Intel Xeon E5-2670 Deal and Price Tracking

[AdditionalPylons]

Here is a couple I seeing mentioned.

IBM ServeRAID M1015
Dell Perc 310H

I cannot comment on any of the Promox/ESXi stuff, but for selecting controllers for FreeNAS this link is a great resource: From 32 to 2 ports: Ideal SATA/SAS Controllers for ZFS & Linux MD RAID - Zorinaq
The cards based on the LSI SAS2008 (found in the 8-port section on that page) are very popular in the FreeNAS community. Easily found, quite cheap.

 

[SINN78]

Stress test all done for those like me that wondered if the intel board could fit into a regular case such as the Corsair Obsidian 750d
I'm sad to report it didn't fit (pause) lol

 

[Boddy]

I purchased the Natex Combo deal with the intention of setting up a Promox/ESXi w/ FreeNAS all in one. I've just recently read that this may not be possible without a RAID card or HBA? I'm very new to all this so I'm not sure if that's actually true. If it is, can someone suggest a card?

There is Intel RMS25KB080 being sold by kalleyomalley on EBay, previously mentioned on this thread. They are accepting offers for $40 each. NB. Will only work with certain Intel boards and CPU's such as those on Natex. You can search this thread for more info.

Intel RMS25KB080 OEM SG35828 Integrated PCIe RAID Module New Bulk Packaging

 

[azev]

There is Intel RMS25KB080 being sold by kalleyomalley on EBay, previously mentioned on this thread. They are accepting offers for $40 each. NB. Will only work with certain Intel boards and CPU's such as those on Natex. You can search this thread for more info.

Intel RMS25KB080 OEM SG35828 Integrated PCIe RAID Module New Bulk Packaging

Can this be flashed with IT LSI firmware ?

 

[jwegman]

Can this be flashed with IT LSI firmware ?

That answer is 'yes'. Depending on the hardware stepping (B0 or D1), the RMS25KB080 (and the mezzanine variant RMS25JB080) are flashed with either the LSI 9205-8e, or the 9207-8i FW. They are very easy to cross flash. Just use the sas2flash utility to erase area 6, then flash the new FW (and optionally the BIOS). I hadn't needed to re-add the SAS address afterwards...

Here's a guy talking about flashing his (as he's using the 9207-8i FW, he has the D1 stepping):
My experience with cross flashing Intel Integrated RAID Module RMS25KB040 with IT mode firmware | FreeNAS Community

To reiterate, these cards are HARDWARE LOCKED to only work on specific E5 Xeon INTEL SERVER boards. Crossflashing doesn't alter this. However if you have the Intel s2600 family board, I think that these are a good/inexpensive option.

 

[svt3391]

For owner of new Intel 2U servers sourced from Kalleyomalley/OEM XS (R2308/R2312/any other variation) --

Is there any concern to put 1.5V ECC RDIMM instead of the preferred choice of 1.35V ram modules?
I saw all the 1.5V modules come with the heat spreaders. Other than more power usage, is there long term ill effect to the overall system?

 

[daniel1926]

Thanks to everyone on this forum I was able to snag a great deal on a dual E5-2670 system.

I want to keep my eyes open in case any deals pop up over the next year or two for up grades. Eventually, I plan on buying a pair of E5-2695 V2s or E5-2697 V2s. Hopefully, their prices will fall 75% over the next 18 to 24 months on the used market.

Right now I have 192GB of 1066 memory. Will upgrading to 1600 memory make a noticeable difference? (I am running massive crawls of the internet and have multi-terabyte databases that have to be processed. When processing the databases I use just about all of the memory.) If increasing the speed of the memory won't make a noticeable difference, then I will wait and eventually double the size of the memory if 16gb sticks fall dramatically in price.

I have 24 TB of storage, but I should run out of room in a few months at current rates. What is the best way to add additional external storage? A JBOD array? Something like the below pasted link? If so, what is the best way to connect that to my current server?

Supermicro Storage NAS Expander JBOD 45 Bay 24 36 SC847E16-RJBOD1 HD SAS2 SAN


Other than that, what should I be looking for?


Here is my current machine:

Supermicro | Products | Chassis | 2U | SC826BA-R920LPB

Supermicro | Products | Motherboards | Xeon® Boards | X9DRi-LN4F+

Fujitsi RAID 9260-8i (firmware) 6GBPS RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60 + BBU

Intel 800GB SSD S3700 as a systems drive

12 x 2TB Seagate HDDs

 

[Roy68]

Well I've worked through all the BIOS, Frustr updates etc on my S2600CP and now have super quiet fans, aaahhh!! Installation looking great in the Corsair Carbide Air 540, but it's really tight. In future I'll need to remove front fans to change out memory (not that I would want to do that often!). May post some pics tomorrow.

The issue I have now is that since these updates the system no longer recognizes graphics card (GT 720), so just using the board VGA output. I tried clean install of Linux Mint again but still no go. It was working fine before the updates. Anyone else had this issue?

I don't see anything on monitor from the card when in BIOS, only visible from the board VGA output, maybe there is something I need to change in BIOS?

