Well the time finally came, I found an excuse which let me buy one of these super cheap HPE servers wtih the EPYC Rome processor in it.
Got a 1U DL325 model, with the 16c/32t 7302P cpu and just 32GB of ram (2x16). I’m going to find a gpu of some sort to stick in there, it has to be single slot. This is a Gen10+, so it has pcie 4.0 slots and pcie 4.0 nvme support. Sadly all I could justify was four SAS SSDs, running in RAID 10.
I am pleasantly surprised, it is super QUIET. The little desk fan I have, and the building air conditioning overhead easily make more noise than this machine.
Currently it’s running Windows Server 2019 to make sure everything is healthy, but I will try installing RHEL 8.2 next, and maybe Windows 10 Enterprise in a VM if I’m feeling ambitious.
This machine was only $2200! Just can’t believe that price. The price has since jumped to $3300, so I guess the fire sale is over. After some more testing, I’ll probably buy an 3rd party memory kit for it, something with four sticks to take advantage of more memory channels.
So, using one of these as a workstation not going so well. Once you put an external GPU into the system, the chassis management system knows, and sets the fans to full speed. Looking to see if there is an override.
New development…
Borrowed a Quadro P2000 from a workstation and my server is much happier with it. I was able to install an official driver for it, and the chassis fans are no longer screaming!
Dunno why Cinebench says server 2016, this is the March(?) 2020 update of Server 2019