I am thinking about getting a Supermicro X8DTE-F with dual quad core Xeon's to replace an Asus P8Z68-V PRO running a quad core i5 and 16GB of RAM, am I crazy?

 

The server functions as a NAS, with a couple of dockers, one of which is Plex. My main reason for doing this is to support concurrent plex streams, this setup will give me 8 cores and 16 threads with hyper threading, plus a mother board that supports IPMI. It is a dated board with dated CPU's though, am I taking too much of a step backwards?

I run four servers that are 5-6 years old, all dual processors. They are awesome. 3 run 8(16) cores, and one is 12(24) cores. But, I got them cheap. And upgrades are cheap. I went from dual e5520 to dual x5670 procs for about 120, and increased cpu power by 80%. The 12(24) core is my main setup, with the other 3 being used for batch media processing/transcoding via vm's and backup purposes.

 

It's nice to be able to run a couple vm's for power hungry users, transcode (not stream) a couple plex vids, run a network switch, all while doing a parity check with no issues. It eats more power, but it evens out if you can get it them for cheap.... or jut dont care about power usage and just want to be able to satisfy your needs. the 12(24) core processor idles at about 100 watts.

 

my next purchase in a year or so will probably be a quad core server, and condense all my needs into 1 box.... and create 60-70 core vm's for blunt power.

 

maybe it is crazy.... but fun!

Yeah I can get the board with dual X5550 2.66Ghz, passive heat sinks and 32GB of RAM for $200 but I just realized that my Antec 1200 V2 case doesn't have room for an EATX motherboard so now I am looking at getting NORCO RPC-4224 case but its a big expense and I need to rethink the whole thing.

so... I bought my servers for 50 each...........

 

 

....................................once you get a rack, you never go back.....