It's been a while since I've been here in the forums, its good to be back! Anyway, I recently moved into my own office space, which I am very excited about and I'm in the process of acquiring some servers, currently looking at government auctions with some nice IMB blade centres and stuff to build up a nice rack. Now that's fine, but something else caught my eye peaked my interest, up for auction is an IBM x3550, it looks great, dual Xeon E5649 for a total of 24 threads, 32GB RAM, 6 HDD hotswap bays. Now, my question is, does anyone know if this server has any PCIE slots and if so, would it be viable to jam a GPU into it, mod the case a little and convert the server into a workstation? If it is it would be a really great machine for game dev which is what I do. Anyone done this before?
I would think for game dev you would want something that is actually close to a gaming system. I'm not a game dev but that would be my thinking. So, old dual xeons are fun and all but maybe something with a little more IPC and clock speed instead of THAT many cores? Keep an eye out for RYZEN 5 would be my advice. Or go RYZEN 7 for more stuff at once.
Oh, maybe let's clear this one first: What kind of game? What engine?
Hey, I understand why you might think that would be a good idea, however I'll be doing rendering, compiling, large builds, virtual machines and running a lot of programs at the same time, so the extra cores are very beneficial. It's most likely also going to be an always on system which server gear is going to deal with a bit better over time.
I did manage to find the documentation for the specific model and it turns out it has 2 x16 PCIE slots so it looks like I'll be able to get a GPU into there with some case mods so i might go for it and see how it goes
I do game dev, and also VFX. I'm currently using a HP Workstation with dual Xeons and a GTX 1080. I find that it's a good balance for DCC applications thanks to the OpenGL performance, as what most of the DCC programs are based on, apart from a few what use DX, like MAX. And even then it sings. And yes you are correct, lots of cores are needed for baking, rendering and compiling so the heavy-thread count really helps. But you also need single core performance as modelling operations in most software only will function on one core, and you will start to feel the effect when editing dense meshes.
I thought I'd drop my two pennies worth in. Modding ex-server hardware though? Something I've not done. However if you get it to work, I can not see any issue with you having a very good productivity machine that will last you a good few years.
X3550 has 18 DIMM slots so RAM ain't no issue, it's max capacity is 288GB. I'm not to certain it would be worth going for E5-2670s over the E5649s that are in the system, they are very similar, the E5649s do have less cache which is probably the biggest difference and does kinda suck, it also has 2 less cores, but 24 threads is more then enough. On a side note I'm interested in why you think 32GB RAM isn't enough?
yes; i didn't mean to imply that you wouldn't be able to buy more. rather, that you might want to.
because
as for the CPUs, they're faster, more cache, and better power consumption. combined with the fact they're real cheap right now. this last point may/not be relevant depending on the price you can get this server for.
the sandy has more pcie lanes, so its going to perform much better under a kvms.
@kingyachan if you want i can sell you dual e5-2670 with aio, 2u intel server with 64GB of ram (max cap is 768GB). for $600. (it supports up to 2 fury-x's, or aprox ~4 rx480)
(it has 2x pci-e x24, but allows you to connect up to 3 cards into each with the riser cards - that are included)
you can't get dual e5-2670 server cheaper. (even cheapest on ebay is like $800 + $100 for delivery)
You can jam a gpu in it,but pretty sure the ipc may cause some cpu side bottlenecking with a 1080 or even a 1070 i'd suggest only buying the above system if you want to run a bunch of vm's for the vm's,hosting,server the above specs are really great for gaming or even more rendering there is going to be a delay from the cpu side.You are better of with a newer dual xeon system.
Righto so just a quick update, the auctions just ended and I was super lucky and managed to get the x3550 I mentioned in an earlier post for $70! So I'll pick it up in the next couple days, do some mods and clean up on it and see how I go turning it into a workstation
