4mo ago

The state of used server hardware, and also a request for advice

Hey y'all.

I've been running a eBay special server with a pair of Xeon E5-2687W v2 and 64gb of cheap RAM. It's been working pretty great (other than a little bit of instability that randomly went away after a while, but I expect to come back at some point). I've had this setup for a couple years now, and have been eyeballing a couple different upgrade paths.

The reason I want to switch is that the eBay special motherboard does not have enough pci-e slots for what I'm planning in the near future.

The reason I want to upgrade is that I like having nice server hardware.

So I have been looking at alternatives. Is anyone else amazed at how cheap a CPU is, but how expensive a socket SP3 motherboard is? The cheapest sp3 board I've found is more than 500$, used. The cpus which will outperform my setup in every metric cost less than 200$.

This had me looking at new/used gaming hardware instead, which is cheaper, but misses out on ecc and also has a more limited amount of pci-e slots as well, (which is the primary motivation for changing my setup).

I'm trying to find a 16core/32 thread setup with the best single core performance available in that class. My current setup is 8core/16thread x2, and i'd like to avoid 'downgrading' to fewer cores. But the things I run usually run do better with more single thread performance than multi thread performance.

I found the epyc 7371, and the ryzen 5950x which meet my core requirements, but both have downsides I'm trying to mitigate. (Mobo price and ECC ram, respectively)

Do y'all have any alternative options I might've missed?

10 comments

Boards will often end up costing more than CPUs as they fail more so supply for them dries up quicker.
As for you use case a little more detail on what you're doing could help. Though if I were you I'd be going for the used gaming hardware if it suits your needs as ECC + management stuff that you get with servers boards while nice isn't really all that necessary for homelab work.
Another avenue to look is if your workload needs lots of individual add-in cards but they don't need much bandwidth old mining mobos can be a decent source though they all use conspire CPU slots from what I've seen.
- Boards will often end up costing more than CPUs as they fail more so supply for them dries up quicker.
  I was hoping you wouldn't say that. I've seen this mentioned in a couple of other places too.
  I use it as a main use home server. Jellyfin (with transcoding), 96tb of storage (64tb usable), the occasional game server (minecraft, valheim, both do better with better single core performance), navidrome (with conversion), and whatever other project catches my eye. Lately it's been playing with the website generator, Hugo, which takes no resources, but prior to that it was VHS to digital conversions, which took all the resources.
  I've got a GTX 1650 and a SAS card (for extra hard drive plugins) right now. I'd like to add a m.2 extension card, and a 10gbps sfp card, but my current board only has two pcie slots right now.
  Given what I'm after, more slots without proper bandwidth, like from a mining board, would likely result in issues that I would only notice in benchmarks, but would bug me regardless. If I'm spending half a grand on new parts, they might as well fully support the stuff I'm spending half a grand for.
Is there a reason you're attached to 16 cores? A modern mid to high range CPU will have about 2x the single thread performance, so even with a downgrade in core count it would still be substantially faster overall.
For example an i5-14600K has 14 cores, with 3x the total performance and 2x the single thread performance, and it's a $160 CPU that also has an iGPU that has really good transcoding ability, and can run openvino for stuff like object detection on Frigate or ML search on images in Immich, so no external GPU needed either.
A setup with a 14600k would also idle at probably 20W (with no PCIe cards or HDDs), so a huge power savings over any enterprise server gear.
Plus even cheaper motherboards will often have 2+ NVMe slots, so you probably won't need an addon card for those, on top of no extra GPU, leaving you with only the 10GbE and SAS cards.
Personally I'd say since you'll be transcoding and stuff I would not go with an AMD CPU.
- The reason I want to upgrade is that I like having nice server hardware.
  Pride, mostly. Bigger numbers make me feel good, and I refuse to apologise for it. I may end up waiting another year if the requirements aren't reasonable right now. This is a hobby without any real deadline, so, 'just waiting a bit' is a decision I'm entirely willing to make to make sure I get what I'm after.
  Notably, the m.2 expansion card isn't for operating system storage; it's for a scratch disk for jellyfin transcodes and in-progress torrent downloads. This is separate from my OS drive, which is also m.2, but usually plugged into the motherboard.
  Also, the epyc 7371, which has 16/32, and is better in every measurable way than my current setup, without a motherboard, is about 80$ on eBay. It's what started me on this topic in the first place. An Intel processor that also does that, but with less cores, is not as impressive in comparison.
  
  Fair enough haha
  You could combine the scratch disk and OS drives into a pair of mirrored M.2 drives. That's what I do on my setup!
  The downside I see to the Epyc 7371 is poor single thread performance, only about 15% better than the E5-2687W v2. I have the E5-2667 v2 CPU in my server and it really struggles at running servers for Minecraft, Enshrouded, Arma 3, etc..
  Also worth a look at the i7-14700k, it has 20 cores and 28 threads and absolutely blows the Epyc and Xeon out of the water.
  https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5719vs5720vs3387/Intel-i7-14700K-vs-Intel-i5-14600K-vs-AMD-EPYC-7371
  Personally I'm probably going to do a build with the i3-14100 to replace my Xeon v2, I want less power usage and more single thread performance.
Have you looked into an actual used server?
I own 2 Dell rack servers, each of which I got for free. The big one cost me about $500 to upgrade to 80vcpu 180gb RAM and has more PCIe slots than I need. I don't even run it because my smaller server does everything I want.
I guess it depends on exactly what you are looking for, but at least do a scan of ebay or amazon refurbs. Look for used Dell or HP rack servers. The parts to upgrade older machines are cheap, and an enterprise server has the capacity to deliver a hell of a lot of performance. Do some searching, see what you find.

10 comments