The PCI slot makes a lot of sense because it's a Workstation, meant for Work. For small industries that use obscure or proprietary hardware controllers which are not economically upgradable yet. Audio system cards for small radio stations. Weather sensor stations. Robotics controllers. Etc. etc... Notably it makes tranferring a backup off an older RAID array, to the new upgrade system extra simple.
everyone was going specifically for the p520s. I looked and they were all £400+, so I just looked at the spec sheets for similar models, realised the p500 would fit my use case just fine, and snagged one for £70
Fun fact the P520 comes with windows 10 workstation edition license hard coded in the MB, eBay sellers sell them with win10 home, a few command prompts and you can pull the license key off the MB and upgrade to win11 workstation for free
@@FINNIUSORION it's fast, it's customizable, it's open source, it's free to use, the rest of the world is using Linux on servers. And I use Linux on my dekstop pc for years with much pleasure. Try Linux Mint for example.
@@boneappletee6416 I just recently pulled an old am2 ddr2 machine out of my closet and set it up with opensuse. I have a bit over one week of Linux experience now lol
I actually have a p510. It came with a E5 v3 6 core and 32 GB of ram. I upgraded to a E5 v4 10 core and 128gb of RAM. It has 4 HDD bays with trays and there's essentially a backplane in it. It also came with a Lenovo Flex adapter (proprietary) which holds one gen 3 nvme and one SATA m.2. I added a single nvme card and it's dead silent. Running Truenas scale (passed through the sata controller) and several VMs. I can't complain. I paid $100 for it from a local seller.
holy crap, it's Skylake?! this IS a great deal! it seems like these "bargain systems" I see reviewed on YT are almost always Broadwell or older which is really rough on power-performance ratio and just performance in general. thanks for checking it out for us!
Gotta appreciate your real world vids. It's nice to see some cool corporate stuff from time to time, but what I really care about is stuff I can personally afford and make use of.
On one hand: that's some lenovo proprietary junk. On the other hand, though, you can actually buy spare parts and replacement somewhat into the future and it's actually easy to find what exactly you need in most cases.
yup my grandfather's current desktop had some issues a few years ago and after looking into it, I figured the power supply was dying and the motherboard had scorch marks where the funny magic electricity escaped I bought a motherboard with a cpu (didn't need it) for $13 shipped on ebay lol. I ended up also upgrading his ram at the same time and threw an SSD into it. That was 6 years ago and I haven't worked on it since, and he still uses it daily. Parts for that machine are plentiful and cheap.
@@RoshiGaming yep, I ditched my last x220 from 2011 just last year and it went to serve yet another user. Seem like proprietary, yet abundant is better than standard and rare.
I once had the same thought, and I once built an epyc server thinking that this is all I'll ever need. Fast-forward to today. I didn't realize how wrong I was... With all the AI and LLM stuff.. one GPU turn into two then three then... 70w idle also turns into a hundred, then few hundreds. I think I have lost the way at this point.
Machines like this get a lot of grief from people ( who have never owned one). I have one with a 2245 8 core processor, 64 gigs of quad channel DDR4 and a 3060 TI video card. It's got a couple of m.2 slots. It's a solid machine. Built like a tank and probably the most stable computer I've ever had so far
This is the exact machine I'm considering for my new ML workstation. Might even go with the 920 for expanding memory. Thank you for the run down for this.
Honnestly was skeptical at the thumbnail. Guess it was a good hook. But man haven't wanted to buy a new pc this much in a while. Fell in love with my gen 4 x1 carbon and just moved to a new yoga 9i. Yes lenovo does proprietary stuff. But their professional stuff is a notch above. Its genuinely a delight to use. It just works for me.
One final comment (sorry, I primary a p520c and have a second one as a server) the w-2145 is the sweet spot value wise, you can get at around $80 and is 8c/16t and you can get retired iMac Pro specific xeons that fit in here for very inexpensive and work with no compatibility issues. You also should be able to bifurcate the x8 slot with the latest bios
@@Saphykitten hey, appreciate this info. Do you happen to know if the p520c has remote management options available? Also, do you know how many 3.5" drives the case supports stock? I've been trying to find that information and haven't been successful.
YOOOOO I got mine back in May because of another RUclips video I saw last year where they used it for a cheap "gaming" pc and immediately saw the application for it being a server, it's cool to see one of my favorite RUclipsrs reviewing it and answering a few questions I've had in the BIOS settings area lol
@@cjmoss51 actually it's "Return of the Console Killer PC" by "Iceburg Tech" that I saw , it's not exactly the P520 in that video but it got me going in the right direction to find the P520 lol
From a mechanic, never torque your way to loosen a screw. Pretend you are an impact drill by applying bits of tourque and releases. Another words, pump the screw driver and you will save your bits along with strip less screws that way. You will also find out that screws and bolts break their tightness easier too.
Yeah baby! P520! *beams at mine over there, which is also used as a gaming PC for my kid, sporting a 2135, 32gbs ram, a couple M.2's and an ARC750) Now go look at a PowerEdge T110-II! My old standby main server!
I just bought an HP Z440 for my home server, and I'm starting to get buyers remorse. I could've gotten the dual CPU model (the Z640) for $10 more and now seeing this next gen one for not much more than that, I'm feeling even more buyers remorse 😭
I have a z440 that runs my truenas/jellyfin. It’s a good machine, it’s not as good as the p520, but it has a lot of life in it. You also can put it in a normal atx case, or in my instance, I have it in a 4u rack mount.
I got a Z840 running dual E5-2667v4s and 128gb of ram (8x16gb) working as my first NAS and occasional cloud server although the second part has a WIP. It will probably end up as an off site backup server when I eventually get a rack setup.
