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Anyone here homelabbing with a Xeon CPU in their server? What kind of secondhand models are best worth it for homelab in terms of price vs performance and power

Anyone here homelabbing with a Xeon CPU in their server? What kind of secondhand models are best worth it for homelab in terms of price vs performance and power consumption?

bayindirh 2y ago
You should look at 2-socket mid-range models of any generation you'd like to use. Higher end models are generally specialized CPUs for certain domains (HPC, banking, etc.), so they're generally hotter. If you're not going to go full-throttle all day, every day, having SMP is good. For an homelab environment, I think 65W-95W band is ideal if you want to keep noise and heat output manageable. While it brings some performance hit, enabling frequency-scaling (SpeedStep in older parlance) is beneficial. Using a 2U server will bring noise lower since you won't be using, counter propeller, 10KRPM 40-50mm fans. If you want especially quiet servers when they're not under load, look at Dell PowerEdge. They run like sleeping cats when idle / lightly loaded, but scream like an agitated parrot if you heat them up. Lastly, a good way to maximize performance without too much power consumption is using an "optimal" RAM configuration which utilizes all channels with homogeneous RAM modules.
- formerly_proven 2y ago
  All two socket systems have horrid idle power consumption though.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    I think newer systems are better since they support desktop-like deeper sleep states, as well. Maybe you can further optimize with a high hysteresis on-demand scheduler and core-pinning long running daemons to a single socket to keep the other one sleeping for most of the time. We do the exact opposite since we're going "full throttle all day, every day", so I can't give you numbers on that front.
mschuster91 2y ago
I got a bunch of HP DL360 Gen8 and an oooold cheesegrater Mac Pro 4.1. These things are a dime a dozen because it all is/was enterprise gear - your best bet is to check out IT resellers, they live and breathe on quickly passing through inventory.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  I recently got a PowerEdge R730XD with 24 drive bays, Two Xeon E5s (a mid range model, I can't recall now) and 256GB of RDRAM installed for less than a new, passively cooled N100. I need to get disks, though. That was not part of the deal. However I won't be installing that thing at home. I'm not that mad, yet.
  - codetrotter 2y ago
    > I won't be installing that thing at home. I'm not that mad, yet. What do you do instead? Colocation rental in a DC?
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      That one will live in a university's data center, for a joint project I'll be doing with my professor. It'll be a project-centric server. Not a general purpose one. For smaller tasks, N100 and RaspberryPi/OrangePi 5 series are more than sufficient.
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > However I won't be installing that thing at home. I'm not that mad, yet. I put my farm under the roof, in a properly enclosed rack. No noise and I'll also get some fire alarms to cut the power feed to the rack in case something goes bonkers up there. (Any recommendations on CO2 extinguisher systems welcome)
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      It's great that you have space for that. I don't have that much space to do that. Another reason I don't yearn for a homelab is that I play with a lot of hardware already. I have no idea on CO2 extinguishers, sorry.
goda90 2y ago
I've been running a Xeon-D server/NAS for several years. Nice low power consumption. Was pretty cheap brand new integrated into a Supermicro server board.
neverartful 2y ago
I have an Apple Mac Pro Late 2013 (aka trashcan) with an Intel Xeon 8 core cpu.
schmookeeg 2y ago
I have a pair of now fairly old Xeon D-1541 which are not the fire-breathing xeons people imagine, but they're robust, sip watts, and have some really full feature sets that have kept them around in my rack for a long long time. I got them as they were the cheapest path to 128GB support (in ~2014) and they're still useful today. I run one NAS/VM/home automation box and one Jupyter box with an nvidia GPU in it. They never complain. Neither does my power bill.
ch_123 2y ago
I have a system with a Xeon 8173M (Skylake-generation, 28 cores + HT) with 256GB in a desktop ATX case. I bought the CPU and RAM second hand, and I would guess I spent €600 between them. I bought a new Supermicro X11SPL-F motherboard which cost about €500. Add in PSU, SSD, the case, etc. and it was under €1,500 for a considerable amount of computing power which doesn't make a lot of noise and has reasonable power consumption for my needs.

