[agussio]

I have a number of various older gen Xeon servers at work that have been gathering dust. The VM admin in me has absolutely no use for their lack of cores, but the computer geek can not stand the idea of scrapping these once upon a time kick @ss processors.

I can't technically sell them, and honestly don't want to hassle with it anyways. I have no need or desire to setup old servers in my basement for pet projects unknown to slay my power bill, or heat my house.

But I am thinking maybe a folding rig? Perhaps a little Audio/video ripping grinder? I don't know. The servers range from socket 775 2 core non-HT up to 6 core Nehalems (these are my best candidates for salvaging)

Could I even find boards to run them on? Would it be worth it? Board recomendations?

TIA

Anthony

 

[ybz90]

Could you donate the older ones that no longer have enough processing power to be useful for you? Perhaps you or your work could end up getting a tax writeoff.

The Nehalem's are actually pretty powerful still all things considered. I would suggest maybe a folding rig as well, but that will still eat up your power bill like crazy. I know you said you didn't want to set up any servers, but maybe you could use it for a home server to serve up media files, backups, and torrents or something of that nature.

The downside to all of this might just be finding boards. Boards for older sockets are almost always unreasonably priced unless you can get one used from a place like OCN.

 

[Aleslammer]

If the Nehalems are socket 1366 could do some nice folding with this.

http://www.evga.com/Products/Product.aspx?pn=270-WS-W555-A2

 

[agussio]

Perfect, that is the kind of board I was thinking of. I will have to tear some bits apart to verify compatibility, but a non gaming, uber grinding server is what I have been thinking of. Now that I've seen that board I am getting other bad ideas. Maybe i do need a pet project and a replacement for my furnace.

The newer procs especially are still good, they are just misunderstood. I know this in my heart and can't retire them to the silicon scrap yard yet.

Sadly a lot of places wont take donations for tech over a couple generations back. For kind of the same reasons we replaced them to begin with. You might be surprised how hard it is to give away old systems. Even ones you just pulled out of production yesterday.