@@Saphykitten I rehomed a Z420 motherboard a few years ago and would not recommend. While the form factor is standard ATX, there's a lot of proprietary headers on the board that require hacky workarounds. From memory, there's a PSU adapter needed, fan and power switch headers are nonstandard, and there's a proprietary temperature sensor that the BIOS will complain about if absent.
I have both the Z440 and the G4 Z4 which is the next newest one. Both are fantastic. I installed some highish end nvidia cards. They game pretty well at 1080. Its hard to beat for $350.
i'm currently in the process of getting a P720 ready for a proxmox virtualization server. 4x40TB WD RED, 256Gb DDR4 REG ECC 2600Mhz, 12x4TB 2,5' WD Red via 2x SAS Controller and Adaptors for 6x2,5 in 5,25' Bay, 2x Xeon 6138 (each 20c/40t), Nvidia Quadro K4200 for Jellyfin HD/4K Encoding, and 2x 4TB M.2 NVME in Raid0 for the OS and Storage of Images.
For people wanting more cores/RAM, Skylake Xeon Scalable has also become pretty affordable recently. The Lenovo P720/920, HP Z6/Z8 G4 and Dell T7820/T7920 are all options, with 6 memory channels instead of 4 and multiple sockets.
The HP workstation are dogs, I have used a couple generations of the Z8 workstations and they run about 200 mhz below the base frequency don’t get within 500 mhz of the boost frequency. I had the IT guys as well as HP support work on the problem and everybody has been left scratching their head.
I bought one and turned it into a powerful workstation/media server. I put in a 10TB hard drive, an RX6600, a Wireless/Bluetooth card, and upgraded the memory to 64GB quad-channel. When I bought it, it came with a 512GB M.2 SSD. I use it for gaming, content creation, and livestream. Honestly it’s a really versatile platform.
I really love these for homelabs as long as you have the space for it. They're super nice to work with (bar the proprietary nature of it of course) and the only reason I didn't go for it is most of my server load just needs maybe 2 PCIe devices and most importantly, I just think rack mount looks nice albeit louder, more power hungry but in my case, cheaper up front cost but very timing dependent. Anyone looking to play with hardware more, might be trying out different PCIe devices, or just doesn't have a specific goal in mind, I can't recommend these enough especially for a lot of the prices you'll find.
I bought one of these over a year ago for about $180 without hard drive and graphics card. Installed a 1tb nvme and a 2070 and use it as my main driver for IT and Photography. Best purchase i made for that year
I picked one of these up after watching your video and it has been nice so far. I did end up getting the Icy Dock 3-Bay Adapter since the lenovo cage would take over a month to be delivered and I don't have a 3D Printer. While it does work the way that the 5.25" bays are secured in the P520 isn't the best, and I can't use their bracket to lock it in place because of the way it is designed. I could probably put my own holes into it so that the securing bracket works, but I don't move the server a ton and it fits in well enough that it isn't just sliding around if I move the case a little.
Fantastic video! I didn't consider looking at Xeon servers due to high power demand, but these workstations are a reasonable alternative to have ample ECC memory, PCIE lanes and drive expansion options without crazy high power usage. And I could actually make use of that old PCI slot. Well done! Thank you! 👍
I have this model as my home lab server with Proxmox and a number of VMs and containers. It’s worth noting you can use the 2 NVMe slots with ZFS to get raid-ish functionality without the VROC expense. It was trivial to setup in proxmox.
Yooo Hardware Haven, I bought a ThinkStation P510 for my home server last year! It seemed like the cheapest way to get everything I wanted for my homelab. It was cheap and easy to add a lot of upgrades, and it has been a reliable and powerful beast of a home server that I've been very happy with. Power usage on mine is higher than I wish it was, but then again I've got two GPUs, four hard drives, an upgraded Xeon with way more cores than I actually need, and a ton of cards in it so that might be on me. I think this is an excellent way to go for a home server!
Great video. About 4 months ago I bought a dell Precision 5820, easily the greatest computer purchase of my life. It was $650 AUD with 128gb of ram, an nvidia p1000 and the model up from the chip in this video the w-2145 which is an 8 core 16 thread cpu. If anyone is in the market for a home server these types of machines are incredible. My unit didn't come with an extra pci power adapter, so I picked one up for 20 bucks to run a 1070
Glad to see you have the sponsorship from UGreen! But I must say that within my many purchases from them, I had one issue with their Mac dock/ usb converter which burnt my ex-fiancé’s MacBook Pro…😢
There was a dirt cheap ex Stadia Dev p520 on eBay here in the UK back in October and I considered buying it to use as a desktop gaming machine/ workstation but decided to custom build instead. Now that I’m building a home server I am gutted cause what a sick machine that would have been.
got a load of these to be scraped, we all in IT took one & saved a few for parts. Powersupply can be bit doggy as we had to swap out 2 of them after they blew. Otherwise they have been class for us learning how to work with VM's. Would like some more Sata ports on the board but sure it was free.
I have a Brickstation P520 myself, it is a serious machine that I generally use for gaming and A/V rendering, or writing silly comments on RUclips. You could use the P520 as home server but its primary design is a workstation, it may not have some features that server systems would have. Lenovo's ThinkSystem machines are server-grade models and might be more suitable. Also, I did some measurements and found that the P520 could potentially accept consumer hardware. The case has punch-outs where a standard PSU could mount, and the motherboard could accommodate a standard mATX or ATX board. However, the case only provides about 110mm of clearance for a CPU cooler, and the front panel uses a proprietary edge connector that would need to be removed and replaced with a new power switch.
8:18 I saw a setting off by default that allows thunderbolt in BIOS and requires that you select where it's connected. You may need to enable that if you haven't. I bought one because of your video lol
I have a p520 and got lucky w/ the 900w PSU and all the HDD cages for $150 shipped. I have since added 128gb of RAM, an x4 NVME adapter, and RX 7900 GRE. I can play modern games at over 100fps, its phenomenal!
