Ok so before you ask why, let me say why not!
So I got my hands on an old Dell PowerEdge T620, So I got my hands on an old Dell PowerEdge T620; this beast of a machine has two Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2697 v2 @ 2.70GHz (12 Cores and 24 threads each) and 384GB RAM! beast of a machine has two Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2697 v2 @ 2.70GHz (12 Cores and 24 threads each), and 384GB RAM!
It was configured with 16 x 558.38GB SAS Hard Drives, but some were dead, and what I thought I should do was throw in a couple of old SSDs I had lying around and raid everything up. So, I ended up with a boot drive of 114GB SSD and a data drive of 5.2TB SAS.
Now, the next thing that I did was I wanted a silent server as even though you can't see from these photos, the fans are just like normal server fans and are loud! So, using some of my favourite Noctua heatsinks and fans, I replaced the standard heatsink and case fans.
The only issue I had and didn't think about was the height of the heatsinks and fans ☹️ but nothing an angle grinder doesn't fix 😄
Apart from that, I just had to do some rewiring to get the Noctua fans to connect to the motherboard, and away we went!
So what next, graphic cards? I found someone selling a pair of Nvidia Telsa P100 on eBay. I wanted to do this for fun and keep it cheap, so I grabbed them for $100! (they probably screwed but let's see)
Now again I wasn't thinking about these cards; what I didn't realise was these cards are made for pizza box servers and use the cooling fans from the server to push air through the heatsinks on the Nvidia cards themselves 🤦
So while I could boot up into a temp Windows install and see everything working, it crashed pretty quicky and the temp of the GPUs was through the roof!
So in came the water cooling, hoping I could keep it silent. So I found a place that builds water-cooling heatsinks for the cards, and they weren't exactly cheap, so I only brought one so I could at least test it out.
Again because the case wasn't built for water-cooling the trusty angle grinder was able to cut out another hole for the pipes!
Only two problems come from this: the pipe with the kit was too small in length and diameter; no worries, supercheap auto to the rescue with some fuel pipe, lol. Second, the pump and fan are not so silent! so to the shed with the server 😦
ok so now we are ready for the fun part, not that wasn't fun, but lets get this beast ready to do some basic AI!
