Will this be overkill or otherwise not recommended for someone who is new and just starting to learn?
My goal is to have something I can grow into, but initially I'd like to host a few VMs, game servers, and a have place to store content. I'd also like to host a PLEX server in the future as well but might buy a separate piece of hardware for it specifically down the road. Thanks in advance for taking the time to help a newbie!
The mini PC crowd will inevitably come in and shit on anything bigger than a matchbox that uses more than 1w.
They're not 100% wrong: power consumption is a factor but there's also a time and a place for rack servers. That time and place is when you have (or are looking to get) a rack and are looking for rock solid reliable hardware with lots of cores and hotswap storage bays, and running game servers is definitely somewhere the low core counts of mini PCs falls down.
That said, in 2023 it's probably not worth spending money on anything older than an E5 v4.
I have some of these.
One is configured with 2x Xeon 10 cores, 192 GB ram and 5x sas SSD. Idrac is telling me that it consumes around 120W which is not that bad if correct. About the noise: obviously it's louder than a desktop but it's not that bad. I had it in my office for a few days while I was setting it up and it's like a loud gaming desktop. It's way quieter than my old Hp server or the R710.
As someone with absolutely no idea what the fk is going on when it comes to servers, can you explain why stuff older than E5 isn’t worth it?
The machine OP linked has E5 v1 CPUs, which are a 12 year old Sandy Bridge-EP chip that's hugely power inefficient by modern standards and tops out at 12 cores per socket. E5 v4 would be Broadwell-EP, which is still 9 years old but benefited from 3 more generations of PPC and efficiency enhancements and tops out at 24 cores per socket.
IMO, that's as far back as you can go in search of cheap and cheerful hardware without shooting yourself in the foot on performance and efficiency.
A 12/13 generation NUC with 64GB RAM eats most of those very outdated servers alive.
And storage you can easily put into a NAS with SFP+ slots.
pro argument for 10+ year racks are:
I had mini's and NUC... only problem I had was true out of band management. Intel AMT was ok ish... but not a candle to ilo idrac. I have a T330 with 64gb idling at 55w with true remote management I can hide it away.
You forgot the last one
- Cool AF
Can you link a $400 NUC (with 64GB RAM) that eats this server alive? (With also CPU benchmarks?)
Running costs are a thing unless you have free energy as posted before or mama pays for it.
So you can't?
A thousand times this. I'm quite happy with my v3, but at this point it just isn't worth it short of nearly free.
I’d go with a v4 asap… literally just picked up a 12 core e5 2650 v4 for $4.80 shipped to my door
Even my v2 are fine for most things, but the single thread performance leaves something to be desired particularly for game servers...
Pretty much only reason why I'm using my v4. I was lucky enough to receive a free R730xd with dual E5-2695 v4, 512GB memory, and 36TB storage but looking to upgrade the drives.
I'll probably retire that whenever I decide to upgrade the hard drives again.
I think that for starters the R720 can be a good choice. It's cheap, parts are also cheap and it's a fully fledged rack server. It can have plenty of cores and ram to host lots of services to start learning.
The R720 is the end of the line for DDR3 based systems. Simply going to a R730 gets you DDR4 and newer iDRAC is better than old iDRAC. It also lets you use V3 and V4 Xeons and it is practically the same price. My local recycler isn't even bothering with 12gen Poweredges anymore.
In my country ( Italy) prices are quite different. The R,720 are cheap but newer equipment are pricier. Also for a starter I don't think there will be much of a difference between 12th and 13th generation. Of course if the price is close the newer is better.
Bang on, the mini pc crowd is funny.
Power consumption isn't black and white, because you have completely different feature sets.
I agree I wouldn't grab any dell under an X30 at this point and def go with a v4, that being said if you find a good deal on a v3, a v4 upgrade is like $20 for something around a 2680
Absolutely this. The power and heat from older servers is a significant factor. I'm running a r720XD and it pulls about 300w under normal load with a typical home server setup of VMs with home assistant, Plex, truenas, etc.
I would love to upgrade to something like a v4 cpu, but I'm leaning towards micro PCs in a cluster because of the size and power constraints.