dell r910 barebone for 4 socket build, good or bad idea?

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homestudio4k

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Apr 28, 2016
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only for home lab. mostly worry about its noise and power usage. don't know if typical ddr3 ram works for it.
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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Too much power.
Too much noise.

Go 2P unless you have specific need for quad.
 

Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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And if you don't need even an older dual and you don't mind spending more for a quieter lower power solution, Xeon-D or e5 v3/v4 but in a workstation case, some brand new e5's will end up cheaper than Xeon-d if you don't need 10G connections.
 

dba

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Feb 20, 2012
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only for home lab. mostly worry about its noise and power usage. don't know if typical ddr3 ram works for it.
Nice hardware if you need quad CPU, and combined with some ES CPUs from eBay, probably pretty cost efficient. That said, you can get almost as much grunt for most workloads from a pair of newer fast Xeon E5 CPUs but for less watts and with less noise.

On balance, you'd go for the quad Xeon E7 if you needed maximum PCIe slots or maximum total CPU horsepower/cores whereas you'd go dual Xeon E5 if you just needed "lots" of CPU grunt and a normal number of PCIe slots, and wanted to save power. For general "lab" use, you'd almost always go dual Xeon E5.

Evan mentioned the eight core Xeon D as well. For a dozen or so VMs doing normal sorts of lab stuff, that's an extremely appealing solution - smaller, quieter, and much lower power consumption.
 

homestudio4k

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Apr 28, 2016
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thanks a lot evan and dba. seems latest e5 or xeon d is the way to go. r910 is only for nostalgia. by the way, i low balled one r910 seller at ebay to $450 barebones, thus this post. was hesitating and finally decide not to buy from your precious input.