Are CHEAP x79 Servers/Workstations Good In 2024?

if you're looking to build a budget server or workstation with lots of cores you'll be hardpressed to find something that's a better value than used xeons older ivybridge zeeon CPUs can be picked up for pennies on the dollar and can have surprisingly High Core counts although that comes at the cost of high power draw and outdated specs in 2023 is something like this even a good idea well I'm going to use this to build somewhat of a budget system that's also kind of a cool sleeper system in my opinion to see how well it performs not only as a hyper visor for running virtual machines but also as a budget workstation let's get [Music] started now buying a use zon may or may not be a good decision but what's definitely a good decision is checking out the sponsor of today's video skillshare skillshare is a learning community filled with curious and creative people and it's a great place to go if you want to learn how to start a new career take on a new hobby or just find ways to be more productive now I've talked in the past about skillshare and how I've used courses to help me as a content creator but sometimes I find skill shares great for simple practical things for example Auto hockey Auto hockey is some software I've used to be more productive but it's been a while since I've programmed anything in it so I decided to brush up all my skills by going through faroo F's course which helped me knock the rest off and get back up to speed and now I've been using Auto hot a lot to speed up everything from video editing to just returning emails faster if you're looking for ways to be more productive or just learn more skills definitely check out skillshare and right now if you're one of the first 500 people to click the link in the description you'll get one month of skillshare for free so go join and start learning with skillshare today I've been running this YouTube channel for well over a year and a half now and somehow this is the first time I've made a video covering used zons well at least the E5 series the bigger ones and that's a bit odd because for a while x79 systems were the thing to get for Budget systems however as these get older newer CPUs get more efficient and power costs keep Rising for lots of people the appeal seems to be slowly diminishing so why did I even decide to make a video covering x79 motherboards and used xeons well because as I often do I made a stupid purchase one day while browsing Facebook Marketplace I came across a listing for a used toel motherboard uh Intel Xeon and 32 GB of DDR3 for just $20 I started getting video ideas in my head and just didn't put all the pieces together so I showed up and bought it and when I showed up the seller actually asked me if I wanted a second motherboard for just $10 more so for 30 bucks two x79 motherboards a single CPU and 32 GB of gdr 3 so without putting too much thought in it I went out and bought two of these E5 2695 5 V2 zon processors to do sort of a hey look I bought two servers for like 50 bucks and it was going to be a cool video but yeah that's not how it turned out you see I already had a feeling this was going to be difficult to work with with it being a proprietary Dell motherboard but I didn't quite understand how complicated it was going to be with a lot of proprietary headers and power and on top of that I don't think this motherboard even works and on top of that these actually aren't even the same model with motherboard this is actually an x99 system and requires ddr4 and yeah this was sort of a mess so I decided to toss that whole idea but I did have two of these xeons that I already ordered and was kind of in the mood to do something around an x79 System since it's something like I said I've never covered before so I basically just decided to make a video about this CPU the E5 2695 V2 this CPU has 12 cores and 24 threads and has a base clock of 2.2 GHz but but can turbo up to 3.4 GHz it can run standard DDR3 udm memory but can also support registered ECC in Quad Channel now this also does have 150 W TDP but we'll get to that originally this CPU would have cost well over $2,000 but today it could be picked up for way cheaper I bought my two for $28 on eBay but you can typically find them for around 15 bucks or so to make this video happen I started looking around for some cheap motherboards but used X7 motherboards are still surprisingly expensive so I ended up stumbling over to AliExpress and checking out some of the x79 motherboards they have there I came across this motherboard from Jinga I'm pretty sure I'm butchering that but oh well and it cost around $40 or $45 with tax now there are some cheaper options but this one did have an nvme slot however it only has two PCI slots one of which is only by four but that shouldn't be that big of an issue now this also only has four dim slots and is limited to dual channnel but trying to find something with more slots and quad channel was getting pretty expensive so I decided to just reain in the budget and go with it it does include four SATA ports and it's nice and compact it's not quite a mini ITX board but it's not a full-size microatx board either now I did have memory from the Facebook Marketplace deal but these are only 4 GB dims which would leave me with just 16 GB so instead I opted to buy a 32 GB kit from eBay for 40 bucks but 32 G ites might still prove to be not enough but we'll get to that while I was shopping on AliExpress I also realized I didn't have a CPU Cooler so I bought this pretty cheap one for right around 20 [Music] bucks with the main system pretty much put together I decided to go ahead and just make sure it posted but since the Zeon doesn't have an egpu I tossed in this Nvidia k1200 I had on hand but I couldn't get it to post I tried pretty much everything you could think of a different GPU different memory different memory and different slots and eventually realized it came down to me just needing to power cycle my capture card because it had been posting the entire time I just didn't realize it it posted I have the motherboard Ram