Using an 8-core server/workstation as a PC

[zxcvbob]

I was looking at refurbished computers the other night at geeks.com and they had some 1U rack-mount servers with multiple Xeon processors for less than $200 (no OS) including an enclosure.  How would that work for a home PC?  The only thing I saw wrong with the specs was the ATI ES1000 video card -- and only 2 USB ports.  Let's see if I can find it again...

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=512F-280B-XQC186X2-2R&cat=SVR

If I wanted to install Windows, would it have to be one of the server editions, like Win 2003 or 2008?

"What do I want to do with it?", you ask?  Mainly just see if I can do it.  And it would be nice to have something powerful enough for games like TF2 and Civ-5 (that's the main reason the ES1000 video card sucks)

This is mostly a thought exercise cuz I have Cheap Bastard Disease.  But if I can run this on one of the Win 2000 or XP Pro licenses I already have, the price is in "toy" range.

[Perd Hapley]

I asked a similar question a while back, and was told that servers use more power than most PCs would draw. That, and it may not have a sound card.

[AJ Dual]

It would make a nice SETI@home box...

[RevDisk]

If I wanted to install Windows, would it have to be one of the server editions, like Win 2003 or 2008?

No. Theoretically, you could put on Windows 7 or XP. Finding drivers might be entertainment, but you could likely get away with using Win2003 drivers for XP and Win2008 drivers for Win7. I've done both, and reverse on occasion. I once used a Dell XPS M2010 as a server simulator (laptop with a RAID card), and slapped Win2003 on it. The XPS design team was impressed.

Worst case, install VMware ESXi or Xen on it. Then run any OS on top of that.

[AZRedhawk44]

It will likely not make a good multimedia or game machine.  Servers...serve.  they are mostly built to have good disk I/O systems and redundant hardware for maximum uptime.  They usually lack in graphics throughput and sound capability.  Most of the time they are accessed via RDP or SSH by an admin, requiring no graphics horsepower.

Likewise, gaming rigs...game.  They typically make for lousy servers due to I/O bottlenecks and poor redundancy.

In short, this 1U server will lack any sound capability, have a non desktop grade I/O system that will make desktop win64 os support trying, and require a video card upgrade to play anything beyond Starcraft.  And the 1U form factor will probably not be large enough for a nice PCIe radeon or nvidea large format card... And definitely will not support anything like crossfireX.

If you are really interested in a game rig, pm me.  I have a 3core amd athlon system with 8gb ram and dual radeon 3900 gpus that i am not currently using.  Dvd burner, sd card reader, i will throw in a decent hard drive with it, somewhere between 500 and 750gb.  I might even include my winXP x64 media and license.

[mtnbkr]

It will likely be loud.  The cooling fans on most servers are optimized for performance and not noise.

The servers we use for our Splunk boxes (Dell Poweredge R710) are as loud as one of those high pressure hand dryers on startup, but settle down to a gentle roar once they've booted.  Even after they settle down, they're louder than I'd want to sit near for extended periods.

The comments about multimedia and such are spot on.

Chris

[Ben]

The servers we use for our Splunk boxes (Dell Poweredge R710) are as loud as one of those high pressure hand dryers on startup, but settle down to a gentle roar once they've booted.  Even after they settle down, they're louder than I'd want to sit near for extended periods.

This.

[zahc]

If you do decide to go the 8-core route, make sure you prop up one side of it on a brick or something. At least, people always tell me 'don't forget to tip your server'.

[AZRedhawk44]

mtnbkr is right about the noise, too.  I meant to type that as well but was typing on an android smartphone and was just annoyed with the keyboard by that point.

It will roar and be audible on the other side of the house when it boots, and dominate any noise you get out of your USB-based audio/speaker solution (since you don't have room to add a PCIe sound card) when running at normal volume.  It will also likely cause a significant thermal difference in the room where you put it versus the rest of your house.

Servers just don't belong in houses, IMO.

[zxcvbob]

It will likely be loud.  The cooling fans on most servers are optimized for performance and not noise.

The servers we use for our Splunk boxes (Dell Poweredge R710) are as loud as one of those high pressure hand dryers on startup, but settle down to a gentle roar once they've booted.  Even after they settle down, they're louder than I'd want to sit near for extended periods.

The comments about multimedia and such are spot on.

Chris

Darn.  Once again, reality ruins a perfectly good project.  Everything else could probably be worked-around, but not the loud fans.  And that's a big deal.

