 1TB data drives. Dusty as hell, but here's the kicker $30.00 each! One had the original M4000 Quadro card, the other I had to add a video card to. Neither had power cords, but those are a dime a dozen. Not a bad haul!

I have a Lenovo P720 with those dual Xeon e5 v4 cpu's, total 28 cores/56 threats. Still holding strong for gaming and editing video's while being quiet. I think if I put them in a X99 board I can get even better performance. Power hungry though so quite expensive when you're not using the system for more than just surfing/watching UKposts.

Lenovo ThinkStation P520 with Xeon W2145 and 96GB RAM. 1TB SSD cache and 3x 8TB HDDs for 16TB total using Unraid. I’ve been so happy with this setup after trying a few others. It’s been super stable and reliable had it 8 months so far. About $250 without storage, was $175 with Xeon W2135 cpu.

well time for me to save up to build a servers :) thanks a lot

I have a server that is racked in a DC that I use for editing and file storage it has x2 E-5 2630 v2s and I will be upgrading the CPUs to x2 E5-2670 v2s because I also am running multiple game servers off of it.

I recently had the opportunity to use an old server/workstation from IBM, built on two Xeon processors, with an additional GTX graphics card. Its only drawbacks were the 300W power consumption during heavy work and the fact that, although it looked almost like a regular computer from the front, it was 80cm deep. During everyday work, or even playing Minecraft without graphic mods, it was impossible to notice that it was a set from 2009, thanks to the total of 16 cores it had and 12GB of 3-channel RAM for each processor (24GB in total). Only in heavy operations or more specific applications there were noticeable performance problems in single-core operation.

I got an old HP Z620 workstation with 32gb memory, a video card a few years ago. Replaced CPU with a similar 10 core CPU. And added an ssd and hdd. Power draw about 100 W while running Windows. Still runs fine.

Im just coming back to the pc world that i left when i was a kid, and started playing minecraft again. Now my gf is playing as well, and we used an online server host, but it wasnt stable, so i was thinking about making my own home server, but I'm on a really tight budget (around 100€). Is there any old prebuilt that might work as it is, just with some extra ram and storage i can add later on? For the software side i know nothing, but i was thinking about one of your older videos with ubuntu server and docker and learn that.

I got into big servers by buying a DL380p G8 with dual Xeon E5-2630L v2's and 128GB of RAM. Bought a second node with the same RAM and dual E5-2650's and built an X99 based custom build with an E5-2650 v4 and 128GB again. Total is sitting at about 384GB of RAM and 88 threads for the main nodes. The DL380p's cost me about 250 euros total, including the upgrades to their "final" specs they're on now. Need new and faster CPU's, however. The X99 system was another 300 in total I think. I actually use about 150GB of RAM and about 10-40% CPU. What I'm trying to say is: there is very great value left in these machines, especially if you go the used enterprise gear route (and for DL380p G8's, you can modify the firmware and achieve near silent operation using some fan control scripts (that also ramp up if needed so no hardware gets burned).)

still rocking a 1650v2 here ! these lil' CPUs still pack a punch tbh if you're not into 1440p ultra settings gaming, even paired with the best GPU they wouldnt be able to deliver enough potential for the GPU to deploy its full power, but if you do some casual gaming at 1080p high with as i have a RX 5700 XT or similar GPUs, it will do the job flawlessly, pro workload wise the lack of some instructions set can be a bit of a pain in the azz tbh but they still work fine for Blender 3D ! the only downside i have to point is the horrible IOMMU groups management on my specific mobo (Asus Rampage IV), but i guess this is less of a issue if you can find a combo with a workstation/server mobo that are often designed for that kind of tasks ! So in the end if you can find a good deal on a Mobo + CPU + RAM kit, you can still get a rly good time on a cheap PC that will run top of the line hardware from 10 years ago without a doubt !

My media server is running 128 gigs of ram and two 2697 v2's its in a 20 bay enclosure and I stream 4k content when I'm away from home. Its literally my own personal net flix.

