Super quiet and compact home server

[davidm]

Hi!

I have a minimalist home and want to build a super-quiet and small living room processing do-all server (as in, inaudible from more than a few feet. It can be enclosed in a cabinet). It needs to support 64GB for occasional tasks, but otherwise just needs to quietly run a few VMs and power a 4k monitor (some NVidia 970s have a passive/active mode which seems ideal). It must support a 3.5" HDD and either PCIE storage or a small array of 2.5" SSDs/M.2/mSATA Ultra drives. It also needs USB 3, and at least one PCIE 3 4X slot in addition to the video card. I was interested in Avoton but the boards don't seem to support the right combination. I'd prefer to run with ECC though don't want the cost of DDR4; I'd like total cost to be less than $1500 exclusive of storage. I've not seen anything exactly right. Any ideas?

Thanks!

 

[HellDiverUK]

Depending on the space you have for the case, then I think my little server would probably hit all those requirements, apart from the RAM. miniITX is pretty much stuck with 2 DIMMs unless you go for the server boards, which is when you lose the multimedia friendly stuff.

There's some nice uATX boards out there, and some pretty nice cases. Silverstone do a large range of uATX "HTPC" cases which are pretty good for home servers. I used to use a ML05B for my server/HTPC/PVR do-it-all rig. I had a 1st Gen i3 in there, a GT610 passive, and two satellite tuner cards. I had two 3.5" 4TB drives and an array of 4 2.5" drives fitted in an IcyBox 5.25" to 4x2.5" unit. It was pretty quiet, with only two Scythe 80mm fans running at 600rpm.

I think ECC is totally and utterly pointless. I've got a few workstations at work, all have ECC RAM, and some are over 6 years old and have never logged a time when ECC had to do anything. All it does is waste money and lengthen boot time.

 

[davidm]

I really can't compromise on RAM capacity, I may even need more than 64GB. ECC doesn't increase boot time per se (and it can be important for long running computations), its the board chipset, but since I'm building an always-on PC boot time doesn't matter much.

 

[Patrick]

Just as a point of reference. I went from a Core i7-3930K with a Corsair H100 and a corsair case. I swapped to a dual processor E5-2600 (8c/ 16T) using an ASUS dual socket motherboard. I added the Supermicro 4U fans and put it into a Supermicro SC732 chassis. That is my main workstation and I have no intention of swapping it out in the near future. It is virtually inaudible during normal operation and has 8x 8GB DIMMs so memory wise there is plenty. The Quadro K4000 is really quiet also. Here is the build log I did:
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/my-december-2013-workstation-build.2849/

 

[HellDiverUK]

Good call on the H100. I have the H100i, first AIO water cooler I've used, and it's excellent. Only thing I can hear in my PC is the fan on the GPU, and it's not a noisy unit (Asus GTX760 Mini).

 

[davidm]

Patrick, that's more like what I need. Except I need a smaller board and case (which is why I was interested in Avoton). I would be able to get by with a microATX with one < 80W CPU, 4 X 16GB, perhaps using water cooling, and a case with large fans. I seem to be in an unpopular niche though.

 

[Dev_Mgr]

One of the problems with the Avoton is that it only supports unbuffered ECC (not Registered) and a maximum of 4 dimmslots. 16GB UDIMMS are very hard to find, and therefor it's is realistically capped at just 32GB of RAM.

To go over 32GB of memory, you're looking at x79, x99, or 600-series chipset based motherboards (or older 1366-socket based system).

 

[davidm]

thanks for that insight. does this mean any board with only four DIMM slots will be difficult to populate with 64GB? I've been hoping to stick to a smaller size.

 

[Patrick]

thanks for that insight. does this mean any board with only four DIMM slots will be difficult to populate with 64GB? I've been hoping to stick to a smaller size.

With four DIMM slots you need to be able to use 4x16GB registered ECC DIMMs to get 64GB. That does limit what you can do mITX or mATX wise as the sockets for the processors that supports those DIMMs are bigger. There are generally single socket 8 DIMMs/ socket ATX motherboards and dual socket 4 DIMMs/ socket ATX boards available but down into the mITX/ mATX less options are available.