I looooooooove seeing your content man it's always so simple and you are always humble when explaining things you are not an expert in, I have started my homelab journey recently after starting watching your content so really really appreciate it so much and keeeeep up the very astonishing work 😊
Dang, I've been using an old Dell Intel 4th gen sff office pc as a NAS for a couple years and this seems like it might be worth the upgrade, currently i'm limited on drive space, sata ports, and overall function (I crammed 2 3.5 hdd but the top won't fit back on so i'm hotrodding it atm 😅) This would def handle most if not all of the future projects I may want to do (currently only running Plex and Home assistant but would love to get into more things like game server hosting and stuff.
You really do get bang for your buck if you're willing to deal with proprietary this and that, although getting into an actual 'server' class system for less than 200 bucks, with a little fooling around and some minor upgrades - even free if you're lucky, this thing really could spice up your network pretty impressively. Good call on this one!
kinda wish I knew about this before building my x99 machine good video! I reccomend looking into old firewalls for your next video, it's a great cheap way to get a 1u server.
The main reason the expansion bays are not found anywhere is because since these are enterprise-class machines, most businesses had server storage, and didnt need their users to have tons of local storage.
I got one of these and I liked that much that I got a second one. One is my home server with proxmox, virtualized truenas and many other VMs like my development server, pre production server. I have it with 64gb of ram and haven’t had any issues. The second one is for gaming and it works amazing with a 3070
Great review video. In the future could you include a few more power numbers along side the testing, it would help those concerned about the cost of power verses performance verses use case verses setup cost. TY
PCIe lanes and remote access is everything I want in a system, especially if it is used as a server. The closest thing to the Thing Station is technically a used AMD TR or lower class, which are still very expensive. Or the way around ASrock's rack motherboards for AM4/5, which are also expensive but only have a maximum of 24 consumer PCIe lanes.
This seems like a good system to invest into as I begin my journey into building a home server that has the potential to grow with me. Thanks for doing the homework and providing all this great information. There's a lot of flexibility and features packed into that box!
Solid deal at that price - the case alone would have fetched that price 5 years ago. I i feel that with advent of Z690-Z790 or AMD4 or AMD5, these will drop in price even more.
You inspired me to have a search for something similar after watching this. I'd wanted a workstation platform for a while, but could never seem to find what I wanted, or could afford. After searching a little for P520's, there wasn't a lot in Australia, and they usually had the W2135 or the W2123 CPU. With the help of a certain LLM, I found out the competitors from the other brands, and then found an HP Z4 G4 with a W-2145 for reasonable money ($285USD) I plan of definitely moving the portainer setup from my old 7th gen Intel NUC i5 to this new server, as a VM in proxmox. The only thing I'm still trying to decide, is if it's worth moving my OPNSense box to this also, and then the NAS as well, and combine all 3 of my current systems into the one. I'm fairly certain that it will have more than enough power to do what I want, and I'm sure that one system would use much less power than 3.
imo the hardest part abt a home server isn’t really about the computer parts but the case itself. it’s hard to find an affordable one with multiple hdd bays (non-itx)
Am I crazy for loving a 2u server? Even the noise I love it. Space for 24 2.5" drives, 2 cpu's, up to 2TB ram, lots os PCIE lanes, ipmi that works .... Yeah, I love it
you guys are so lucky to have a second hand market/ amazon doesn't ship to my country and this workstation is only available new and costs almost 2000$.
I've suggested these Xeon W-21xx CPU workstations on your videos before. I bought one myself several months ago. I have an HP Z4 G4. The proprietary junk is a little annoying, but replacement parts are dirt cheap on Ebay if you need them. Proprietary workstation/server equipment is way cheaper on the used market than standard stuff, so if you want budget options with a lot of features, that's the best way to go. I bought it for something cheap with a lot of PCIe lanes and high maximum RAM capacity.
@@nootnewt I prefer the PCIe slot layout on the HP Z4 G4. It goes empty slot, x16, x4, x16, x4, x8. That lets me put two x16/x8 cards and an x8 card in with each card having free space between them for airflow. The Lenovo has the x8 slot is right above the first x16 and thus has less airflow for that one slot. If I remember correctly, the Dell model has the same PCIe slot issue and a more cramped chassis. Most x8 cards I'd look at like NICs and SAS adapters need a lot of airflow and having it that tight in there makes them harder to cool adequately without getting very loud.
It does seem like a pretty versatile system. The real heart breaker for me is the power supply. I can live with proprietary for a lot of things but power supplies make it really difficult in my experience. That said it might well be a system worth checking out regardless. Thank you for the accessible content as always!
Plenty of situations in a professional setting where a PCI slot is great to have. For example we have modern systems with them for older National Instruments GPIB and DAQ cards in our labs. They have plenty of life left and are too absurdly expensive to simply replace them all with their PCIe versions. Especially as its the same darn chips on them still lol
Maybe your 10Gtech SFP+ card prevented C6 CPU idle state? Try without it? Check out Wolfgang's videos on forcing cards to support PCIe sleep, or whatever. I've not tried that yet. Easier to remove the card and measure.
I have the sister P500 version, and it's VERY power hungry - it was my unraid box for a long long time. I've since moved away from it, and my energy bill thanks me
The Dell Precision workstation 5520s are all over ebay too and simular to this. Lots of tooless easy expansions, etc.. I tested one with a Kil-a-watt and it hovered around 70 to 90 watts at idle on a windows 11 login in screen with one nvme boot drive and two spinning disks.
