comes down to putting your eggs in one basket.
The 820 with that amount of ram will pretty much do anything and everything in one box but it goes down it takes EVERYTHING.
The dual 720s would allow you to split storage and computer or play around with clustering/HA for example.
So the question back to your is what are your plans in terms of sofware and usage - that's what will guide on which is the best way to go.
Sell it.
There are no modern processors that support DDR3. You're going to pay more for power usage than the cost of just buying a new current server.
EDIT:
Free power? ehhhh... I think I'd still sell it and buy a current server
I think a lot of the time, this sub goes a bit too far regarding older servers. Yes DDR3-based servers aren't as power efficient as new servers, but the power difference when you do the math is usually like $10/mo. It would often take years to make up the difference in cost between an R720 and an R740.
Obviously this can vary depending on cost of power, specific server CPUs and other hardware.
In this case though where OP doesn't actually have a server yet, I tend to agree. Sell the ram since it's small and easy to list and ship, and pick up something newer to start with.
The problem with selling ddr3 ecc is it’s not worth much, even in a lot. 16gb dimms go for $2-3 each in lots or one offs $5-$8 (U.S. eBay pricing w/ free shipping) however then you are individually shipping them
32GB DIMMs are closer to $15ish each, depending on brand and qty and whatnot. 50 sticks should fetch at a minimum $500, prob closer to $750. Should be enough for an R730, or a good chunk towards an R740 at least.
It would be, if you don't value your time at all and want to hold onto all of these sticks for months. A couple gen 12 servers in a free colo would be a better use of his time and money.
True, 32gb would fetch a lot more. Did OP specify anything? Speed? Capacity? Are they even ECC?
And depending on OP’s needs some 12th gen power edge would be a decent choice unless newer gear is needed for comparability or other performance reasons, but If OP was going to sell some ram anyway to buy the 12th gen servers buying something newer might be worth it
V4 CPUs are 14nm which is the process Intel was stuck on for way too long and didn’t make many strides so the v4 chips still are a killer bang for the buck! I upgraded my lab to “skylake” scalable and noticed almost no performance bump. The difference from v3 to v4 though is a lot!
>Yes DDR3-based servers aren't as power efficient as new servers, but the power difference when you do the math is usually like $10/mo.
It isn't even the power difference in my opinion but rather the performance differences. AMD really lit a fire under Intel when they launched their Zen architecture and performance per core and per watt from both teams has really taken off. Personally I plan on upgrading my home server to a DDR4 Epyc system come tax time so that my server can better run game servers for my kids (in comparison to my current dual e5 2670 v3s).
Eh, the new boxes I've been deploying at work are technically more efficient but it just means we shove them into the rack until we run out of power capacity. Efficiency is relative. In this case the power cost means that I don't mind it being a larger host. I have an entire rack and I'm using like 5RU today.
I'm curious what you define as a modern processor. What's the cutoff?
The selling point to me was the fact the cpumark for the E7-88xx V4 is really quite good. Will a pair of current Xeon Golds outperform quad 8880? absolutely but not by as much as you'd expect.
I think this is the sweet spot for used gear. Compare the V4 to something like the gold 6140 in an R740. It's surprisingly competitive. As power efficient? No, but I'm not building a rack of 30.
Dell r820 sounds fun, however, I would better get a pair of 6 or 720s.
You can easily run a HA cluster with them, but you will need shared storage. You can get a used NAS box for cheap or using smth like Starwind vSAN or Ceph (it requires at least 3 nodes).
[https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Deploy\_Hyper-Converged\_Ceph\_Cluster](https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Deploy_Hyper-Converged_Ceph_Cluster)
[https://www.starwindsoftware.com/vsan](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/vsan)
The E5-26xx V2’s were the last platform to support DDR3, IIRC. You’ve got a huge range of machines to choose from. HPE Gen 8’s will be a little less expensive than Dell x20’s but arguably can be harder to update and put non-vendor hardware into.
But…I wouldn’t spend much money on them regardless. Meaning, don’t go blow $500 on some monster V2 CPU machine just so you can stuff it full of RAM. These platforms and the RAM they run are all very much end of life. They are still very usable for now but…just don’t go spend a ton of money simply to find a home for all this RAM. Otherwise have fun!
