IBM x3650 M4 NOS eBay score! 256GB RAM, but can this file server game? :)
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- Опубликовано: 15 сен 2023
- Unboxing, testing, installing and trying it out as a gaming rig
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We still have one of these In production.
That bay in the front is for an optional backup tape drive.
This is the kinda silly stuff I do with old servers and desktops. Love it.
Same lol
I don't know if you mentioned it later in the video, but on the rear of the machine there's a blue thumbscrew (to the left of the USB ports). This is for the optional onboard networking/mezzanine card, which can provide some high speed networking options without using one of the general purpose PCIe slots on the server. I have the Intel X520 dual 10GbE SFP+ card in mine (IBM P/N 49Y7982).
That sounds like a good option, thanks
@@Epictronics1 I had to same problem trying to load windows on older Laptop. You have to re make your USB windows installer and in Rufus 3.16 choose Extended windows mode this will by pass TPM and secure boot and enable Legacy Bios support.
Using old servers and workstations is really a great option for budget gaming, I played on a HP Z800 for a few years. It had two Xeon X5620, 16gb ram and a GTX 970.
If you don't pay your own power bill :P
@@Nukle0nAbsolutely
These old servers are great fun! I have two x3690x5 servers with half a TB RAM, each, 4 PSUs and lots of very angry fans, some kind of fibre NIC for SAN, etc.. ;-) They are real beasts and run LINUX very smoothly.
Wish they were power efficient.. they sure must consume a lot (which is no problem with solar and batteries) or where energy is cheap (relatively).
@@pr1sm55 Yes - certainly no good choice for a home server. I only fire them up sporadically for fun or to blow dry my hair ;-)
@@pr1sm55 that much memory consumes way more power. That much nearly requires as much power as the processes
When you said, those fans are not that angry at all... I said "well just wait a second... and THERE WE GOOOO" lol
haha, like a bloody jet engine!
Always down for another video, especially about this, always been interested in the same concept but knew there would be hurdles along the way
You'll need the driver for the RAID controller for Windows to see your drives.
enjoyed watching!
I had this idea years ago when I inherited the old hp proliant servers from my workplace but discarded that idea because then I would have to listen the constant humming from the machines and probably my electrical bill would sky rocket lol😂
You could just put it in another room.
I did something similar a few years back with a x3650M3 using 2 X5675 CPUs. I liked the fact the server had an altimeter in it to match fan speed relative to sea level and having a pcie power socket on the motherboard was handy.
In Ye Olden days what you needed for getting your drive controller recognized was an "F6 Disk" as F6 was the key for specifying you had drivers to install. Server 2008 can use Windows 7 drivers and vice versa. I have easily installed desktop level OS's on decommissioned servers.
I noticed the driver you tried to load during setup wasn’t for the raid card you have, it was very typical in 2012 and 2008 to require additional drivers
I think most of the issues in the beginning could have been circumvented by using an hypervisor OS like proxmox/unraid and then just pass the GPU to a VM. In case of this old CPU, disabling mitigation will help performance since you are not planning on sharing said hardware with anyone anyways and you know what you are running.
Cool video.
Thanks!
@@Epictronics1 My main PC (Ryzen 9 5950x) is using proxmox 8 which has rebar support. It is a dual gpu system split to 2 vm's. My main is manjaro with the rx 6800 xt passed to it for general usage and the secondary is a ubuntu server with rtx 3080 for AI usage.
The best thing about proxmox 8 is that you dont really need extra config for the passthrough unlike previous versions.
Might be a fun idea for a future video to build a multi gpu processing powerhouse .
you should've tried windows server datacenter or Workstation
@@SuperDav1995 AI Usage? Are you possibly planning to take over the world?
@@Slow.S55 More for self research. When you work with machine learning model it usualy takes most of the gpu usage. This machine configuration allows me to run it in parallel to my main vm and do other stuff like gaming.
Main drawback is that the 16 lanes are now split to 8 for each gpu.
Noctua NF-A12x25 PWM as the best PC fan, no surprises there. Though for anyone looking to spend less, the cheaper Noctua NF-S12B redux-1200 also cools supremely well. Neither fan is loud, either, and that is such a key consideration with any fan.
The latest version of Noctua's advanced Smooth Commutation Drive system ensures superb running smoothness by eliminating torque variations and switching noises. This makes the fan remarkably quiet even at very close distances.
An untouched dual socket ivy bridge server, what a steal.