Subbed to the channel because I am thinking of making a truenas server to do some stuff with zfs and maybe something crazy with intel optane and cacheing. With all the options for pcie lanes, this seems like a mich better platform to learn on for me and means I can leave my omv server running on the x570 board I have. Appreciate all the content and hope to learn more.
I bought the same system on ebay only with 128gb ecc memory for $300 and bought the extra cage from the Lenovo website for $40. It's running TrueNas Scale. I bought 6 used HGST 10GB HDD @ $80 ea. , 2 - 1TB NVMe drives (one boot drive for TruNAS Scale, and 1 for Windows 11 Pro. Running Windows 11 as a vm in Scale was...awful... 😂. Running it as a stand-alone OS was a 1000% improvement! Still playing with it as I'm learning Scale. It will eventually be my media server exclusively.
I have been screaming about this thing since I got one like 2 years ago for ~$200 on ebay. The P520c would make a better workstation though b/c is also just as cheap, can do many of the same things and fit 2 GPUs. Re: NVMe tests: A single NVMe drive outperforming RAID zfs between 4 drives bifurcated actually somewhat makes sense. You are r/wing to 4 different drives vs one. This is also a good way to wear out your drives fairly faster. I feel as though using them separately via passthrough is a better use case.
Dell an HP also have some pretty good refurbished/second hand offerings of the same generation (Dell T5820/HP G4 Z4) that you can find for around the same price. I have the slightly older T5810 and after throwing in some more ram and upgrading the CPU it served me well as a Proxmox server until I upgraded to Epyc Rome. If your budget stretches a little farther there are also Epyc Naples cpu/motherboard/ram combos all over eBay for pretty decent prices and you avoid the proprietary nonsense (but it's not a complete system).
thats my major gripe with desktop workstations from Dell, Lenovo, HP. It only has space for 2 3.5" drives from the get go with xtra useless space. too bad cant have room for maybe 6 drives not including ssd's or m.2 going off an adapter
I think there's a ton of value hiding out there just in decent old cases - heck my server case is older than dirt but it works - no flashing LED support or things in that vein, but I can swap out a PSU in just a few minutes and have a ton of cable room, with four drives in a virtualized TrueNas. It just works and it's paid for LOL😂
You should take a look at the dell precision T7600/T7610. It’s an older workstation but still pretty usable and affordable. It can go up to 512gb ddr3 ram, I believe it can support up to 40tb of hdds. And can have as many as 3gpus installed at once as it has a 1,300 watt psu.
I've got something similar and it works great for running truenas. Dell precision T3600, I've definitely gotta get creative sometimes because of the proprietary stuff but for a $20 marketplace find I was on cloud nine. 😂 Great vid!
For starters, like me, I would recommend cheap Lenovo m720t, minitower with 3 sata on board (Ive put inside 2pcs 3.5hdd easily) + 1 m2 nvme and intel i3 8100. Very cheap and power efficient
Hardware Haven - A seriously good channel that's affordable to watch.
Well. It's free.
Zero is always a fair price.
That cost a time that cannot be bought
It doesn’t cost an ARM because it’s X86
No RISC involved
@@dingomatic RISC-y move, but it paid off!
😂😂😂
ba dum tss
Bing!
The PCI slot makes a lot of sense because it's a Workstation, meant for Work.
For small industries that use obscure or proprietary hardware controllers which are not economically upgradable yet.
Audio system cards for small radio stations.
Weather sensor stations.
Robotics controllers.
Etc. etc...
Notably it makes tranferring a backup off an older RAID array, to the new upgrade system extra simple.
That's why people are moving from hardware solutions to things like zFS and UnRAID in the enterprise anyways.
Now watch as the ebay prices skyrocket over the next week 😂
W0rd. Get in early before the decently-configured ones go over $400!
they did.
everyone was going specifically for the p520s. I looked and they were all £400+, so I just looked at the spec sheets for similar models, realised the p500 would fit my use case just fine, and snagged one for £70
@@rerereuj E5 v4 Xeons are Broadwell, the P520s use Skylake Xeons, which are 8th gen architecture. Broadwell is 5th gen.
@ 4:13 "hardware license module" is the PERFECT description for a $250 RAID controller haha cheers for that one
It's just DRM, from size alone there can't be more than either a flash chip or something like a YubiKey.
Fun fact the P520 comes with windows 10 workstation edition license hard coded in the MB, eBay sellers sell them with win10 home, a few command prompts and you can pull the license key off the MB and upgrade to win11 workstation for free
I use Linux and you should try it too.
@@MelroyvandenBergwhy?
@@FINNIUSORION it's fast, it's customizable, it's open source, it's free to use, the rest of the world is using Linux on servers. And I use Linux on my dekstop pc for years with much pleasure. Try Linux Mint for example.
@@FINNIUSORION have you tried Linux? The Workstation and server performance and usability is much better than Windows. At least in my honest opinion
@@boneappletee6416 I just recently pulled an old am2 ddr2 machine out of my closet and set it up with opensuse. I have a bit over one week of Linux experience now lol
I actually have a p510. It came with a E5 v3 6 core and 32 GB of ram. I upgraded to a E5 v4 10 core and 128gb of RAM. It has 4 HDD bays with trays and there's essentially a backplane in it. It also came with a Lenovo Flex adapter (proprietary) which holds one gen 3 nvme and one SATA m.2. I added a single nvme card and it's dead silent. Running Truenas scale (passed through the sata controller) and several VMs. I can't complain. I paid $100 for it from a local seller.
really just a fantastic deal.
holy crap, it's Skylake?! this IS a great deal! it seems like these "bargain systems" I see reviewed on YT are almost always Broadwell or older which is really rough on power-performance ratio and just performance in general. thanks for checking it out for us!
Gotta appreciate your real world vids. It's nice to see some cool corporate stuff from time to time, but what I really care about is stuff I can personally afford and make use of.