If you are really interested in a game rig, pm me.  I have a 3core amd athlon system with 8gb ram and dual radeon 3900 gpus that i am not currently using.  Dvd burner, sd card reader, i will throw in a decent hard drive with it, somewhere between 500 and 750gb.  I might even include my winXP x64 media and license.

Nah, gaming was just the excuse to justify it.

 
If you do decide to go the 8-core route, make sure you prop up one side of it on a brick or something. At least, people always tell me 'don't forget to tip your server'.

 

[RaspberrySurprise]

Also most games won't use more than four cores, the rest will just sit there all lonely.

[sanglant]

win7 likes to crash on 8 cores, and often. mostly firefox, but it's not alone.

that's with an amd fx-8150 though. was hoping 16GBs of ram would keep FF happy. intel might be different.

i'm actually considering the upgrade, to win8.

[Hawkmoon]

win7 likes to crash on 8 cores, and often. mostly firefox, but it's not alone.

that's with an amd fx-8150 though. was hoping 16GBs of ram would keep FF happy. intel might be different.

i'm actually considering the upgrade, to win8.

I'm of the opinion that Win7 doesn't co-exist happily with AMD processors.

Bought my wife a new Toshiba notebook with Win7 and an AMD brain. Locked up just trying to install MS Office. Sent it back to Toshiba, they replaced it in kind -- same thing. Finally sent it back again, did battle with the customer "service" department, and convinced them to replace it with a similar model (with a slightly lower MSRP) that has an Intel brain.

End of problem.

Right now, I'd rather have a netbook with an Atom processor than an AMD anything.

[mtnbkr]

I'm of the opinion that Win7 doesn't co-exist happily with AMD processors.

My Win 7 system is running quite happily on an AMD system.






Chris

[AZRedhawk44]

I'm of the opinion that Win7 doesn't co-exist happily with AMD processors.

Bought my wife a new Toshiba notebook with Win7 and an AMD brain. Locked up just trying to install MS Office. Sent it back to Toshiba, they replaced it in kind -- same thing. Finally sent it back again, did battle with the customer "service" department, and convinced them to replace it with a similar model (with a slightly lower MSRP) that has an Intel brain.

End of problem.

Right now, I'd rather have a netbook with an Atom processor than an AMD anything.

Purge Toshiba-loaded OEM OS.  OEM OS loads are full of bloatware, bundled junk and so on.  Load the OS clean, get the drivers you need, and abstain from all the Toshiba-sponsored apps.  Install the apps you need.

It's not AMD.  It's just a bad OEM load.

[Phantom Warrior]

The consensus is clear but another plug for the fan being way too loud.  We had a blade server in our office to image off of and it was quite obnoxious to sit next to. 

[zxcvbob]

The consensus is clear but another plug for the fan being way too loud.  We had a blade server in our office to image off of and it was quite obnoxious to sit next to. 

How many blades were in your server?  The noise is cumulative...

For $165 I'm still tempted to get one just to play with, but at this point I will wait around and they will sell-out.  I don't have a lot of patience for "loud fan".

[Gewehr98]

Note what was said above about "server" vs. "workstation".

There is a difference, and a big one.

I've been buying off-lease IBM dual-socket workstations since about 2001, but only the workstations (IntelliStation M-Pro and Z-Pro) - NOT servers.

Those workstations are set up to actually run desktop apps and utilize video cards, albeit in a heavy-handed fashion.

Rackmount servers aren't so friendly to doing anything other than acting as remote servers.  They'll run a VM for you, and obviously play fileserver. 

They won't be your first choice for running Borderlands 2 or Adobe Creative Suite 6.

There's also a noise and wattmeter penalty for those 8 cores and big power supply.

I continue to dabble in the heavy iron - my latest IBM toy is an IntelliStation Z-Pro 9228 workstation.

It has 2 each Xeon X5365 quad-core 3.0Ghz processors, and 16Gb of FB-DIMM memory.  It's also hopelessly obsolete in 2012, IBM stopped selling them in 2009. 

IBM, HP, and Dell professional-grade workstations are built like the proverbial brick outhouses, but for entirely different purposes than typical gaming desktops.

For reliability, they have long self-testing Power-On Self Test routines, use Fully Buffered DIMM memory, and run big noisy fans with huge heatsinks, SAS/SATA RAID controllers, and chassis intrusion monitoring hardware, amongst other things. 

