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Some of those servers are fantastic value when you get them from a ex-stock supplier. I was seeing 8 thread and 64gb ram boxes for ~£125. If you are building a

Some of those servers are fantastic value when you get them from a ex-stock supplier. I was seeing 8 thread and 64gb ram boxes for ~£125. If you are building a dummy cloud these are great to play around with.

tiernano 10y ago
yea, the c6100 i got has 8 xeons (4 nodes) 48gb RAM (4x12) and cost about £300 quid... we got some for the office (64gb per node) and they where about £600... given what you are getting, cant complain!
- alex_hitchins 10y ago
  Out of interest, did you encounter any driver issues? I was warned by a few people saying that some of these servers are designed for the client and therefore have non-standard NIC's and finding drivers could be a problem. I've not encountered this and found Windows, Linux and BSD (FreeNAS) all run from standard installs.
  - tiernano 10y ago
    have Windows Server 2016 running on them currently, and no problems. worked out of the box. not tried any other OS, so cant say about those...
valarauca1 10y ago
If you can snag westmere socket boards for E5/E7 hold on to them. The old westmere E5/E7 socket upgrade CPU's from 3rd parties are dirt cheap literally ~$120 for a 10/20 thread xeon. Sure it's still a first gen so no AVX, AVX2, AES, etc. But it is still a lot of compute power. The issue is a 4-8 socket CPU board to fit them in will run you ~$3000.
- shiftpgdn 10y ago
  Those old 20 thread xeons DRINK power. I wouldn't recommend them unless you're getting your energy for free. (Though there is no such thing as a free lunch.)
  - tiernano 10y ago
    the Westmere E7s seem to be the equivalint of the Xeon X5600 series[1]... so, between 105 and 130w... sticking 4 or 8 of those in a box will blow most power budgets! [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westmere_(microarchitecture)#Server_.2F_Desktop_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westmere_(microarchitecture)#S...
deleted 10y ago
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webmaven 10y ago
Hmm. I wonder when all the Tesla P100 GPU servers being sold now will get dumped on the market... Does GPU-compute server hardware obsolesce faster or slower than standard CPU-compute hardware?
- tiernano 10y ago
  I do remember seeing older (not sure the generation) NVidia CUDA gear going cheap... when i seen it, it was about 5 year old... so, possibly the same... maybe less...

tiernano 10y ago

yea, the c6100 i got has 8 xeons (4 nodes) 48gb RAM (4x12) and cost about £300 quid... we got some for the office (64gb per node) and they where about £600... given what you are getting, cant complain!

alex_hitchins 10y ago
Out of interest, did you encounter any driver issues? I was warned by a few people saying that some of these servers are designed for the client and therefore have non-standard NIC's and finding drivers could be a problem. I've not encountered this and found Windows, Linux and BSD (FreeNAS) all run from standard installs.
- tiernano 10y ago
  have Windows Server 2016 running on them currently, and no problems. worked out of the box. not tried any other OS, so cant say about those...

valarauca1 10y ago

If you can snag westmere socket boards for E5/E7 hold on to them. The old westmere E5/E7 socket upgrade CPU's from 3rd parties are dirt cheap literally ~$120 for a 10/20 thread xeon. Sure it's still a first gen so no AVX, AVX2, AES, etc. But it is still a lot of compute power. The issue is a 4-8 socket CPU board to fit them in will run you ~$3000.

shiftpgdn 10y ago
Those old 20 thread xeons DRINK power. I wouldn't recommend them unless you're getting your energy for free. (Though there is no such thing as a free lunch.)
- tiernano 10y ago
  the Westmere E7s seem to be the equivalint of the Xeon X5600 series[1]... so, between 105 and 130w... sticking 4 or 8 of those in a box will blow most power budgets! [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westmere_(microarchitecture)#Server_.2F_Desktop_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westmere_(microarchitecture)#S...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

webmaven 10y ago

Hmm. I wonder when all the Tesla P100 GPU servers being sold now will get dumped on the market... Does GPU-compute server hardware obsolesce faster or slower than standard CPU-compute hardware?

tiernano 10y ago
I do remember seeing older (not sure the generation) NVidia CUDA gear going cheap... when i seen it, it was about 5 year old... so, possibly the same... maybe less...