 

[Roy68]

Ignore that last question I've got it sorted now, the graphics card worked as soon as I disabled VGA output in BIOS!

 

[StammesOpfer]

Just picked up 4x of these for a Quanta Open Compute. Got them for $119 per pair. They are officially under $60 apiece.

 

[zhoulander]

This guy @ $55 each, with "Best Offer" available... how much better can it really get?
IBM SR0KX INTEL XEON E5-2670 2.60GHZ 20MB 8GT/s 115W 8 CORE PROCESSOR

 

[Oakdown]

For those considering a non-intel chassis build, I'm posting the following comments and pictures of my S2600CP2J build.

Motherboard: S2600CP2J from Natex.us, with 64gb hynix PC3-12800R, dual e5-2670's (obviously in this thread) 425us (612 cad plus 80 import/tax bs)
Case: Phanktek Enthoo pro w/ windows Titanium green. 129 cad shipped from amazon
Fans: Cooler Master EVO 212 - 89 CAD for the two, free shipping (NCIX)
Power Supply: EVGA 750 G2 - can't remember price bought it awhile ago - probably had for around 140 cad.
HD: Samsung SSD 850 evo - 119 cad.
Still missing: video card - likely will be a used 760 gtx or something of the like.

Notes about the build, not too bad! fit in the case well. Phantek touts that it is SSI EEB compliant - and in general it was had to move some motherboard posts/stand-off's as they were setup for an atx build, but that was easy enough - however it is missing the one post that would go under the memory (mid right hand side of the motherboard) so that area is just floating a bit. If one was going to be swapping memory in and out of there all the time, it would probably be nice to have the support - but in general it's not a huge concern of mine. The phantek case is huge, it is wide, and tall, dwarfs the z820, it's pretty spartan but has a clean look, and I do quite like it even compared to another corsair vengeance (military green) case that I have.

The power supply, installed easily, and all cables reached without extending any - however the one power cable for cpu 2 is a long stretch - so I can't exactly follow the velcro pathways as seen in the back-shot.

I'm undecided on how I currently have my fans setup - they all currently run through the Phantek supplied fan header (also seen in the back shot) and are only plugged into CPU-1's fan pwr on the motherboard. this works well with FRUSDR updated - I just told it - that CPU-1 was the only fan connected, and since it signals the header - all the fans get direction from that .... but at the same time I'm perhaps curious about what happens if that one motherboard cpu-1 pwr outlet fails, ...FRUSDR wouldn't be able to tell all the other fans to ramp up at the failure, so I might forgo the header, so if one fails at least the others can stay running...

Don't know how I feel about the whole ssd concealed in the back of the case either... I guess it works, and I won't be accessing it much. I will only be adding one more drive to this machine another western digital 1tb black, as I have in the z820 (page 96 of this thread) - as well as a video card, just need the finances to cool a bit after the two builds.

with the S2600cp2j usb 3.0 case outputs won't work (obviously), but i'll probably add a little pcie card with header output for that as they can be had for fairly cheap - the usb 2.0 ports work though when plugged in on the motherboard.

The Bios, BMC, FRUSDR updates all went well, only other thing I'd recommend is making sure you turn on one or both NIC'S in the bios, as they were off (from natex) when the board arrived, caused a bit of a head scratcher when no network device was showing up in windows. I did the bios first, but then I read in the BMC instructions/readme that there is an order in which you should flash the roms - I was already out of sync with that order - but all seemed to go well!

The S2600cp2j onboard Matrox g200 gfx really suck, max resolution is 1024x768... I did get a lenovo server driver (g200e?) for them for windows hoping the resolution might get a bump but nope. This computer will eventually get render duties like the z820, but for now it has to wait!

I hope that helps some people, and if you have any questions feel free to ask, this route was much cheaper than the z820. I haven't run cinebench in comparison to the z820 yet.

 

[crazyea]

Looks good!

 

[Roy68]

Nice build!! Have you had a chance to explore the CPU performance settings in BIOS? I tried a couple of benchmark renders in 'balanced performance' and 'performance', but I couldn't see any difference, they both turbo to 2.999GHz on all cores, both render times were the same, so I've left it on 'balanced performance'.

 

[Evan]

Nice build!! Have you had a chance to explore the CPU performance settings in BIOS? I tried a couple of benchmark renders in 'balanced performance' and 'performance', but I couldn't see any difference, they both turbo to 2.999GHz on all cores, both render times were the same, so I've left it on 'balanced performance'.

I would suspect balanced will be fine for rendering, the high performance mode on machines I know (this board I don't know) most useful for times when you have unexpected spikes in load so it runs everything in a way that can ramp up performance fast.
With a render it's a solid load that goes to 100% and stays till done.
The actual performance when a system is 100% loaded is I guess mostly the same in the server context.

Essentially high performance mode usually reduces latency at the expense of watts.

(Having said this some low power modes on some systems will limit turbo)

 

[crazyea]

There is Intel RMS25KB080 being sold by kalleyomalley on EBay, previously mentioned on this thread. They are accepting offers for $40 each. NB. Will only work with certain Intel boards and CPU's such as those on Natex. You can search this thread for more info.