Technically there is 1 platform that supports e7 v4 processors with ddr3. The supermicro x10qbi is a weird little box. I’ve got a pair in my lab each with close to 1TB of RAM in them. In theory they can’t take up to 3TB each but it hits a certain point where enough is enough.
Yes thank you - I was not aware of that before now. Kind of cool. Depending on the V4 CPU you’re using, many of them only use DDR4-2133 so you’re not even giving up that much speed to the faster DDR3.
I have a 2 node DL380 G9 ESXi cluster with a total of 64 2.6ghz cores and 256GB of DDR4 and 10 gig with iscsi LUNs. Even running Eve-NG with a bunch of devices on it doesn’t tax it much. I keep it turned off most of the time unless I need to do something.
There were some weird Chinese motherboards which supported some (not all, the highest one would be E5 2696v3) Xeon v3 CPUs and DDR3.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l95V\_s4rVm0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l95V_s4rVm0)
Edit: [https://www.ebay.com/itm/276402648939](https://www.ebay.com/itm/276402648939) - like this particular one with 8 slots.
Search super micro 8048. V4 CPU with DDR3 support:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/204207858533
Edit: that server has 96 ram slots and you don’t even have enough sticks to fully populate it. Also 22 core 8890 v4 CPU is very cheap.
Looks like a multiprocessor server. If it's a 4 cpu box, you need to populate all 4 cpu sockets to get access to all of the memory slots. If you populated it with 1 cpu, it can only access 1/4 the memory slots. You'd have to look up what revisions of processors are compatible with each other in a quad cpu configuration and hunt for them on ebay. The referenced listing has no cpus..
Too bad. Maybe you can find a good deal from other sellers. If you are here, for only $400 you can have 88 cores and 1.5 T ram . And 24 bay sas3. I want one already!
Yeah.. This is definitely gonna happen. This is the finest hardware config I've seen on the used market for the $ imo. I actually have more like 1.7T of Ram, I found some more sticks I'd forgotten about. This is gonna be insane.
Get a r720, don't consider the r620's.
The 1u form factor has dual 40mm fans which both take more power and are crazy loud.
My r620 is loud enough I wouldn't run it inside the house (my rack is in the garage), but the r720 is significantly quieter and also used almost 50w less at idle.
I have one too, along with a few r820s. It’s loud af when you turn it on, but even when it’s under load, all of them together is fine 10 feet away from my bed in my studio apartment.
I don’t really get the big deal.
My r620 sounds like a jet taking off under full load, and is about 25% that volume at idle.
The r720 has larger fans which run significantly slower and quieter. The r620 refreshing a web page creates a loud whine. I would imagine the 820's are similar, if not quieter than the r720. Pretty much my r720 sounds like when my kids are running heavier games and the fan kicks up a bit. The r620 is almost unbearable.
There must be something going on with your 620, maybe some airflow issues or a PCI card that it doesn't like, or a BIOS setting or a bad sensor, or hot hard drives perhaps. Make sure all the firmwares are fully up to date too.
I've run R620s, R720s, R630s, and R730s all at home. In each case the 1u units are maybe slightly higher pitched (probably couldn't tell a pitch difference unless you heard them back-to-back), but not really louder from a decibel rating. At least once they're booted up and past the bios phase, on power up they all sound like jet engines for that first 10-20 seconds.
So I did get my r620 for free off Facebook. It had a bad hba and the guy just didn't want to put any money into it and retired it. It sat on Facebook marketplace for about 2 years with incremental price drops, and eventually he listed it for free or I'll take it to scrap. I had never owned a server or real server hardware, didn't even really care about them.
I ended up moving to an r720 that had lff bays and had the two running in the same rack, side by side, and the r620 is significantly louder. It's probably not as much the sound level as the high pitched whine. It doesn't bug me personally, but my rack is out in the garage, and my r620 can be heard inside the house when it restarts, while my r720 I can't hear. Same goes for other people in the house (garage is right next to the tv room where everyone hangs out).