Just sick 🤘
Holy crap its so clean
M4, nice! Love the socket 2011 CPUs. I still use one for my office PC
If it wasn't for the noisy fans, I'd be using this M4 as my office PC :)
The Xeon workstations from HP are good for setting up gaming rigs, I have two HP Z420's and they are large but work really well. Cheap, easy to fit large graphics cards and plenty of memory space.
The only issue I have run into is replacing the power supply but did that with a special 24pin to 18pin ATX cable.
Well done!
Looking forward to the final server build
Thanks!
Servers will always be the ultimate gaming rigs, because they are designed for high throughput performance, much higher than any gaming PC, since they have to serve many requests from many users. People who have never worked with servers argue that they can't be, that only gaming PC's are good for games.
That's a very capable server. You can have lots of fun with it.
using that server as a desktop is like asking to ruin your own life, the noise is unbearable
The secret with noisy machines is to poke a hole through a wall that provides enough sound deadening. To anyone that actually tries this: good luck not getting yelled at.
I remember my dad getting a few cheap servers years ago. They were so loud the neighbours complained
I used a 2U HP DL380 G8 as a workstation for about 2 years. I put it in the basement, drilled holes through the floor, and ran DisplayPort and USB through the floor. Having 256GB of RAM was great, but it was always a basketcase. I had a quadro in it with 4x DisplayPort connections. The post would only go through the onboard VGA
I actually had a solution like this. My VP6 back in 2000 was a bit to noisy to keep in the room. I drilled a hole in the wall and feed the VGA, and PS/2 extension cables trough the wall :)
yeah, same thing here. The post did not show up through the Geforce
I think the issue is a combination of UEFI vs Legacy Boot and using the right RAID driver. I have worked on these systems with Linux and that normally worked just fine. Apart from one case where a customer wanted to network boot them using PXE, and it just refused. With the customer declaring, "but it works on our Dell systems". After some head scratching I found the issue was indeed that the IBM system was set for UEFI boot, and the PXE image they were serving was rather old and only supported legacy BIOS... Short term solution, enabling legacy BIOS support on the IBM server solved the issue. Longer term, told them to update that ancient PXE image.
Windows 10 supports Legacy boot.
I tried Server guide with windows 2012, same problem unfortunately
@@tiepup Sounds... disgusting. I bet an SSD connected to the "tape drive" SATA has less bullshit in the way. There are also modded BIOSs people come up with for NVME boot on the X79 era stuff, which this is.
@@Marc_Wolfe Yeah, you can boot from SATA or another device on a PCIe card. You still have a few issues with some of the IBM device drivers, especially in consumer versions of Windows.
I find Dell servers to be a lot more flexible for home lab stuff.
Being that an OS could only be installed at around minute 17, I seriously thought "we would leave it here for the moment, complete the install and check all devices in the server are recognized and working, and will try our gaming shenanigans in a second part". Glad it wasn't the case.
yeah, I noticed when I did the edit. That part of the video sounded a bit like an outro
I love how you boldly apply heatsink compound with no regard for the peanut gallery. haha Good onya, buddy. It's only applied correctly if your CPU oozes like a fried egg sandwich! :-D
Lol.
For windows server OS the Windows Audio Service is disabled by default but you can enable it by going in the Sounds settings.
Were some of those boot problems UEFI vs. Legacy BIOS related ?... or maybe GPT vs. MBR formatting on the drives ?
Oh, that never crossed my mind. I'll check! thanks
Seems too new to have used MBR
Neither.
Systems like this, you can have your cake and eat it too. I have the Dell R720 with the same generation of CPU, and I installed Linux, put Windows in a VM, then used PCIE passthrough to assign a good video card to Windows. I had a display, keyboard, and mouse for Linux, plus *another* display, keyboard, mouse for my Windows gaming.
Its probably so clean because its used in datacenters. Datacenters have very clean air and almost no dust due to filtration in the airconditioning units.
I can't find any info in the bios, but the machine never had an update in its life. I guess we can also check the drives if I can find the matching diagnostic software. It doesn't really matter but I'm curious :)
@@Epictronics1 most machines in datacenters which are not hyperscalers wont ever get firmware updates. They are firewalled and shouldnt be connected to the internet directly. Also, people are lazy 😅. But this is a nice server. Lots of ram and nice ssds. Going to use zfs for the fileserver?
@@TheShellshock67 I haven't looked in to zfs. Right now I'm shopping for a better controller. The included controller only has raid 1/0/5 When the hardware is sorted I'll have to figure out the best software setup.