Literally just got mine delivered yesterday, it's an absolute unit of an affordable homeserver
On one hand: that's some lenovo proprietary junk. On the other hand, though, you can actually buy spare parts and replacement somewhat into the future and it's actually easy to find what exactly you need in most cases.
yup
my grandfather's current desktop had some issues a few years ago and after looking into it, I figured the power supply was dying and the motherboard had scorch marks where the funny magic electricity escaped
I bought a motherboard with a cpu (didn't need it) for $13 shipped on ebay lol. I ended up also upgrading his ram at the same time and threw an SSD into it.
That was 6 years ago and I haven't worked on it since, and he still uses it daily. Parts for that machine are plentiful and cheap.
@@RoshiGaming yep, I ditched my last x220 from 2011 just last year and it went to serve yet another user. Seem like proprietary, yet abundant is better than standard and rare.
I once had the same thought, and I once built an epyc server thinking that this is all I'll ever need.
Fast-forward to today.
I didn't realize how wrong I was...
With all the AI and LLM stuff.. one GPU turn into two then three then...
70w idle also turns into a hundred, then few hundreds.
I think I have lost the way at this point.
Machines like this get a lot of grief from people ( who have never owned one). I have one with a 2245 8 core processor, 64 gigs of quad channel DDR4 and a 3060 TI video card. It's got a couple of m.2 slots. It's a solid machine. Built like a tank and probably the most stable computer I've ever had so far
Woa, i jumped in early today, been looking for a nice cheap server and this one might be perfect
It really is.
You can also get different wattage PSU's for it.
Mine has the 900W.
This system has a lot of flexibility.
This is the exact machine I'm considering for my new ML workstation. Might even go with the 920 for expanding memory. Thank you for the run down for this.
Honnestly was skeptical at the thumbnail. Guess it was a good hook. But man haven't wanted to buy a new pc this much in a while. Fell in love with my gen 4 x1 carbon and just moved to a new yoga 9i. Yes lenovo does proprietary stuff. But their professional stuff is a notch above. Its genuinely a delight to use. It just works for me.
Fun fact, the p520 has a proprietary motherboard, the p520c does not, and is a standard matx only needing a 24pin to 14pin PSU adapter.
One final comment (sorry, I primary a p520c and have a second one as a server) the w-2145 is the sweet spot value wise, you can get at around $80 and is 8c/16t and you can get retired iMac Pro specific xeons that fit in here for very inexpensive and work with no compatibility issues. You also should be able to bifurcate the x8 slot with the latest bios
That's useful information. Thanks
Thanks for this
@@Saphykitten hey, appreciate this info. Do you happen to know if the p520c has remote management options available? Also, do you know how many 3.5" drives the case supports stock? I've been trying to find that information and haven't been successful.
nvm, I see in the documentation that the p520c does support intel amt.
YOOOOO I got mine back in May because of another RUclips video I saw last year where they used it for a cheap "gaming" pc and immediately saw the application for it being a server, it's cool to see one of my favorite RUclipsrs reviewing it and answering a few questions I've had in the BIOS settings area lol
Is it sad that I know exactly what YT channel and video you are talking about? Toasty Bros 6 mos ago (watch?v=hI9nW2K0G-I)
@@cjmoss51 actually it's "Return of the Console Killer PC" by "Iceburg Tech" that I saw , it's not exactly the P520 in that video but it got me going in the right direction to find the P520 lol
I've been running a P250 I upgraded for a year and a half now.
I absolutely love mine and have been recommending it to others!
Thanks. Nice cheap server.
WOAH! More than just the standard "Thanks." 😂
From a mechanic, never torque your way to loosen a screw. Pretend you are an impact drill by applying bits of tourque and releases. Another words, pump the screw driver and you will save your bits along with strip less screws that way. You will also find out that screws and bolts break their tightness easier too.
Yeah baby! P520!
*beams at mine over there, which is also used as a gaming PC for my kid, sporting a 2135, 32gbs ram, a couple M.2's and an ARC750)
Now go look at a PowerEdge T110-II! My old standby main server!
I'm interested in something like this. How did you power the ARC750?
I just bought an HP Z440 for my home server, and I'm starting to get buyers remorse. I could've gotten the dual CPU model (the Z640) for $10 more and now seeing this next gen one for not much more than that, I'm feeling even more buyers remorse 😭
I have a z440 that runs my truenas/jellyfin. It’s a good machine, it’s not as good as the p520, but it has a lot of life in it. You also can put it in a normal atx case, or in my instance, I have it in a 4u rack mount.
Although I'd like to have a Z840 or a G5 but I'm still loving my Z440. I just need to stop being lazy and add some more ram
I got a Z840 running dual E5-2667v4s and 128gb of ram (8x16gb) working as my first NAS and occasional cloud server although the second part has a WIP. It will probably end up as an off site backup server when I eventually get a rack setup.
@@Saphykitten I rehomed a Z420 motherboard a few years ago and would not recommend. While the form factor is standard ATX, there's a lot of proprietary headers on the board that require hacky workarounds. From memory, there's a PSU adapter needed, fan and power switch headers are nonstandard, and there's a proprietary temperature sensor that the BIOS will complain about if absent.
I have both the Z440 and the G4 Z4 which is the next newest one. Both are fantastic. I installed some highish end nvidia cards. They game pretty well at 1080.
Its hard to beat for $350.
Nice to see a video on these machines. I run a P500 with 7 drives on unraid and its amazing!
i'm currently in the process of getting a P720 ready for a proxmox virtualization server. 4x40TB WD RED, 256Gb DDR4 REG ECC 2600Mhz, 12x4TB 2,5' WD Red via 2x SAS Controller and Adaptors for 6x2,5 in 5,25' Bay, 2x Xeon 6138 (each 20c/40t), Nvidia Quadro K4200 for Jellyfin HD/4K Encoding, and 2x 4TB M.2 NVME in Raid0 for the OS and Storage of Images.