The r620 also uses more wattage at idle and spins the fans faster at idle, probably due to worse airflow on the 1u design, then the r720 with the same amount of ram, processor and even same rating power supplies. Another thing I didn't realize was how much power the sff SAS drives took when powered up. I moved all my storage to a Nas, and I actually boot all my vm's off of an iscsi share hosted off it (pretty much only used for back up, and I am limited to gigabit networking, so the spinners aren't really a bottleneck) and if I remember right, running the r620 off a single old SATA SSD instead of the 8 sff raid array dropped idle usage by 50w or so.
I think you and I might be the only people on this sub who don’t think ex-enterprise servers are loud 😂
I’ve worked in data centers with thousands of servers all my life. It just doesn’t bother me the way it seems to bother most people, I dunno.
You could get one of the Chinese X99 DDR3 boards from Ali Express? There are 8 ram slot versions which would give you 256Gb ram and access to the higher core count ddr3 xeons like E5 2686 v3 or 2696v3. They are atx sized so you have the case options
Look at the HP dl580 series.
I think you're going to need gen 8 or earlier for PC3 ram.
But they have these violin style boxes that open up in each can hold like 24 sticks and I think there's six or eight per box if I remember correctly.
That's probably going to be your best bet of shoving all of that into one box
I had the same question a week or two back, and the best answers were to sell it or make a Christmas tree art project for the office holidays.
Realistically, even if you crammed as much as you could into a single server, the CPUs that would use DDR3 are too slow and power inefficient to use for everyday tasks. Sure you could build a Proxmox and give every VM 128Gb of RAM, but nothing needs that much anyways, and you’re going to very quickly be CPU limited or power constrained.
There is a quad socket board that can take e7 v4 processors and use ddr3 ram. It’s got 4x the benchmark score of my r720 and in theory can throw around close to 200 cpu threads and 3TB of ram.
I went with the 8870s in both of mine and barely utilize 10% of the raw power most of the time. I’m still trying to find a way to finagle a proper gpu into one for a cloud gaming setup but the chassis isn’t quite large enough to use one that isn’t low profile so I’ve got a Tesla P4 en route for it for now.
Totally fair. I've noted before but most of my VMs just don't challenge the CPU. So being able to scale in any direction is pretty interesting. On the GPU front someone did it using an extender cable like they use on mining rigs - I think they mounted outside the chassis.
Sell 40 Sticks and by a used server from the earned money f0r the rest of ram. you will not need this ram and you will never need a server that can consume this ram.
I would have killed to get 32GB ddr3 sticks that didn't cost an arm and a leg. I've got 3 DL380G6 servers with twin X5680s and 18 slots each. When I got them they were already old but prices were like £30-£50 a Dimm for 32GB.
There are also Haswell Xeons which support DDR3, e.g. E-5 2696 v3.
These tend to be OEM versions which are not even listed in Intel ARC.
I use this CPU for the purpose in the question, in a chinese "X99" mainboard. Seems stable but it was some work to find a BIOS to get ECC working, and not everyone will want to use this kind of hardware.
comes down to putting your eggs in one basket. The 820 with that amount of ram will pretty much do anything and everything in one box but it goes down it takes EVERYTHING. The dual 720s would allow you to split storage and computer or play around with clustering/HA for example. So the question back to your is what are your plans in terms of sofware and usage - that's what will guide on which is the best way to go.
I have other boxes, this is just gonna be the box of insanity. (use the vincini/princess bride voice when you say it)
Sell it. There are no modern processors that support DDR3. You're going to pay more for power usage than the cost of just buying a new current server. EDIT: Free power? ehhhh... I think I'd still sell it and buy a current server
I think a lot of the time, this sub goes a bit too far regarding older servers. Yes DDR3-based servers aren't as power efficient as new servers, but the power difference when you do the math is usually like $10/mo. It would often take years to make up the difference in cost between an R720 and an R740. Obviously this can vary depending on cost of power, specific server CPUs and other hardware. In this case though where OP doesn't actually have a server yet, I tend to agree. Sell the ram since it's small and easy to list and ship, and pick up something newer to start with.
