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While the solution here works, the alternative is you can find a used Intel S2600CP from some random data center together with one or two E5 CPUs. You can get m
by xuejie 9y ago
While the solution here works, the alternative is you can find a used Intel S2600CP from some random data center together with one or two E5 CPUs. You can get much more possibilities of upgrading the rig this way.
I recently built such a PC with roughly $950, it includes one used E5-2650c2, used S2600CP board, 750W power supply, 32GB DDR3 ECC memory(I'm buying CPU, motherboard, power supply and memory from one vendor so I didn't know if the memory is new), brand new GTX 1070 and a brand new 128GB SSD. The good part is the board has 2 CPU slots, 16 memory slots and 6 PCIE slots, so if I feel the need, I can easily by another E5-2650 CPU, or 12 8GB memory sticks to make the total memory 128GB(or more if I choose to upgrade current 4*8GB memory sticks as well), or add more graphics cards for machine learning purposes.
Of course this won't cover all use cases since server CPUs tend to have more cores than high frequencies(mine has 8 cores, and 16 threads after HT, but only at 2.00GHz), which might be bad for high end games, but for programming tasks as described by the article here, this might be a better choice
- luca_ing 9y agoNice build. I've been considering something similar every now and then. The argument that makes me pull back though is my fear that its power draw would be considerable. How much power does your system draw? Idle, and/or under load?
- ihattendorf 9y agoNot the person you're responding to, but I have the S2600CP2J w/ dual E5-2670, 128gb ram, 8 2-3tb drives + an ssd and I draw ~120 watts at idle (~3% cpu usage). 100% load is around 300-350 watts. No external video card. Great budget server, motherboard + 2xCPUs + ram were just under $500 from NATEX, intel server case + PSU was $100 from ebay.
- luca_ing 9y ago100W idle is quite a lot in absolute terms, and more than I'd like because my boxes tend to run 24/7 (as do yours, I assume), but I suppose for the sheer amount of hardware you're running it's actually pretty reasonable. So energy cost would be about €240/year where I live, assuming permanent idling. Not exactly cheap, but you get what you pay for I guess :-) Thanks a lot for the info, and congrats on the sweet rig :-)
- xuejie 9y agoTBH I haven't tested it yet since the GTX 1070 card is still in shipping state, but I guess ihattendorf has provided detailed information :) If I can complete the setup before HN locks me from editing, I will edit this post
- xuejie 9y agoOkay so I manage to complete the build, on idle this is about 80w, but notice I have a 1070 card, which costs around 37w according to nvidia-smi, so if you don't need a graphics card, I'd say 40w - 50w is more than enough in idle.
- luca_ing 9y agoThanks for taking the time to reply :-) Very interesting.
- luca_ing 9y agoThanks a lot for your reply. I'm really curious.