All 3.5”?
@@zeroturn7091 yeah all 3.5 the p500 I got had 4 drives internal then I used a 2 5 1/4 to 3 3.5 drive dock in the front
For people wanting more cores/RAM, Skylake Xeon Scalable has also become pretty affordable recently. The Lenovo P720/920, HP Z6/Z8 G4 and Dell T7820/T7920 are all options, with 6 memory channels instead of 4 and multiple sockets.
The HP workstation are dogs, I have used a couple generations of the Z8 workstations and they run about 200 mhz below the base frequency don’t get within 500 mhz of the boost frequency. I had the IT guys as well as HP support work on the problem and everybody has been left scratching their head.
I bought one and turned it into a powerful workstation/media server. I put in a 10TB hard drive, an RX6600, a Wireless/Bluetooth card, and upgraded the memory to 64GB quad-channel. When I bought it, it came with a 512GB M.2 SSD. I use it for gaming, content creation, and livestream. Honestly it’s a really versatile platform.
I really love these for homelabs as long as you have the space for it. They're super nice to work with (bar the proprietary nature of it of course) and the only reason I didn't go for it is most of my server load just needs maybe 2 PCIe devices and most importantly, I just think rack mount looks nice albeit louder, more power hungry but in my case, cheaper up front cost but very timing dependent. Anyone looking to play with hardware more, might be trying out different PCIe devices, or just doesn't have a specific goal in mind, I can't recommend these enough especially for a lot of the prices you'll find.
There's a rack mount adapter for these also. Big money for drawer slides from Lenovo, or a 3D printed option on printables.
I bought one of these over a year ago for about $180 without hard drive and graphics card. Installed a 1tb nvme and a 2070 and use it as my main driver for IT and Photography. Best purchase i made for that year
I picked one of these up after watching your video and it has been nice so far. I did end up getting the Icy Dock 3-Bay Adapter since the lenovo cage would take over a month to be delivered and I don't have a 3D Printer. While it does work the way that the 5.25" bays are secured in the P520 isn't the best, and I can't use their bracket to lock it in place because of the way it is designed.
I could probably put my own holes into it so that the securing bracket works, but I don't move the server a ton and it fits in well enough that it isn't just sliding around if I move the case a little.
Fantastic video! I didn't consider looking at Xeon servers due to high power demand, but these workstations are a reasonable alternative to have ample ECC memory, PCIE lanes and drive expansion options without crazy high power usage. And I could actually make use of that old PCI slot. Well done! Thank you! 👍
350 aud at time of release
4 day update: now they cost anywhere between 350 AUD and 470 AUD
I have this model as my home lab server with Proxmox and a number of VMs and containers. It’s worth noting you can use the 2 NVMe slots with ZFS to get raid-ish functionality without the VROC expense. It was trivial to setup in proxmox.
Yooo Hardware Haven, I bought a ThinkStation P510 for my home server last year! It seemed like the cheapest way to get everything I wanted for my homelab. It was cheap and easy to add a lot of upgrades, and it has been a reliable and powerful beast of a home server that I've been very happy with. Power usage on mine is higher than I wish it was, but then again I've got two GPUs, four hard drives, an upgraded Xeon with way more cores than I actually need, and a ton of cards in it so that might be on me. I think this is an excellent way to go for a home server!
Great video. About 4 months ago I bought a dell Precision 5820, easily the greatest computer purchase of my life. It was $650 AUD with 128gb of ram, an nvidia p1000 and the model up from the chip in this video the w-2145 which is an 8 core 16 thread cpu. If anyone is in the market for a home server these types of machines are incredible. My unit didn't come with an extra pci power adapter, so I picked one up for 20 bucks to run a 1070
I love how you have a bunch of chinesium screwdrivers you can break on a screw.
I used one of these for my first home lab! Was super great to break into the space.
Until I needed a motherboard replacement and a PSU replacement 😂
Glad to see you have the sponsorship from UGreen! But I must say that within my many purchases from them, I had one issue with their Mac dock/ usb converter which burnt my ex-fiancé’s MacBook Pro…😢
There was a dirt cheap ex Stadia Dev p520 on eBay here in the UK back in October and I considered buying it to use as a desktop gaming machine/ workstation but decided to custom build instead. Now that I’m building a home server I am gutted cause what a sick machine that would have been.
got a load of these to be scraped, we all in IT took one & saved a few for parts. Powersupply can be bit doggy as we had to swap out 2 of them after they blew. Otherwise they have been class for us learning how to work with VM's. Would like some more Sata ports on the board but sure it was free.
a main aspect of a server is its power consumption, consider that too
He talked about it and showed the power consumption of the cpu on indle
I think only idle, like 31w. But with no gpu, 10gb nic or additional sata ports. I've asked if he did test it with a fully running with component.
I just bought a P720 with a pair of 6138s, 128GB RAM and a RTX3090 a month ago and it still has 10 months of warranty.
I have a Brickstation P520 myself, it is a serious machine that I generally use for gaming and A/V rendering, or writing silly comments on RUclips. You could use the P520 as home server but its primary design is a workstation, it may not have some features that server systems would have. Lenovo's ThinkSystem machines are server-grade models and might be more suitable. Also, I did some measurements and found that the P520 could potentially accept consumer hardware. The case has punch-outs where a standard PSU could mount, and the motherboard could accommodate a standard mATX or ATX board. However, the case only provides about 110mm of clearance for a CPU cooler, and the front panel uses a proprietary edge connector that would need to be removed and replaced with a new power switch.
8:18
I saw a setting off by default that allows thunderbolt in BIOS and requires that you select where it's connected.