Intel RMS25KB080 OEM SG35828 Integrated PCIe RAID Module New Bulk Packaging

I want to pull the trigger on this, however the disclaimer about the stepping worries me. Is there any issue buying the B0 stepping?

 

[nthu9280]

I want to pull the trigger on this, however the disclaimer about the stepping worries me. Is there any issue buying the B0 stepping?

Search jwegman's posts. Has already been answered more than once

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

 

[crazyea]

Search jwegman's posts. Has already been answered more than once

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

Seeing as you went through it, I guess giving an answer would have been too much to ask.

For those wanting to know, it seems b0 is pcie2.0 and d1 is 3.0. Both steppings can be crossflashed.

 

[Roy68]

I would suspect balanced will be fine for rendering, the high performance mode on machines I know (this board I don't know) most useful for times when you have unexpected spikes in load so it runs everything in a way that can ramp up performance fast.
With a render it's a solid load that goes to 100% and stays till done.
The actual performance when a system is 100% loaded is I guess mostly the same in the server context.

Essentially high performance mode usually reduces latency at the expense of watts.

(Having said this some low power modes on some systems will limit turbo)

Here are some pics of my build in a Corsair Air Carbide 540. It was very tight, you can see how close the RHS RAM fasteners are to the fans. I thought I would need to hack away at the fan cases and /or memory fasteners to get it in, but it just fits as is. The case comes with 2x140mm fans at front but had to change these to 3 x 120mm budget Artic fans to get the board in, this allowed me to change from 3 pin to 4 pin PWM fans so these now plug directly into the board (basically I used all the blue fan sockets on the S2600CP board, 3 front +1 rear), the placement of these sockets is perfect for this build so didn't need to use any fan cable extenders. Once I had worked through the BIOS/FRUSDR etc updates the fans are really quiet.

I took a chance on 64 gig of new Samsung 1600MHz, 8 DIMMS Reg ECC from China, no issues.

Haven't done any cable management yet, I'm still waiting for I/O shield to arrive so it will all need to come out again to get that in. I used a Fractal design Newton 800w platinum PSU, this is a semi modular design, there is a lot of spaghetti in the back so fully modular would have been neater, but this was the best UK price I could get on a decent PSU which included a second CPU power 8 pin socket, the cables as shipped are long enough to stretch to corners of board for these CPU sockets.

Only 3 of the standoffs nearest the PCI slots lined up, so I had to drill the backplate and insert some M3 bolts, with 3 nuts on each, 1 to clamp the bolt to the backplate 2nd for height adjustment and 3rd to clamp the board.

I have borrowed a half height GT 720 GPU from my other PC to get this up and running, it's just a basic card, but still much better than the Matrox video from the board which is pretty naff. Note I had to disable the onboard video output in the BIOS before my card was recognised (took me a while to figure that out!).

I recommend you unplug your GPU for the BIOS/FRUSDR etc updates and use the onboard video. I left my GPU in the board connected to monitor, started the updates and the screen went black, this may be obvious but this is my first build. So I shat myself, thought the MOBO had died and I'd lost everything! But I think what really happened is that the board had updated the BIOS and selected onboard graphics by default. Also make sure you write down the fan socket numbers you are using beforehand because the FRUSDR update dialogue will ask you for them.

Overall the cooling is great, maybe even overkill, with all cores to 100% load it's still very quiet and doesn't get anywhere the full fan speeds I saw before the FRUSDR update. I'm seeing CPU2 nudging 70 deg C on full load all cores, around 6 deg higher than CPU1. Ambient 20 deg C. I tried rotating the CPU fans 90 deg (blowing upwards) so each processor gets fresh air, but in the end I decided it is better to move the air through the case as fast as possible, because that's what this case is designed to do.

In terms of the system performance, I've seen some mixed reviews on You Tube, people who are video editing generally don't seem very happy with the performance gain (or penalty) from this system, it's clear that packages such as Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas are not optimised for multi core use (or maybe the process itself is just not parallel friendly?). But in my use case (rendering Blender files, which I believe is an embarrassingly parallel task) this system really flies, it's around 3x the speed of my i7 4790 and about 55% faster than the dual X5650 Xeon HP Z600 Workstation I just flipped on fleabay.

 

[Oakdown]

Looks great roy68, clean looking case and I dig the shorter length.

I haven't tried the s2600cp build on renders yet as it doesn't have a suitable video card and I am not currently set up for node based rendering, but once I get that setup I can report back.

The z820 has been rendering (3ds max/vray) since it was built though, rock steady - highest temps are 70 on cpu2... Been up for days so I'm not worried. It is only about 25 percent faster than my 5820k on renders, but that machine is also overclocked to 4.2 so I'm still impressed... Love watching 32 buckets do their thing!! Also the two machines are replacing an i5 3570k so 64 buckets will be better than 4!!

The renders It's carrying out are for an instructional video, so pretty basic in nature and global illumination isn't even used, so their might be more separation between them and the 5820k in a more loaded scene.