I recently bought a dell r720 server, same generation as your ibm server and it didn't give anywhere near as much hassle as this ibm has subjected you too
best gaming server idea yet
Thanks :)
The older versions of windows probably needed a raid driver. But you might not be able to find the correct one.
I did similar project but on older server X360 2cpu with DDR2 ECC, I did installed a WINDOWS 10 , it need specific drive setup and drivers to be loaded onto system during startup of instalation
To see an estimate of total run time you can look at SMART drive stats for one of the stock drives. Most drives have a total runtime hours stat.
That's a fascinating beast. I wonder if the expected OS was Linux and it wasn't expected to be easily configured on Windows Server.
IBM's whitepaper on the server says that it was available with Windows Server 2008-2012 R2, SuSE Enterprise Linux Server 11 and RHEL 6. I suspect that their own proprietary Unix, AIX was also available in some configurations.
@@GGigabiteM That's interesting.
@@GGigabiteM No, i don't believe current versions of AIX will run on x86-64 (a early version of AIX was available on PS/2 machines)
The amount of disks in it - some type of ZFS box ?
Those boxes was probably intended for: windows server/linux or vmware.
The USB port inside will take a boot image for vmware and so allow the user to manage the disks using ESXi.
Would be fun to mess with one of those. Great for a nas and a game server too it seems.
HD Sentinel on Windows can read total power on count for disk drives, probably a bunch of other tools that can do that too.
Got to love Windows, fresh install and it blue screens 😂
Fan noise is why I avoid servers. Usually there is no mitigation short of making a muffler case.
A x3650 M4 should work well with TrueNAS Core (FreeBSD based) or TrueNAS Scale (Debian Linux based). Proxmox should also work well.
I second using ProxMox.
Always configure your disks in the RAID controller firmware prior to doing anything else :P These can be 'fun' if you're not familiar with them.
My guess for 2008/2012 not installing is lack of awareness of the uefi setup of the server thus can't interrogate the raid controller properly. You should be able to set the system to run in CSM mode which will force it to run on a legacy style for older os's. I had this problem with older early uefi HP workstations.
Ok, Thanks
Servers are interesting beasts. I hate the long booting time though! I found one myself "at the skip" with a 6 cores Xeon and a Titan X inside - too bad it was the previous generation Titan X!
Titan X rocks! What the heck was it doing in a server?
I have this exact server with dual power supply and dual pci-e controllers. I only ran windows server as a portable usb. It didn't install it but it ran it like a linux from the usb and it booted in. Never had boot issues with it I run proxmox and had dual cpu Xeon E5-2670 with only 64GB of ram.
Ok, thanks. Do you know what the fastest CPU is that these servers can take?
@@Epictronics1 any E5-2600 xeon and none xeon.
Sweet!!
Have two of these x3650 m4 servers one has 8x2.5" disks, and the other is the x3650 m4 BD model with 12x3.5" drives. You can run Windows 10, server and Linux on these. I have these in my home lab. Cheers.
Ok, thanks!
All the issues you ran into with drives not showing up in Windows 10 and the older Server installs are just related to them not having the correct driver for the raid controller in that system. If you found a compatible driver it should just work.
The way he said blanks made me think be was on to something
Usually these fans can be controlled directly over IPMI. I have an x3500 M5 and an able to quieten it to the point of being quieter than my desktop. Still runs cool while doing so!
Sounds great. I want to get back to this project again. What software did you use?
these LGA-2011 servers and workstations are great for cheap gaming and production i have an hp z420 with 512gb of ram and a e5-1680v2 also a hp z820 with 512gb ram and two e5-2690v2 played games on both for 7 years
I converted an old Tyan server to an XP gaming machine. An SSD to IDE converter, a PCI-X accelerated video card, and away she went.
Move on to the next project. From the point of view of energy consumption and noise, a server for playing does not make sense. Still, thanks for the great video. It's well done and was fun to watch!
Not sure someone else mentioned, but I think your issues with some versions of Windows not recognising the disks is probably fixed by installing the hardware driver during the early part of the installation.
You have to put the drivers on the usb drive and use them to see the hard drives due to the OS do not have the drivers preinstalled.
Wow, what a journey. 😂
Haha, adventures in incompatible windows versions!
My server is a Dell PowerEdge R720XD. it has two Xeon E5xx V2 6 core processors. I'm running windows server 2022 without issue.
nice keyboard
Great vidéo ! Bring back some memory, i have Seen few of this server as esxi Host for VM. Was really solid and stable.
