I love the IBM x3650 range. My absolute favourite workhorse.
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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if only my teenage self understood the treasure that setup would become.
Oh yeah that's sad, I remember moving out of my parents house 15 years ago only to come back for Christmas and asking where the old Tandy computer was.. My mother threw it out, that thing had a bunch of great classic games running on DOS like Rampage, Pitfall, Star Trek, galaga, centipede, etc... I'm still mad.
Im interested in your journey with that one. Im keyboard 'nerd' myself and own lots of ibm keyboards. Model f XT and AT both work over usb after converting them. Lots of model M:s, beamspring mainframe keyboard it weights over 5kg... Thats also converted to usb and littlebit exotic M50 and F50. I regret selling my model F104 aka Unsaver. But i really needed money at that point in my life.
Congrats! You just paid for shipping and got the server free.
If anyone will try to tell you it's garbage - don't listen. It's still the cheapest way to get multicore performance with up to 768GB RAM. Downside? It's noisy and power hungry. If you can live with that - you will enjoy it. It's well designed machine that will serve you well.
Downside? It's noisy and power hungry
Pretty big downside tbh and pretty meh Xeon CPU at this point (equal to a 7th gen i7).
But plus side is the space for HDD, memory is easy to get cheap (DDR3) and a solid case to build in a new build at worse.
Well you can't put two I7s on one board :)
That's why I'm saying - it's a cheap way to get to those levels of performance, not the best way.
In 90% of cases small 920x would be sufficient for homelab, but if someone likes big, loud enterprise machines - this one is oldie but goodie.
Well you can't put two I7s on one board :)
Technically you can : https://www.newegg.ca/p/pl?d=dual+processor+motherboard
Question is, why would you? 😂 You will get better performance from a Xeon or Epyc cpu for probably less.
The x3650 M4 7915 is a fine server, although outdated to today standards can still pull his weight if hidden and not scared of power cost (like OP mentioned, he's not haha.
Also an i7 of that age doesn't go up to 12 cores, for multithreading that is quite a benefit. Especially in a server.
I’ve got space to keep this baby out of the way, so the noise problem is a non-issue, and we have residential solar panels installed which significantly mitigates our utility costs, so I’m in a situation where those factors—while still significant—aren’t as big an issue for me atm.
Like I said, nostalgia was an admittedly outsized factor in my decision making process, and I’m fully cognizant of the limitations of this rig, even with significant upgrades, but as a starting point, and with my current planned uses for it, I’m feeling fairly happy with my decision.
I had a System X tower (forget what model right off hand) previously. Thing was an absolute beast in terms of size and weight, took two people to manhandle, poor FedEx guy complained about it lol. You think rack mounted servers are loud, my 1U is deathly quiet compared to the jet engines cooling that model of System X. Was always a thrill turning it on though!
I’ve been watching to add another System X to my collection. I love IBM gear where and when I can get it.
Hah, my old company that I left a year ago still runs those as their primary ESXi cluster.
I'm glad I left that place. I remember paying more than that for the annual hardware-only support on it lol.
That's a nice heater! And a very good door stop. Nice catch.
The best part of those machines was the warranty service, which I used regularly when I was supporting these machines in production.
If you don't already know about Morten Hjorth, he has an absolute priapism when it comes to IBM and Lenovo server gear.
He has made a YouTube channel with a huge amount of videos about his obsession over them.
I have 3 of those make sure they're fully updated otherwise a chip is slowly killed at every reboot
For more information https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zl4iDxGD7cQ
Meh. You paid someone to get rid of their ewaste.
With top end processors you're still left with garbage CPU performance, especially single thread performance. 24c/48t of crap 🤷♂️ I'm not sure why guys in this group get so excited over cores and threads. Omgmoar! 🙄
For what you'll pay in electric you could have had a brand new machine on a desktop processor that would decimate that machine on 1/4 of the power. (I went from 2660v4's to a 13500, cut my power by now than half and have significantly better performance in every way. Paid for itself in 18 months)