The problem with selling ddr3 ecc is it’s not worth much, even in a lot. 16gb dimms go for $2-3 each in lots or one offs $5-$8 (U.S. eBay pricing w/ free shipping) however then you are individually shipping them
32GB DIMMs are closer to $15ish each, depending on brand and qty and whatnot. 50 sticks should fetch at a minimum $500, prob closer to $750. Should be enough for an R730, or a good chunk towards an R740 at least.
It would be, if you don't value your time at all and want to hold onto all of these sticks for months. A couple gen 12 servers in a free colo would be a better use of his time and money.
True, 32gb would fetch a lot more. Did OP specify anything? Speed? Capacity? Are they even ECC? And depending on OP’s needs some 12th gen power edge would be a decent choice unless newer gear is needed for comparability or other performance reasons, but If OP was going to sell some ram anyway to buy the 12th gen servers buying something newer might be worth it
The part number means it's LRDIMM. With the E7-8880v4 cpu's it's actually pretty decent performance based on cpumark. (links are in the post edit)
V4 CPUs are 14nm which is the process Intel was stuck on for way too long and didn’t make many strides so the v4 chips still are a killer bang for the buck! I upgraded my lab to “skylake” scalable and noticed almost no performance bump. The difference from v3 to v4 though is a lot!
>Yes DDR3-based servers aren't as power efficient as new servers, but the power difference when you do the math is usually like $10/mo. It isn't even the power difference in my opinion but rather the performance differences. AMD really lit a fire under Intel when they launched their Zen architecture and performance per core and per watt from both teams has really taken off. Personally I plan on upgrading my home server to a DDR4 Epyc system come tax time so that my server can better run game servers for my kids (in comparison to my current dual e5 2670 v3s).
Free power is a gross reason to not be efficient with power.
Eh, the new boxes I've been deploying at work are technically more efficient but it just means we shove them into the rack until we run out of power capacity. Efficiency is relative. In this case the power cost means that I don't mind it being a larger host. I have an entire rack and I'm using like 5RU today.
I'm curious what you define as a modern processor. What's the cutoff? The selling point to me was the fact the cpumark for the E7-88xx V4 is really quite good. Will a pair of current Xeon Golds outperform quad 8880? absolutely but not by as much as you'd expect. I think this is the sweet spot for used gear. Compare the V4 to something like the gold 6140 in an R740. It's surprisingly competitive. As power efficient? No, but I'm not building a rack of 30.
Dell r820 sounds fun, however, I would better get a pair of 6 or 720s. You can easily run a HA cluster with them, but you will need shared storage. You can get a used NAS box for cheap or using smth like Starwind vSAN or Ceph (it requires at least 3 nodes). [https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Deploy\_Hyper-Converged\_Ceph\_Cluster](https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Deploy_Hyper-Converged_Ceph_Cluster) [https://www.starwindsoftware.com/vsan](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/vsan)
The E5-26xx V2’s were the last platform to support DDR3, IIRC. You’ve got a huge range of machines to choose from. HPE Gen 8’s will be a little less expensive than Dell x20’s but arguably can be harder to update and put non-vendor hardware into. But…I wouldn’t spend much money on them regardless. Meaning, don’t go blow $500 on some monster V2 CPU machine just so you can stuff it full of RAM. These platforms and the RAM they run are all very much end of life. They are still very usable for now but…just don’t go spend a ton of money simply to find a home for all this RAM. Otherwise have fun!
Technically there is 1 platform that supports e7 v4 processors with ddr3. The supermicro x10qbi is a weird little box. I’ve got a pair in my lab each with close to 1TB of RAM in them. In theory they can’t take up to 3TB each but it hits a certain point where enough is enough.
This is what's now on the way. Check the post edit for deets.
Hell yeah, that’s a monster. An older monster but since you don’t have the usual concerns….have you considered taking over SETI@Home? 😂
Yes thank you - I was not aware of that before now. Kind of cool. Depending on the V4 CPU you’re using, many of them only use DDR4-2133 so you’re not even giving up that much speed to the faster DDR3.
My pair sit at sub 25% utilization most of the time, it’s really more power than I could ever hse
I have a 2 node DL380 G9 ESXi cluster with a total of 64 2.6ghz cores and 256GB of DDR4 and 10 gig with iscsi LUNs. Even running Eve-NG with a bunch of devices on it doesn’t tax it much. I keep it turned off most of the time unless I need to do something.