CPU all working but I needed to figure everything else out starting with the case now because the motherboard was so compact I had the thought to see if there was something out in my garage that I could maybe repurpose and put this in and that led me to this this is the compact CQ 5720 F and it's actually a really special computer for Me Not only was this the computer I covered in my very first video but it's also the computer that made the fan sound that you hear in all of my intros so if there was any system I had on hand that deserved to be ref featured in a video I figured this one made the most sense also other than the stupid Torx SL Flathead screws and the fact that it's upside down compared to most layouts this case is actually just a bog standard matx case good times when computer manufacturers just used standard ATX Hardware first I started by just completely gutting everything before dropping in the motherboard it needed a boot drive so I used this 256 GB SSD from Team group that I've used in pretty much all my videos for the last couple months or so and then dropped the motherboard in the case and this is a quick reminder that you do get what you pay for when you buy cheap motherboards off of AliExpress because I don't think that designers of the motherboard ever actually used it in a build themselves if they had they probably would have realized how terrible some of the screw placements are this one here is literally blocked by the tabs of the dim slots so it's pretty much impossible to get a screw in there and it's even more of a pain the but when you accidentally plug in the wrong fan headers and have to take the motherboard back out and then put it back in again I used this EVGA 650 W bronze power supply because I happened to have it sitting around and while that might not be the most efficient option it'll give us plenty of power for anything we might want to do now to make this system a bit more fun I dropped in this cage from Icy do this let you go from one 5 and 1/4 in Bay to four 2 and 1/2 in Bays so that way I could drop in some ssds later [Music] on after plugging in all the cables I also dropped in a 2 and 1/2 GB Nick and the Nvidia k1200 graphics card and I do plan to remove the graphics card later on to try to bring the power draw down because I believe this system should be able to work entirely without a GPU at least once we have something like proxmox installed where we can access it via a web browser now speaking of proxmox I thought it would be fun to use that ic. cage to drop in four ssds and set up a ZFS pool to run a bunch of virtual machines off of but the only four ssds that I had that were the same size were these 128 GB ssds from a video I did quite a while back now 128 GB is not a ton but if I set these up in rid 10 it'll at least give us some decently fast storage and we'll have about 250 GB or so to work with after a bit of off camera cable management things were looking pretty good looking good but not sounding so good because the system fan sounded like a jet engine fortunately I had some of these low noise adapters from noctua lying around and was able to drop one in and that helped a lot although somehow I got the CPU fan on backwards I got it all fixed eventually with everything squared away and all the fans in the right direction I installed proxmox to try and take advantage of all those cores and 32 GB of memory now we're a few minutes into this video and I know you've probably been wondering this entire time about power draw and I don't want to make you wait too long so while running proxmox just sitting at idle this system Drew between 60 and 61 Lots but proxmox isn't just going to be sitting idle so I decided to start setting up some VMS and containers I started off by setting up just one VM with Linux Mint and then two containers one running Kasa OS and then crafty to run some Minecraft servers and then the other running Jelly fin when running this the power draw crept up to around 90 WT but it was all working pretty well minus the fact that memory was starting to get a bit cramped I thought 32 GB was going to be enough but I didn't really think about the fact that I'd be using ZFS and I think that was my problem here ZFS likes to use pretty much any memory it can get its hands on and maybe that wasn't the best idea regardless everything ran really smooth in the virtual machine I set up I installed Linux Mint and then set up sunshine so that I could remote into it with moonshine from my desktop it was a pretty decent experience and I even played some super tux cart at a decent frame rate although it didn't look the best in a debb container I installed Kasa OS so that I could quickly set up some containers but really ended up just using this to run crafty for some Minecraft servers I ran both a paper server and a forge server and both worked totally fine granted it's a little hard to Benchmark Minecraft servers by yourself regardless when I hopped into either server we were still barely utilizing the CPU in a good way jelly fin ran great and the system could even transcode 4K video without Hardware acceleration although power crept up to about 150 watts or so now I could have used the GPU for some Hardware accelerated transcoding but my goal was to take that GPU out entirely and that was actually what I tested next now I was a bit nervous that there would be issues with a graphic card because in the past I've experienced network issues whenever you change pcie devices but everything worked fine and this actually brought our power usage down by 15 watts at idle we were sitting at around 45 watts and when running all of our servers it was sitting at about 75 Watts now that's not nearly as bad as I expected granted it's not great compared to some newer CPUs you can get especially mobile chips but with those options you lose a lot of things like PCI Lanes memory channels or just your money now with the big empty pcie slot I decided to drop in a quad 2 and2 gbit Nick mostly just to see if I could break things but I could still log into the proxmox UI with no issues I decided to tweak