Dell PowerEdge PE2850 Server

[thehulkk]

http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/2850_specs.pdf

I found this add on craigslist selling this servers for about $125 with 2 intel xeon 2.8 ghz, 2 36gb ultra 320 15k hard drive, and 4gb ram.  There are little more expensive ones if more ram and hard drive space needed.
So my questions are if is it possible to add two 7950 radeon cards to these servers? and is it worth it to even try?

[swordfish6975]

two PCI Express™slots (1 x 4 lane and 1 x 8 lane)


so yes you may need riser cables to go from the x4 and x8 slot to a x16 slot - something like this

the issue would be that 7950's need two 6 pin power connectors i would imagine they don't come on Server Power Supplies
you could get adapters like these but im not sure of the power connectors in the servers could even be sata ones


the biggest problem would be the server is rack mounted and with a 7950 you wouldn't be able to close the lid

although with riser cables you could cut a hole in the lid and run the graphics cards outside?



you could probably get a old second hand P4 motherboard with heaps of PCIEx1 slots grab a beastly power supply for around 200  mb+cpu($50) PSU(150)

use a usb to boot from so no HDD needed folow cryptobadgers tutorial for linux

stick it all in a milk crate

[perlboy]

This is old kit, extremely noisy, spares are difficult to come by and the raw power consumption of this server (last time I had one) was quite a few hundred watts. Even if you manage to get some mining cards in them the power consumption alone is unlikely to be economical.

Sorry to burst your bubble...

Stu

[thehulkk]

Oh well it was worth the try, the price seemed pretty good, but there are too many uncertainties, I could buy a new power supply, the risers and a crate. I had another topic about building a new mining rig with new parts for about $900, I think for me that's the best way to go.

[perlboy]

Hey again,

All the components in Dell Poweredge servers are very much custom fitted to their requirements. The PSUs are Dell specific and usually (can't remember about 2850's) 'slot' into motherboard slots rather than running ATX cables. Essentially, if you're looking at getting a 2RU server for a mining rig you'd want to look at Supermicro, Tyan or other 'generic' branded servers (something like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101671) .

Probably the biggest challenge you will have is that traditionally these servers aren't really designed with any real GPU requirement in mind so space is very limited (realistically the PCI slots are meant for fibre channel or disk controller cards, not heatsink heavy components).

If you had $$ or potentially know a rendering house offloading things at good prices you could look at their GPU optimised solutions: http://www.supermicro.com/gpu/ specifically http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/2U/2027/SYS-2027GR-TRFT.cfm.

It'll all cost a fair bit though so I'm not sure it'd make much sense.

Either way all the best!

Stu

[thehulkk]

@perlboy thanks for the reply, but no thanks, there is a big difference between $125 and $1000 +.

[thehulkk]

Here are some images of the server.