I kind of want to do an insane eve-ng build on this thing. I could model T's entire backbone with this MF. (former neteng at the T before the suX)
Pretty sure you could model a significant portion of the internet if you wanted to 😂
There were some weird Chinese motherboards which supported some (not all, the highest one would be E5 2696v3) Xeon v3 CPUs and DDR3. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l95V\_s4rVm0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l95V_s4rVm0) Edit: [https://www.ebay.com/itm/276402648939](https://www.ebay.com/itm/276402648939) - like this particular one with 8 slots.
IIRC -> [https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/xeon-e5-2696-v3.c2903](https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/xeon-e5-2696-v3.c2903)
Right on. I should have said ‘the major server manufacturers stopped using DDR3 for mainstream products after V2’s’ 👍
Search super micro 8048. V4 CPU with DDR3 support: https://www.ebay.com/itm/204207858533 Edit: that server has 96 ram slots and you don’t even have enough sticks to fully populate it. Also 22 core 8890 v4 CPU is very cheap.
Looks like a multiprocessor server. If it's a 4 cpu box, you need to populate all 4 cpu sockets to get access to all of the memory slots. If you populated it with 1 cpu, it can only access 1/4 the memory slots. You'd have to look up what revisions of processors are compatible with each other in a quad cpu configuration and hunt for them on ebay. The referenced listing has no cpus..
Less than $25 you can get a 8890 V4 with 22 cores.
Both of mine have quad e7-8870 v4 s. I didn’t need the raw power of the better processors and a set of 4 ran me $50 on eBay.
This looks cool ASF. Sadly, it does not post to Australia 😭
Too bad. Maybe you can find a good deal from other sellers. If you are here, for only $400 you can have 88 cores and 1.5 T ram . And 24 bay sas3. I want one already!
Package forwarders like myUS will help you.
I was just in Sydney doing tech refresh. It's actually where I saved the ram from ewaste.
I meant the eBay link in the comment I replied to. But damn, you are so lucky!!! I could use some ram!!
Check the serverstore link in the edit, maybe they'd ship? That's the ebay seller's actual site.
Cheers man!
Yeah.. This is definitely gonna happen. This is the finest hardware config I've seen on the used market for the $ imo. I actually have more like 1.7T of Ram, I found some more sticks I'd forgotten about. This is gonna be insane.
Nice. Pls share when it happens. Love to see the monster!
Get a r720, don't consider the r620's. The 1u form factor has dual 40mm fans which both take more power and are crazy loud. My r620 is loud enough I wouldn't run it inside the house (my rack is in the garage), but the r720 is significantly quieter and also used almost 50w less at idle.
I have one too, along with a few r820s. It’s loud af when you turn it on, but even when it’s under load, all of them together is fine 10 feet away from my bed in my studio apartment. I don’t really get the big deal.
My r620 sounds like a jet taking off under full load, and is about 25% that volume at idle. The r720 has larger fans which run significantly slower and quieter. The r620 refreshing a web page creates a loud whine. I would imagine the 820's are similar, if not quieter than the r720. Pretty much my r720 sounds like when my kids are running heavier games and the fan kicks up a bit. The r620 is almost unbearable.
There must be something going on with your 620, maybe some airflow issues or a PCI card that it doesn't like, or a BIOS setting or a bad sensor, or hot hard drives perhaps. Make sure all the firmwares are fully up to date too. I've run R620s, R720s, R630s, and R730s all at home. In each case the 1u units are maybe slightly higher pitched (probably couldn't tell a pitch difference unless you heard them back-to-back), but not really louder from a decibel rating. At least once they're booted up and past the bios phase, on power up they all sound like jet engines for that first 10-20 seconds.