You may need to enable that if you haven't.
I bought one because of your video lol
I came here to type "regular PCI" aggressively, but I got fooled so, you won this time.
I have a p520 and got lucky w/ the 900w PSU and all the HDD cages for $150 shipped. I have since added 128gb of RAM, an x4 NVME adapter, and RX 7900 GRE. I can play modern games at over 100fps, its phenomenal!
I looooooooove seeing your content man it's always so simple and you are always humble when explaining things you are not an expert in, I have started my homelab journey recently after starting watching your content so really really appreciate it so much and keeeeep up the very astonishing work 😊
Dang, I've been using an old Dell Intel 4th gen sff office pc as a NAS for a couple years and this seems like it might be worth the upgrade, currently i'm limited on drive space, sata ports, and overall function (I crammed 2 3.5 hdd but the top won't fit back on so i'm hotrodding it atm 😅) This would def handle most if not all of the future projects I may want to do (currently only running Plex and Home assistant but would love to get into more things like game server hosting and stuff.
You really do get bang for your buck if you're willing to deal with proprietary this and that, although getting into an actual 'server' class system for less than 200 bucks, with a little fooling around and some minor upgrades - even free if you're lucky, this thing really could spice up your network pretty impressively. Good call on this one!
The very good think about this server is that I can wash the motherboard in the sink with hot running water, afterwards it runs blazingly fast.
kinda wish I knew about this before building my x99 machine
good video! I reccomend looking into old firewalls for your next video, it's a great cheap way to get a 1u server.
Same, after choosing my own parts I’m $40 over the price of a used workstation.
Always love to see more people finding more uses for the thinkstation P5xx machines.
I have a 48core P920 as my shop sever, got it renewed from Amazon a couple years ago, and it far exceeded my expectations...
I got one in April. I'm using mine as a budget gaming pc paired with an RX 6700XT.
It's an amazing value. I love it.
The main reason the expansion bays are not found anywhere is because since these are enterprise-class machines, most businesses had server storage, and didnt need their users to have tons of local storage.
ZFS is a COW (Copy on Write), it is doing a validation before committing the write
I remember when epyc rome cpus were affordable. Getting last year a low power EPYC 7D12 including board on the cheap was the best decision for me.
7D12 epyc . . . cool 👍
I got one of these and I liked that much that I got a second one. One is my home server with proxmox, virtualized truenas and many other VMs like my development server, pre production server. I have it with 64gb of ram and haven’t had any issues. The second one is for gaming and it works amazing with a 3070
Great review video. In the future could you include a few more power numbers along side the testing, it would help those concerned about the cost of power verses performance verses use case verses setup cost. TY
PCIe lanes and remote access is everything I want in a system, especially if it is used as a server.
The closest thing to the Thing Station is technically a used AMD TR or lower class, which are still very expensive.
Or the way around ASrock's rack motherboards for AM4/5, which are also expensive but only have a maximum of 24 consumer PCIe lanes.
I bought one of these late last year, and it's been a solid virtualization server. Calling this thing a workstation doesn't do it justice at all.
This seems like a good system to invest into as I begin my journey into building a home server that has the potential to grow with me. Thanks for doing the homework and providing all this great information. There's a lot of flexibility and features packed into that box!
Picked up a couple used P620 units, which is essentially the threadripper pro variation of this form factor. They are very nice.
Solid deal at that price - the case alone would have fetched that price 5 years ago. I i feel that with advent of Z690-Z790 or AMD4 or AMD5, these will drop in price even more.
The extra drive bay is pretty cheap from lenovo. It also ships with a power adapter to power 4 drives instead of the standard 2.
Channel is growing fast. That's good cuz you have good content
Watching the videl whil side-eyeing the four P520s in my homelab, actively seeking rails to rack them.
You inspired me to have a search for something similar after watching this. I'd wanted a workstation platform for a while, but could never seem to find what I wanted, or could afford. After searching a little for P520's, there wasn't a lot in Australia, and they usually had the W2135 or the W2123 CPU. With the help of a certain LLM, I found out the competitors from the other brands, and then found an HP Z4 G4 with a W-2145 for reasonable money ($285USD)
I plan of definitely moving the portainer setup from my old 7th gen Intel NUC i5 to this new server, as a VM in proxmox. The only thing I'm still trying to decide, is if it's worth moving my OPNSense box to this also, and then the NAS as well, and combine all 3 of my current systems into the one. I'm fairly certain that it will have more than enough power to do what I want, and I'm sure that one system would use much less power than 3.
If you like street running, Gennesee and Wyoming has quite a bit of it in Columbus, Georgia on their Columbus & Chattahoochee Railroad
For a Dedicated streaming PC... IS A GOOD ONE!!! 48 pci lanes !!! No issues to make work more than one capture card at the same time!!!
It's possible that the screws on the heat sink are JIS instead of Phillips. That may be why you had issues with a Phillips bit fitting.
imo the hardest part abt a home server isn’t really about the computer parts but the case itself. it’s hard to find an affordable one with multiple hdd bays (non-itx)
Am I crazy for loving a 2u server? Even the noise I love it.
Space for 24 2.5" drives, 2 cpu's, up to 2TB ram, lots os PCIE lanes, ipmi that works .... Yeah, I love it
The out of bound management is pretty sweet. Better than dealing with an iDrac license.
you guys are so lucky to have a second hand market/ amazon doesn't ship to my country and this workstation is only available new and costs almost 2000$.
NEW HARDWARE HAVEN VIDEO....OH HELL YEAH BROTHER!!!!!
