so thinking about getting a r810 or 910 quad socket 1567 server. idea would be to run 4x 10 cores (probably e7 2870’s)
lot of parts cheap on ebay. the use case would be possibly hosting a game server for a friend who made his own game if he can get off his lazy ass. if not just make my own cloud ftp thingy and nas and play around with vm’s and probably host a site or two and email server. maybe do some freelance hosting on the cheap or monero mining because 40 cores 80 threads and cheap power.
so never played around with a poweredge and socket 1567 is rather confusing and dell’s user manuals full of buzz words are more advertisements then actually helpful. any sage advise?
I don’t have any experience with the R810, but I am familiar with the R910.
My advice for it is:
The R910 is very particular about its memory layout. Read the technical guidebook carefully to understand all of the rules before you purchase a memory upgrade. Even then I would recommend buying from a seller with a good return/exchange policy.
There are two generations of memory riser available (the second generation is marked with a “II” symbol on the top corner), either will work but you cannot mix them.
The rear of the chassis gets hot and the tabs on the hot-swap power supplies are made of an oily plastic which degrades from the heat over time. They tend to fall off and make a mess which you especially would not want to get mashed into a carpet.
The power supplies are available in 750W and 1100W varieties. You might need the higher wattage power supplies depending on how much hardware you plan to install in the chassis, especially if you’ll be plugging it into 120V AC.
It might be obvious, but since you mentioned using it as a NAS I should point out that there are no models of the R910 which support a 3.5" backplane.
If you remove or don’t have the PCIe riser, you can install a low-power GPU like a 1050 Ti in the x24 slot, which is rare for this generation of hardware, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. Passthrough into a VM works on ESXi, and probably for other hypervisors too.
The server is heavy. This is one of the ones where you should heed the “team lift” sticker when installing in a rack.
thankyou for your knowledge. was planning on throwing in all noctua fans. didnt know about the ram so great help there. the 1100wat psu’s are around 20$ each so if the one i get doesnt come with 1100w i’ll be sure to fix that. dont have my own rack so i will just figure something out. got some metal supports meant for heavy glass aquariums i may re purpose as it’ll allow airflow + easy cabling. for the drives i was thinking external harddrive cage from a old case or three, maybe in a case just stacked with drives with their own psu also running fans and a lot of long sata cables. maybe not ideal but it would work and it’d be cheap and it doesnt have to be pretty. as for the weight, i been working with and around servers long enough to figure this out myself =/ do a lot of structured cabling and lately i’ve become the go to guy to get the hodge podge of networking and server equipment looking pretty.
also i dont suppose you know anything about 1567 cpus and what boards support which cpus? from what i understand the cpu’s were not all released at the same time and some boards got bios updates for the newer ones and maybe some didnt? cant seem to find any information about this that isnt older then the newer cpus of that socket.
As far as I know, Dell always releases BIOS updates for their servers to support newer CPUs when they become available for the socket (which always happens, because sockets are supported for two CPU generations). Really the only unusual thing about this socket is that the naming scheme for Xeons changed mid-cycle and so Intel released the E7 v1 series instead of a 7600 series as the upgrade path. The E7 v1 is still a Westmere CPU like the 5600 series and not a Sandy Bridge like the name might suggest.
I know that there are “Revision I” and “Revision II” versions of the chassis, and I’m not aware of any hardware differences between them. This is admittedly speculative, but I think this would be the indicator of what BIOS version it shipped with, and therefore whether it supports the newer generation of CPUs out of the box or not. If you get a revision I chassis without CPUs and the previous owner never updated the BIOS, then you would have to pick up at least one older CPU in order to install the BIOS update (pretty sure iDRAC 6 can’t install it for you). The update utility is a .exe file which you can download from their website, and it runs in FreeDOS if you’d prefer not to install Windows to do this.
I have upgraded these systems from quad E7530s or X7550s to quad E7-8870s before, no problem.