Anyone here homelabbing with a Xeon CPU in their server? What kind of secondhand models are best worth it for homelab in terms of price vs performance and power consumption?

bayindirh 2y ago

You should look at 2-socket mid-range models of any generation you'd like to use. Higher end models are generally specialized CPUs for certain domains (HPC, banking, etc.), so they're generally hotter. If you're not going to go full-throttle all day, every day, having SMP is good. For an homelab environment, I think 65W-95W band is ideal if you want to keep noise and heat output manageable. While it brings some performance hit, enabling frequency-scaling (SpeedStep in older parlance) is beneficial. Using a 2U server will bring noise lower since you won't be using, counter propeller, 10KRPM 40-50mm fans. If you want especially quiet servers when they're not under load, look at Dell PowerEdge. They run like sleeping cats when idle / lightly loaded, but scream like an agitated parrot if you heat them up. Lastly, a good way to maximize performance without too much power consumption is using an "optimal" RAM configuration which utilizes all channels with homogeneous RAM modules.

formerly_proven 2y ago
All two socket systems have horrid idle power consumption though.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  I think newer systems are better since they support desktop-like deeper sleep states, as well. Maybe you can further optimize with a high hysteresis on-demand scheduler and core-pinning long running daemons to a single socket to keep the other one sleeping for most of the time. We do the exact opposite since we're going "full throttle all day, every day", so I can't give you numbers on that front.

mschuster91 2y ago

I got a bunch of HP DL360 Gen8 and an oooold cheesegrater Mac Pro 4.1. These things are a dime a dozen because it all is/was enterprise gear - your best bet is to check out IT resellers, they live and breathe on quickly passing through inventory.

bayindirh 2y ago
I recently got a PowerEdge R730XD with 24 drive bays, Two Xeon E5s (a mid range model, I can't recall now) and 256GB of RDRAM installed for less than a new, passively cooled N100. I need to get disks, though. That was not part of the deal. However I won't be installing that thing at home. I'm not that mad, yet.
- codetrotter 2y ago
  > I won't be installing that thing at home. I'm not that mad, yet. What do you do instead? Colocation rental in a DC?
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    That one will live in a university's data center, for a joint project I'll be doing with my professor. It'll be a project-centric server. Not a general purpose one. For smaller tasks, N100 and RaspberryPi/OrangePi 5 series are more than sufficient.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > However I won't be installing that thing at home. I'm not that mad, yet. I put my farm under the roof, in a properly enclosed rack. No noise and I'll also get some fire alarms to cut the power feed to the rack in case something goes bonkers up there. (Any recommendations on CO2 extinguisher systems welcome)
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    It's great that you have space for that. I don't have that much space to do that. Another reason I don't yearn for a homelab is that I play with a lot of hardware already. I have no idea on CO2 extinguishers, sorry.

goda90 2y ago

I've been running a Xeon-D server/NAS for several years. Nice low power consumption. Was pretty cheap brand new integrated into a Supermicro server board.

neverartful 2y ago

I have an Apple Mac Pro Late 2013 (aka trashcan) with an Intel Xeon 8 core cpu.

schmookeeg 2y ago

I have a pair of now fairly old Xeon D-1541 which are not the fire-breathing xeons people imagine, but they're robust, sip watts, and have some really full feature sets that have kept them around in my rack for a long long time. I got them as they were the cheapest path to 128GB support (in ~2014) and they're still useful today. I run one NAS/VM/home automation box and one Jupyter box with an nvidia GPU in it. They never complain. Neither does my power bill.

ch_123 2y ago

I have a system with a Xeon 8173M (Skylake-generation, 28 cores + HT) with 256GB in a desktop ATX case. I bought the CPU and RAM second hand, and I would guess I spent €600 between them. I bought a new Supermicro X11SPL-F motherboard which cost about €500. Add in PSU, SSD, the case, etc. and it was under €1,500 for a considerable amount of computing power which doesn't make a lot of noise and has reasonable power consumption for my needs.