Comment by broknbottle
12 hours ago
The E5-2670v1 was goated for this back in 2016-2017. You could get them for like 25-50 bucks. I still have one of the supermicro boards I got from work in hardware decommissioning and one of the chinese franken-boards with a modded bios.
Yeah, I have an old X99 old asrock Fatality (lol) board, micro ATX with a Xeon E5 2640 and 128GB of ECC DDR4 running 24/7 as a Truenas server with 80TB of storage in it. It seemed like an overkill when I put it together two years ago when I replaced my 5820 CPU that had been my daily desktop but now with storage and everything prices exploding it has turned into a very useful thing. I still don't like the fact that it sits at around 130 watts. But given that it has so many hard drives in it, it's not that bad. My whole basement cloud now feeds into it.
I just bought a Xeon E5-2690 v4 for $16 and a Sparkle A770 for like $350. Going to try some local models on there. I think it will be plenty good for my use cases.
Typing this from an Asus X99 WS 3.1 with a E5-2696v4 . I got 256GB of RAM, sees only 128GB but I am sure with some overvoltage and lowering the ram speed it could see all 256GB.
if anybody got a tip, i'd be more than glad to listen, please.
Thanks for this! Your post inspired me to look at my X99-UD4 system that was put in a closet some years ago. The board currently has a 5960x CPU, and I did not know I could put an E5-2697v4 CPUs in it. I have a couple of these v4 CPUs and tons of DDR4 modules from a recent data center decomm event. Time to hack again - it may revive my old PC!
> Typing this from an Asus X99 WS 3.1 with a E5-2696v4.
Yeah the Xeon E5 v4 to me are really an amazing spot. These things, today, are basically free. If you look a bit you can buy stuff like four 20 cores E5 v4 for $60, making them effectively $15 each. Basically free.
And here's the trick: I don't need my Xeon to be up 24/7. 8/7 is sufficient, so I save 2/3rd of the electricity cost. I set up my network so that when I sleep, my main server doesn't need to be on. The services that really need be on 24/7 (say my DNS for when I'm sleeping and my wife/kid need Internet) are running on a Raspberry Pi (which consumes nothing).
And when I need the shitloads of cores / ZFS etc.: I turn the Xeon on.
Now it's still a server in my case: my main machine is a recent AMD.
> if anybody got a tip, i'd be more than glad to listen, please.
Slap 128 GB of the 256 in a $50 used Xeon server and use that has a backup / to run VMs / ZFS / etc.