This is it, an AlieXpress secondhand Xeon and 16GB DDR4 Registered Ram, plus a new Chinese ‘Mougol X99’ Motherboard for under $100 AUD including shipping and tax.
I’ll use a old 650W PSU and case I already have, along with a old Nvidia GeForce 660 GTX video card.
CPU:
Processor Series: Intel Xeon
Model number: E5 2680 V4
Processor Speed: 2.4GHz
Maximum core frequency: 3.3GHz
Processor Socket: LGA2011-3
Process: 14nm
Memory type: DDR4 1600/1866/2133/2400
The number of CPU cores: 14
The number of threads: 28
L3 cache size (MB) 35 MB
Wattage: 120 Watts
Virtualisation Software ?
It’s either Proxmox or SmartOS, but I’ve a preference for the latter as I do love using Solaris Unix.
16GB isn’t nearly enough for a SmartOS virtualisation server on ZFS, but after I’ve tested the Mobo and CPU, and if they look good and useful, I’ll buy 64GB of the same ram for $85 AUD and install it.
Usage: ?
Testing Distros
Presentations, so a mistake live on air doesn’t wreck my NixOS workstation
I’m really curious to see how this build goes, @techman! I’ve seen those X99 bundles online several times (and being discussed on several YouTube channels), but never gone as far as buying one.
Looks like the CPU side of it will be comparable performance (within ~10%) with your Ryzen 5 5500 build (PassMark Benchmark), but for $100! If you can put together a setup that’ll handle that 120W TDP, that’s incredible value.
That’s an absolute steal of a price - care to share the seller, if they’ve still got stock? I’m curious to see if they’ve got lower TDP bundles. I swapped a E3-1220Lv2 into my current Proxmox machine, despite the lower cores and significantly lower performance, because I was optimising for power consumption. If there’s an L version of an X99 bundle I wasn’t aware of, I’m curious to give it a look! Either way, I’ll be following this project with great interest.
The price of the new Ryzen 5500 was only $130 AUD and the mobo was similar for the single GPU slot board, so it’s not that much more expensive for the brand new (modern) Ryzen gear, which is also super low power when not flat out, I really love it.
The Xeon is for those times when I need lots of cpus, as in a virtualization server or a video editor where number of cores is more important than raw speed on fewer cores.
I’d rather have used a 64-core/128-thread Ryzen Threadripper 9980X but I looked in my wallet and it was about $5,000 USD short.
Thanks for sharing. Some of those bundles looked very appealing, but I’ll resist the urge and avoid buying more toys for now .
Give it a couple of years and those Threadrippers will probably be in similar bundles. The E5 2680 V4 was itself up around the US$2000 mark 5 years ago!
.