The money I saved on buying my off-lease IBM (as found on eBay or other websites) went into a Koolance water-cooling system to kill the fan noise, a Radeon HD6870 for gaming and Creative Suite 6, a 256Gb SSD primary drive for sheer speed of file access, and stuffing those 8 sticks of expensive and obsolete FB-DIMM memory into the slots.  I run Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, and the computer reports a Windows Experience Identifier score of 7.8.  That's the good part.

The bad part is that one could get a current quad-core or hex-core i7 system that would also do the same performance-wise, with less wattage draw, footprint, weight, and noise. 

That having been said, if you just want to play with industrial-grade hardware, it is cheap when sold as surplus.  I used to buy at www.pcsurplusonline.com for a long time, but they've somewhat dried up in the workstation and server department.  Sometimes www.geeks.com gets corporate machines in, as do a few other sites out there.

I ran SETI Optimized for a few weeks earlier this summer.  I averaged just over 10K credits/day, but the heat in the office and the spinning wattmeter shut me down in short order. 

My next machine will be the Lenovo ThinkStation D30, with 16 Xeon Sandy Bridge cores vs. the 8 relic Clovertown cores I'm currently using.  And yes, I'll test it out on SETI.   

[Phantom Warrior]

How many blades were in your server?  The noise is cumulative...

I'm not sure I understand the question.  The one I was referring to was a standard 1U blade server.  We had a server room with at least 50 or 60 rack mounted servers in it and yes, the noise was quite cumulative.  :)

[zxcvbob]

I'm not sure I understand the question.  The one I was referring to was a standard 1U blade server.  We had a server room with at least 50 or 60 rack mounted servers in it and yes, the noise was quite cumulative.  :)

The one in the office; I couldn't tell if you were talking about a whole rack full of blades or just a single one (like the 1U chassis I linked to)

[AZRedhawk44]

I'm not sure I understand the question.  The one I was referring to was a standard 1U blade server.  We had a server room with at least 50 or 60 rack mounted servers in it and yes, the noise was quite cumulative.  :)

That's not a blade server.

A blade server is a large chassis... 4U to 12U or so in size, in which "blade computers" are inserted in a typically vertical arrangement.  They share network bandwidth and power provisioning from the blade server, but each blade has its own RAM/CPU and sometimes even 2.5" drive subsystem (though they are more recently provisioned via SAN allocation over FC or iSCSI instead for higher IO).

A 1U server is just a plain old boring server.

[Sindawe]

I'm not sure I understand the question.  The one I was referring to was a standard 1U blade server.  We had a server room with at least 50 or 60 rack mounted servers in it and yes, the noise was quite cumulative.  :)

I've seen few things in IT that make more noise starting up than a full chassis of blade servers.  We have several in my workplace and when just one of the chassis reboots they make more noise than the 50 odd 1 or 2 U high servers on the other racks combined.  I've had folks a good 15 feet away outside the server room complain about the din.

[Perd Hapley]

How many blades were in your server?  The noise is cumulative...

For $165 I'm still tempted to get one just to play with, but at this point I will wait around and they will sell-out.  I don't have a lot of patience for "loud fan".

Yup, sold out.

[RevDisk]

How many blades were in your server?  The noise is cumulative...

For $165 I'm still tempted to get one just to play with, but at this point I will wait around and they will sell-out.  I don't have a lot of patience for "loud fan".

http://www.servermonkey.com/

They will sell you fully working servers for reasonable rates. The U is the standard unit of measurement with servers. 1 or 2 U's is pretty common for regular servers. Blade server chassis tend to be minimum of 3U, and can be up to a full rack (48U usually).

Not really useful for most home users. They make very small home servers that work very well. 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859107052

That would be perfect for "random physical box" server at a small data center or home office.

[zxcvbob]

They have them in stock again,  along with some even cheaper ones (same basic specs for $149.)  What happens if install Windows XP Pro on a box with too many processor cores?  I have an old laptop with a dead display running XP Pro, and I could pull the HDD out and use it for install media and use its license key -- basically transfer the license to the server.

if I recall correctly XPP supports 2 physical sockets with 2 cores each.  Not sure about hyperthreading on top of that, but I think these are 4-core w/o hyperthreading.  Guessing it would run 4 cores (2 each socket) and ignore the other 4.

Then when (if) I get that working I can make it dual-boot Linux and see if that can get all 8 cores running.