Opteron Server in 2020

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So Level1Tech is awesome. I must admit I’ve neglected the forums but been a follower of Wendell since before Level1Tech. I just wanted to mini-rant a little about the state of youtube. If you go looking for Opteron servers on youtube, pretty much all is some kind of “gaming on Opteron in 2019!” type video. However I’d rather see especially larger YT’ers show it actually acting as a server, how it compares to a desktop turned server, or more recent server parts or things like that. It’s not exactly surprising to anyone that a sub 3GHz bulldozer CPU has terrible gaming performance.

Anyway, now that’s over with, here’s the thing; I got my hands on two Opteron 6378’s for a new server I want. My current server is actually inspired by a video Wendell did some time ago, detailing an Asrock Rack board and how you can pair it with an I3 to have ECC enabled. That’s exactly what it is, a little Haswell I3 server, it just runs FreeNAS +Emby & Usenet via FreeNAS. However it’s not quite strong enough to run everything I’d like and it being a tiny little box also means I can’t really add anything to it. I’d rather make something I can add and remove VM’s from. So I thought, “something with plenty of cores would be nice”. Then I got my first 6378; it was cheap, and below the price of paying import charges(Norway). I also realized that if I also wanted IPMI on the board, I’d either have to pay three times as much for a board ooor I could simply get another 6378 and buy a two socket board WITH IPMI as well as a SAS 2008 built in controller. I could get all of this for less than that one socket IPMI enabled board… then I must admit I kinda lost courage, suddenly I started worrying about power usage and will it actually be too slow to do anything? This is why I feel like there should be more focus on cheap server parts like this. You see these channels for gaming, where a guy buys a £1.5 gfx and runs crysis on it… Anyway I decided to take the plunge(the board was the last thing missing). I already have the CPU’s and 8x 8GB ECC memory for this thing, as well as a case for it. If I’m horribly dissapointed(I doubt I will be considering where I’m coming from) I will just sell it.

Anyway the TL;DR is here
Building this server:
CPU - 2xOpteron 6378
RAM - 8x8GB ECC 1600MHz DDR3 memory
Mobo - SuperMicro AMD H8DG6-F
Case - A superMicro workstation case with support for SAS for it front bays I got at a flee market for ~$10
The intention is to run Proxmox on it. And combine everything I currently have(pfsense, FreeNAS, PC for remote desktop & handbraking stuff) into one.

Have I gone completely mad? Or would this be a decent system for it’s price?(somewhere between 250 and $300 ca. when all is said and done, minus HDD’s)

And if you guys have experiences with these parts please share :slight_smile:

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For that price? It’s not terrible, but I hope you live in Siberia. That thing is going to put out enough heat to melt Antarctica.

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I suspect it will especially during load, though the CPU’s are “only” 115W TDP each, and I doubt the system would ever run near full tilt as I’ll probably only give Handbrake 8 cores to work with. So I’m hoping it will be manageable.

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Let me get the negative points out of the way:
One; With that work load target, your going to be better served with higher single core performance (can still get multi-core Intel chips, ex. data center hardware) plus gives your project more flexibility in future.
Second; Price of that Mobo is still really high (Norway ebay pricing/shipping will add more $$$)

So in the interest of building a value server that can serve a few options. I’d recommend research the Serverbuilds forums links below, they are crazy good at breaking done part lists and compatibility (which is the unspoken problem of ebay buying)

Sample builds:

Handbrake: (Qucksync builds)

Feel free to DM if you have any issues. Looking forward to seeing your server build!

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I’ve got a small cluster of ARM cores that probably have the same compute power as your system. Idles at 20w including network gear.

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Awesome, thanks for that. I’ll bookmark this for future reference. But yeah the problem was getting Xeon chips that were worth it performance wise, I suspect getting ones with Quicksync is even more expensive. I was trying to keep the cost as low as possible, ordering from ebay, while maintaining a certain standard, ECC, and servergrade motherboard.

That supermicro case, was actually a full computer, it was strange, as it had a SAS controller(with no HBA support sadly), but then the CPU was a 2700K, and no video output on the board itself, it’s just a strange machine really, anyway, I suspect it could probably be turned into a rather decent Handbrake machine. If quicksync is accessible, the thing is, it’s not that much of an upgrade over my I3 server, and afaik I7’s don’t support many, if any VM features, so it wouldn’t really work for what I want it to. So it would just end up as another box in my “lab”.

I can’t wait to show it actually. it’ll be a fun build regardless.

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