some memory usage settings and ran a few more VMS and containers including pfSense using that quad Nick as well as home assistant OS and py hole and it all worked like a charm now high power draw is mostly just an issue if you're running something all the time like a server but what if you just need something like a workstation to run some software when you need to get some work done well I decided to install Windows so that I could put this thing to the test doing what I do editing videos I should point out here that I couldn't install the most recent version of Adobe Premiere because of some limited instruction sets on the CPU and that's something you should take note of if you're looking to run a 10-year-old CPU fortunately I was able to install Premier Pro 23 which just so happens to be the version I use and I jumped into a recent project with multiple 4K sequences the system struggled a bit especially when there were multiple effects running but that was primarily a limitation of the GPU with any GPU accelerated effects turned off and while using proxies like I normally would it handled the edit fairly well now scrubbing and Playback wasn't quite as smooth as my system running a 3950x but it really wasn't that bad to sort of test something other than premere Pro I decided to run cinebench in cinebench R15 the x79 system was pretty impressive being only 10% slower than the cotus mine I just covered with its i7 136p however the x79 system Drew over three times the power things got even worse in the much newer cinebench R23 where in the multi-threaded test it was almost 24% slower than the cus mind and in the single threaded test it was 75% slower now to be fair there's a 10year difference between those two CPUs but even if you compare the Zeon to something like an i5 6500t it's not great in the multi-threaded test it it smashed the I5 but in the single threaded test was 40% slower than an i5 6500t this just goes to show the biggest weakness of these older zons which is single-threaded performance they're great if you're running software that can really take advantage of multiple cores and threads or if you're trying to run a bunch of concurrent tasks like virtual machines and containers but anything that needs single-threaded performance is going to really suffer so maybe this makes sense maybe it doesn't make sense but that's all going to depend on the cost so how much did I really spend on this whole project well it gets a little tricky because a lot of these parts I already had on hand but I'm going to sort of break it down sort of as best as I can well obviously I bought two CPUs for around 30 bucks but I think realistically we can say $15 for the CPU since you can find that right now on eBay so with the CPU RAM and motherboard I spent right around $100 if you tack on the cost of the cooler power supply and SSD it's about 185 now the case and the graphics card are a little bit trickier because the case I I literally got for free because it was being thrown away and the graphics card I got with a system bundled together but you can find these graphics cards are pretty similar for around $15 on eBay and the case like I said I got for free so realistically for the whole system about $200 now if you add the 2 and2 GB Nick the icy do and the ssds things get closer to around the 350 range or so now obviously this isn't like a buying guide for how to go get this stuff and a lot of this was stuff I already had so don't expect to build this exact same system and you really shouldn't build this exact same system but hopefully this can kind of give an idea of what you might be able to piece together with deals that you can find if you're interested in building something similar now if you are looking to go this route I do have a couple recommendations first make sure to get plenty of memory if you're buying something like this to run a bunch of virtual machines you'll want a lot of memory for that and I kind of made a mistake by buying the memory that I did I could have actually bought 64 GB of registered ECC memory for the same amount of money that I spent on the 32 GB kit that I got and it really doesn't matter that it's ECC but registered ECC is sort of being dumped like crazy from any businesses that are still running it so you can get it for really cheap I would also recommend just not really going with the x79 platform at all because you can go for x99 which is becoming a lot cheaper you can find Haswell and even Broadwell chips for basically the same price as anything Sandy or iy bridge now those systems will use ddr4 which might make it a little bit more expensive to buy memory but they're going to be way more efficient and have more modern Creature Comforts I had a lot of fun making this video and it was really interesting to check out a 10 year-old CPU that once would have cost over $2,000 and I also had a lot of fun putting it in a case that brought back a lot of good memories hopefully you guys had a good time and if you did make sure to hit the like button the Subscribe button and maybe even consider supporting me as a raid member on patreon or as a YouTube member I'm really thankful for what I get to do and that I get to make videos like these so I'm really appreciative for all your support whether it's through patreon YouTube membership or just by watching these videos that's about it for this one though so as always thank you guys so much for watching stay curious and I can't wait to see you in the next one jelly fin Grant jelly frint jelly fin ran great and could even trans code

Channel: Hardware Haven

Views: 246,510

Keywords: budget pc, budget home server, budget workstation, budget video editing pc, adobe premiere pro, cinebench, proxmox, hypervisor, x79, x79 motherboards, x79 server, used xeon, budget build, x79 in 2023, is x79 good for home server?, e5 v2, e5 2695 v2, intel xeon, budget xeon pc, how to build a server on a budget, x79 power draw, x79 efficiency, x79 wattage, x79 xeon, 12 core, 14 core, 16 core

Id: YnRje33sfXg

Length: 17min 22sec (1042 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 03 2023