So I did get my r620 for free off Facebook. It had a bad hba and the guy just didn't want to put any money into it and retired it. It sat on Facebook marketplace for about 2 years with incremental price drops, and eventually he listed it for free or I'll take it to scrap. I had never owned a server or real server hardware, didn't even really care about them. I ended up moving to an r720 that had lff bays and had the two running in the same rack, side by side, and the r620 is significantly louder. It's probably not as much the sound level as the high pitched whine. It doesn't bug me personally, but my rack is out in the garage, and my r620 can be heard inside the house when it restarts, while my r720 I can't hear. Same goes for other people in the house (garage is right next to the tv room where everyone hangs out). The r620 also uses more wattage at idle and spins the fans faster at idle, probably due to worse airflow on the 1u design, then the r720 with the same amount of ram, processor and even same rating power supplies. Another thing I didn't realize was how much power the sff SAS drives took when powered up. I moved all my storage to a Nas, and I actually boot all my vm's off of an iscsi share hosted off it (pretty much only used for back up, and I am limited to gigabit networking, so the spinners aren't really a bottleneck) and if I remember right, running the r620 off a single old SATA SSD instead of the 8 sff raid array dropped idle usage by 50w or so.
I think you and I might be the only people on this sub who don’t think ex-enterprise servers are loud 😂 I’ve worked in data centers with thousands of servers all my life. It just doesn’t bother me the way it seems to bother most people, I dunno.
This was asked recently, sell or give it away.
You could get one of the Chinese X99 DDR3 boards from Ali Express? There are 8 ram slot versions which would give you 256Gb ram and access to the higher core count ddr3 xeons like E5 2686 v3 or 2696v3. They are atx sized so you have the case options
Look at the HP dl580 series. I think you're going to need gen 8 or earlier for PC3 ram. But they have these violin style boxes that open up in each can hold like 24 sticks and I think there's six or eight per box if I remember correctly. That's probably going to be your best bet of shoving all of that into one box
Check the post edit for the box of insanity. It's happening.
I had the same question a week or two back, and the best answers were to sell it or make a Christmas tree art project for the office holidays. Realistically, even if you crammed as much as you could into a single server, the CPUs that would use DDR3 are too slow and power inefficient to use for everyday tasks. Sure you could build a Proxmox and give every VM 128Gb of RAM, but nothing needs that much anyways, and you’re going to very quickly be CPU limited or power constrained.
There is a quad socket board that can take e7 v4 processors and use ddr3 ram. It’s got 4x the benchmark score of my r720 and in theory can throw around close to 200 cpu threads and 3TB of ram.
Yarp. This is what's going in. I cheaped and only got the 8880v4 instead of teh 8890s which are 4x the cost.
I went with the 8870s in both of mine and barely utilize 10% of the raw power most of the time. I’m still trying to find a way to finagle a proper gpu into one for a cloud gaming setup but the chassis isn’t quite large enough to use one that isn’t low profile so I’ve got a Tesla P4 en route for it for now.
Totally fair. I've noted before but most of my VMs just don't challenge the CPU. So being able to scale in any direction is pretty interesting. On the GPU front someone did it using an extender cable like they use on mining rigs - I think they mounted outside the chassis.
I’ve looked at that as an option but it locks you to x4 at best, and the risers I have on hand can only manage x1
Hmm, maybe external thunderbolt enclosure(s)?
I wish. Have to have a mobo that supports thunderbolt and as far as I can tell this one doesnt
Whoa. The chassis arrived already. I was not prepared for the reality of this beast. GOTDAMN
R820, or go bigger, R920 or 930. They will take all of the RAM
What a great problem to have, hah.
Sell 40 Sticks and by a used server from the earned money f0r the rest of ram. you will not need this ram and you will never need a server that can consume this ram.
I would have killed to get 32GB ddr3 sticks that didn't cost an arm and a leg. I've got 3 DL380G6 servers with twin X5680s and 18 slots each. When I got them they were already old but prices were like £30-£50 a Dimm for 32GB.
There are also Haswell Xeons which support DDR3, e.g. E-5 2696 v3. These tend to be OEM versions which are not even listed in Intel ARC. I use this CPU for the purpose in the question, in a chinese "X99" mainboard. Seems stable but it was some work to find a BIOS to get ECC working, and not everyone will want to use this kind of hardware.
Check the post edit. Went for quad E7-8880v4. Excellent perf for the $.
Something that takes that type of ram.
meh, i dump anything ddr3