Human: The noise is so bad I cant take it
Human: Removes couple of fans
BIOS: WHERE THE FUCK ARE MY FANS
I have a similiar system running as my home server. There is an Ivy Bridge 12 core 2.7 GHz CPU available for it. I have one left over because I went to alow energy consuming 10 core instead.
I already had a Xeon E5-2643 V2 installed, so I ordered a second one. Don't know if that was a good choice really
@@Epictronics1 will probably be enough. I barely use mine. Rendering is better on a GPU these days anyway.
I wonder if the windows 10 issue is due to lack of AVX2 support on this processor? BTW, at least on the DL380's SAS and SATA are interchangeable. I've found fans run at minimum speed the vast majority of the time with only SSDs installed, presumably because of the lower power consumption. As others have suggested, proxmox is totally the way forwards on these machines, create a windows VM and pass through the relevant hardware.
Ok! thanks
Or XCP-ng! I'm messing around with it lately and it's pretty good imo. Idk if I'd switch over my whole proxmox setup. But if I was ever building another server I'd definitely try it out first.
That's why building a server with a BSD or Linux makes sense :)
I'm not "against" Windows, I use it for games and it's great for this.
yeah, I went for w10 because I thought it would be easy... :)
@@Epictronics1 I think the problem with Windows is always the backward drivers compatibility.
A new Windows version mean change all your printers, and other devices.
Since we still can use an old parralel printer with Linux/BSD.
The goal is selling new stuff.
Ibm site says win 2008, 2012, suse linux 11, rhe6 and vsphere 5.1 are supported. As you found out if the os does not see the drive i imagine you are either missing the driver disk or the virtual drive mappings in the raid bios are not set correctly. Ibms site still appears to have a crap ton of drivers on it.
just out of curiosity, how much did you pay for the server on Ebay? What do you consider a Bargain?
I'm sure Windows 10 supports those CPUs. I'm personally running it on a dual 2630 v1 SuperMicro board (X9DRH-7F). As soon as I have any spare money, it'll be a dual 2667 v2 system. On that board, without add-in GPU drivers, the add-in only outputs 640x480, and without UEFI video mode and no drivers, it's 640x480 black and white. Currently running a Quadro 410 and MI25 flashed with Vega FE water vBIOS, which is underclocked and undervolted, because it has to be. And all that is in a Poweredge t320 case modified to use a standard ATX PSU.
And my board doesn't like to boot off most it's SATA ports. I have 2 low hassle free ports, the rest are obnoxious.
I bought a Dell PowerEdge R810 for the purpose of playing games on it. It came with two 10 core Xeons and 128GB RAM, I installed a 1660ti and it runs Windows 10 with no issues. The only problem is that it doesn’t switch over to the GPU until it loads Windows.
Similar to how this server behaves. It switches to the Geforce after about 30 seconds
I have the exact same machine except 128gb, it was super cheap and I consider it a real bargain. Upgrading the CPU to 20 cores (2x10) cost just 18 dollars including shipping. Sure this thing uses a little more power but worth it. Mine idles at 120w but some forum posts show that you can get idle to 66w. Impressive for tech from that era. I have a video for it here on YT.
I'll check it out, thanks. What's the fastest CPU it will take?
@@Epictronics1 Ask Chatgpt to tell you in a table format the CPU's, cores and power consumption. I chose the low power ones that have the L suffix. Great channel good luck with it!
@@callmebigpapa Thanks!
I converted a Dell PowerEdge T440 to be a desktop and man to the fans scream. I will be getting some aftermarket CPU heatsinks in order to get the system to quiet down.
These are going for sale very very cheap. Definitely a best buy. (Ibm is my favourite brand)
You just needed the RAID controller driver and press F6 or something to add it in the drive configuration steps. It’s not difficult. It’s been like that since NT4.
I have many years of repairing and replacing massive servers like this one, and much bigger for major corporations like Lowes and Home depot just to name a few. I will say this, don't judge by looks, you'll have to do a health check on those drives before committing to put your data on it. Also, please don't skip out on the redundant power supply. Those power supplies go out frequently. You will get a warning when its time to replace it luckily. The good thing about repairing servers is that the repairs are designed to take literally no time to replace and install. Downtime on those servers are critical. Its literally the heart beat of any place of business.
Okay, I'll keep an eye out for a spare PSU and check those drives, thanks!