I've suggested these Xeon W-21xx CPU workstations on your videos before. I bought one myself several months ago. I have an HP Z4 G4. The proprietary junk is a little annoying, but replacement parts are dirt cheap on Ebay if you need them. Proprietary workstation/server equipment is way cheaper on the used market than standard stuff, so if you want budget options with a lot of features, that's the best way to go. I bought it for something cheap with a lot of PCIe lanes and high maximum RAM capacity.
As far as proprietary stuff goes, I'd take Lenovo over HP or Dell any day.
@@nootnewt I prefer the PCIe slot layout on the HP Z4 G4. It goes empty slot, x16, x4, x16, x4, x8. That lets me put two x16/x8 cards and an x8 card in with each card having free space between them for airflow. The Lenovo has the x8 slot is right above the first x16 and thus has less airflow for that one slot. If I remember correctly, the Dell model has the same PCIe slot issue and a more cramped chassis. Most x8 cards I'd look at like NICs and SAS adapters need a lot of airflow and having it that tight in there makes them harder to cool adequately without getting very loud.
It does seem like a pretty versatile system. The real heart breaker for me is the power supply. I can live with proprietary for a lot of things but power supplies make it really difficult in my experience. That said it might well be a system worth checking out regardless. Thank you for the accessible content as always!
Plenty of situations in a professional setting where a PCI slot is great to have. For example we have modern systems with them for older National Instruments GPIB and DAQ cards in our labs. They have plenty of life left and are too absurdly expensive to simply replace them all with their PCIe versions. Especially as its the same darn chips on them still lol
Maybe your 10Gtech SFP+ card prevented C6 CPU idle state?
Try without it?
Check out Wolfgang's videos on forcing cards to support PCIe sleep, or whatever. I've not tried that yet. Easier to remove the card and measure.
I have the sister P500 version, and it's VERY power hungry - it was my unraid box for a long long time. I've since moved away from it, and my energy bill thanks me
The Dell Precision workstation 5520s are all over ebay too and simular to this. Lots of tooless easy expansions, etc.. I tested one with a Kil-a-watt and it hovered around 70 to 90 watts at idle on a windows 11 login in screen with one nvme boot drive and two spinning disks.
Subbed to the channel because I am thinking of making a truenas server to do some stuff with zfs and maybe something crazy with intel optane and cacheing. With all the options for pcie lanes, this seems like a mich better platform to learn on for me and means I can leave my omv server running on the x570 board I have. Appreciate all the content and hope to learn more.
I bought the same system on ebay only with 128gb ecc memory for $300 and bought the extra cage from the Lenovo website for $40.
It's running TrueNas Scale.
I bought 6 used HGST 10GB HDD @ $80 ea. , 2 - 1TB NVMe drives (one boot drive for TruNAS Scale, and 1 for Windows 11 Pro. Running Windows 11 as a vm in Scale was...awful... 😂. Running it as a stand-alone OS was a 1000% improvement!
Still playing with it as I'm learning Scale. It will eventually be my media server exclusively.
i might just need to save up for this
I love my P520, enough I found an i7 M900 thinkcentre to match it :D
I have been screaming about this thing since I got one like 2 years ago for ~$200 on ebay. The P520c would make a better workstation though b/c is also just as cheap, can do many of the same things and fit 2 GPUs.
Re: NVMe tests: A single NVMe drive outperforming RAID zfs between 4 drives bifurcated actually somewhat makes sense. You are r/wing to 4 different drives vs one. This is also a good way to wear out your drives fairly faster. I feel as though using them separately via passthrough is a better use case.
With PCIe bifurcation you can have TONS of NICs for DIY mega-router...
Dell an HP also have some pretty good refurbished/second hand offerings of the same generation (Dell T5820/HP G4 Z4) that you can find for around the same price. I have the slightly older T5810 and after throwing in some more ram and upgrading the CPU it served me well as a Proxmox server until I upgraded to Epyc Rome.
If your budget stretches a little farther there are also Epyc Naples cpu/motherboard/ram combos all over eBay for pretty decent prices and you avoid the proprietary nonsense (but it's not a complete system).
thats my major gripe with desktop workstations from Dell, Lenovo, HP. It only has space for 2 3.5" drives from the get go with xtra useless space. too bad cant have room for maybe 6 drives not including ssd's or m.2 going off an adapter
Skylake?! Say less, I’m on an old Broadwell system! Lmao
I think there's a ton of value hiding out there just in decent old cases - heck my server case is older than dirt but it works - no flashing LED support or things in that vein, but I can swap out a PSU in just a few minutes and have a ton of cable room, with four drives in a virtualized TrueNas. It just works and it's paid for LOL😂
Absolutely love these systems, along with the p330 for a NAS, now I have to figure out how to put them in a rack compatible case
Take a look at Mk1 Manufacturing. They’re who my Lenovo reps officially recommend for ThinkStation rack cases.
It looks like you could just put it on its side and it would "be a 4u case".
The P920 is what I went with for the dual xeons and AI configuration abilities.
Just found your channel. Hello from Chickasha! Great content!
Thank you for this video. It's a very nice system even today.
You should take a look at the dell precision T7600/T7610. It’s an older workstation but still pretty usable and affordable. It can go up to 512gb ddr3 ram, I believe it can support up to 40tb of hdds. And can have as many as 3gpus installed at once as it has a 1,300 watt psu.
Been watching you videos for a while now and didn't know you were from Oklahoma. OKC here! Cheers!
I've got something similar and it works great for running truenas. Dell precision T3600, I've definitely gotta get creative sometimes because of the proprietary stuff but for a $20 marketplace find I was on cloud nine. 😂 Great vid!
For starters, like me, I would recommend cheap Lenovo m720t, minitower with 3 sata on board (Ive put inside 2pcs 3.5hdd easily) + 1 m2 nvme and intel i3 8100. Very cheap and power efficient
I have a P520 as my work computer. Solid machine!