I've been running two HP Z440 workstations as my Proxmox hosts for about 5 years now, using the E5-2690 v4 which gives me 14 cores and 2 threads per core. It's great for lab stuff but I've been wondering whether I'm reaching the point of diminishing returns on power / performance. The price is always attractive upfront but those energy bills do add up eventually.

I have been running ivy Xeon for years. Supermicro and the Asus z9pa are good boards. I currently have a dual 2687wv2 with 128gb of ram and a 3070. This fits in a fractal north as Asus do the z9pa d8 as ATX. Need to print some better air flow guides but still pretty good.

I got a 2660V4 for $6.00 and a 2650V4 for $4.00. I love these budget chips for the X99 boards.

Wouldn't use it as a proxmox cluster and have it on 24/7, but as a desktop PC lots of fun. Fast web-browsing, multiple screens, multitasking and on a few hours per day is not burning thru a lot of power. Using Intel NUC 12-i5 as my proxmox cluster, I love this box!

holy crap im using that SAME case right now - my grandmother had a compaq 5000 something or other - thats too funny, i have an MSI B250M with an i7-7700 with 32G as a NAS with 5 drives in it....I had to buy the removable drive cage for the front of the inside off of ebay since hers didn't have it but the slots for it were there.....thats fantastic

Machinist $37 motherboard with quad channel memory. Works great. Also I got a dell t620 dual processor with 6 hard drives, memory, and dual 750watt power for $400...

i love your videos on refurbishing trash into homelab, /w current trend on the mid-low class : we're getting less and less, doing more /w less is a necessity ❤

About the power draw of those x79/x99 systems, I'm currently checking X299 systems like the Lenovo P520 because I would like to setup an all nvme SSD NAS while and in the same time having a 10G network on it and an A310 or A380 dual slot (double x16 slot and 1 x8 all in gen3 on the motherboard) for media encoding. The X299 is also called Kaby-lake X which correspond to the 7th gen intel CPU and I think they can manage C8 C-State. I'm hesitating pulling the trigger to buy a refurbished one (they can drop as low as 100 euros in my region) but the weight of those PC (24kg) and the fact that the motherboard is non ATX standard holds me from buying one. Also I don't have good experience with Lenovo PC compared to HP for C-states idle power draw. Maybe wait until aliexpress does X299 motherboard --' I would setup two small SATA ssd for the OS in raid 1 and create a ZFS pool of 5 NVME in raid Z1 or Z2.

I’m a cloud devops engineer obsessed with privacy and security. My main workstation runs Qubes OS. So everything’s in a VM. Probably 10 or more total concurrent VMs in my average workload. A pair of 8 core Xeon E5-2667v2s with 128GB of ram makes easy work of it. Single core performance is meh but it chews through the demanding workloads I put on it.

YAY! New video!

if I recall avx2 instructions are on the xeon v3 and v4 series. I run an et-3650 v2 xeon on a Kllisre x79 mobo kit with ddr3-1333 4x4, 16gb ecc. Running LInux Mint 20.3 as my daily driver, not for game use. Runs like a champ. If I were to pick a xeon for gaming it would be something from the v3 or v4 family of xeons, since those have the avx2 instruction set. Tho I would try to pick a xeon under 135W tdp. Power consumption is a concern for me. Along with even newer 14th gen intel and ryzen 7000 are getting crazy with their power draw even worse than the xeons of v2, v3 & v4. I'm a budget oriented builder/user, no issue working with a xeon PC for my needs, be it work/office or gaming.

I have owned a DX79SI setup from when it was new (worked for Intel at the time so got the motherboard and 3930k CPU at half price), still in daily use. Now I'm wondering if it's worth finding an Ivy Bridge Xeon to swap in or if I should just keep it as is until I build a new workstation.

Last fall my old faithful "8-core" FX-8350 bit the dust. I had an older machine I'd bought just for the fancy case with an older i7 on an EVGA 132 mobo, and after shuffling around some hardware had my workstation up again. Too slow. So I went online and found the biggest fastest CPU that would work on the EVGA, a Xeon x5690, and threw some more RAM at it. It's doing a much better job than the much newer FX it replaced, handling linux audio production without any of the annoying audio glitches, xruns, and other problems I'd been having. So I've been quite content going the old-Xeon route.