I have a Dell PowerEdge server running FreeBSD. FreeBSD or Linux is meant for those machines. ;-)
Would be interesting to see what booting using a new Linux distribution would say.
most of these raid controllers didnt come with passthrough, so you need drivers for the OS to understand whats going on. had the same thing happening on old haswell and broadwell based HP servers in the past. i would also not recommend using the raid controller as its common practice nowadays to passthrough and let the operating system manage the drives instead. remember you are still using older SSDs. they are fast but they dont have all the feature sets that you expect with modern ssds and you might run into issues when using them in raid
If you want to build the ultimate gaming rig, take a server motherboard and server-type CPU's. Slap in a 3D accelerator and a soundcard and Bob's your uncle. It'll be much faster than any dedicated gaming PC-bucket. Actually it'll be an overkill for games.
Sounds like a fun project :)
The most annoying about servers for gaming is the noise and boot time. The time a server takes until it boots the OS, a normal PC is already running the game.
Yes, this is a bit silly, but also a really fun way to learn and explore this machines
@@Epictronics1 That is true. There are many things that are different on a server than on a PC. I do this for a living, so I have no need for that. I can play with the older models as well as the latest and greatest all the time. 😎
Adding benchmarks would be more interesting.
Since my x79 board refuses to die, i'm using an E5-2697 v2. They're sold for around 30-50€. If you plan to keep this system until proton decay happens, get 2 of them.
And you can play games on those cpus with surprisingly little difference in fps, compared to a recent ryzen build. Of course you need to sell your soul to the devil (or amazon, which is basically the same) and get a decent gpu...
The only bummer is that the multiplier is locked. So you'd need a board which lets you crank up the fsb frequency. If the board supports it, you can get another 25%. On launch, intel asked over 2000 bucks for it. That alone makes it worth having at least one ^^
I have actually already bought new CPUs for this project and planning to make another video.
If you are unable to see any drive in windows setup then you should try to check drives from disktpart from cmd while in windows setup
Step1: press shift+f10 (it will appear cmd)
Step2: type diskpart press enter( it'll open diskpart utility)
Step3: list disks (it'll show you all the disk drives and usbs connected to pc and their type i.e gpt or mbr)
Always check your type of partition before making the usb whether its gpt or mbr then use rufus for making bootable usb of windows.
I'll try that, thanks
you might consider using low profile cards that are pretty decent performance.
You can run Windows 10 on these. I do this myself. BUT it needs to have UEFI Enabled in Bios in order to work. :)
Ok, thanks!
And E5 2645 V2 Came From 2014/2013
So I AssumingThis Server Maded From 2014/2013
Might Be Working In Windows 10 And 2012 Or Up
Just Need Raid Drivers Witch You Can Get From Lenovo EOL Portal
I ran into a similar problem with the Dell server, and it absolutely needed a RAID driver.
Did you install it in windows like I tried for w2008?
@@Epictronics1 actually installed Windows 2000 Server!
That is the reason why you should run serious not sorry OS
No version of Windows is really geared for servers
They may have Server in name, but Windows in general is joke OS
You know why IBM and Lenovo server have little "R" Reset button on diagnosti board infront?
So you could restart the server, without having to spin down and spin up fans, Fans can keep running and server will restart... 😂
Someone get this man a copy of TrueNAS
Hell yeah, V10 F1 engine is booting up. 😂😂😂
Too bad is not Fat MATX case, but it can work for game is the great news :)
great video! what model geforce is the graphics card?
Thanks! That was a GTX 970 4GB
@@Epictronics1 awesome, thanks!
@@Epictronics1best GPU
Now install Windows 2000 Datacenter Server ;) ...... A quick google and I found out that it supports 32 CPUs and 32 GBs of RAM that's quite impressive.
It's 64 GB of RAM.
not finished watching yet but you can check spin time on hdd if they have smart info enabled
My budget simply can not accommodate a gaming computer. Disability and SSI don't provide for such extravagance.
For Load Partition On Windows setup I Think Need Raid Drivers
nice server but I still prefer my e-atx supemicro x10dri with a dual 2699v3 and a gtx1080ti, a lot more power for much less space and noise, perfect for productivity and gaming and it was dead cheap
i was just thinking that, Linux software for servers could make the machine run like a modern day server.?
I'm sure it will. I'm gonna go with Windows 2019 to make it easy on me
Lenovo has a windows installer packaging tool for this sort of problem haha
I tried it. Unfortunately, It didn't help
You need the riad drivers to install windows
Try Win 7, or even 8.1 ?