and then you open ebay and for 300 is only mb with cpus or for 400 with one weaker cpu :D

I dont know the electricity cost in the US but in Germany it would cost me a asset. ~ 35 Cent per kWh Edit: So the Internet says 13.19 Cents in the US.

@@shadowmasterlord presne tak ako hovoríš 😂

Dell Precision T7600 16-Core 2x Intel E5-2680 with 64 GB ram - $400 + $55 shipping DELL PRECISION T7600 1300W POWER SUPPLY - $50 + $16 shipping AC Power Supply Cord Cable 4 Dell Precision - $8 + $3 shipping XPG LITE SX6000 Series: 512GB Internal PCIe Gen3x4 (NVMe) - $66 M.2 NVMe SSD to PCIe X4 Adapter - $20 Samsung 860 EVO 500GB 2.5 SATA III - 8 x $85 ($680) Athena Power BP-15827SAC an 1 x 5.25" External Drive Bay to 8 x 2.5" - $65 Cable Matters Internal Mini SAS to SATA Cable - $12 Seagate ST5000DM000 5TB Internal 5900RPM 3.5" HDD Lot of 4 - $275 + $9 shipping Total - $1660..... So 1360 dollars over or 5.5x the ammount presented in this $300 server. The extra 5tb drive can be used for backup of the SSDs and NVMe capacity (4tb with raid 5) while the other three can be in raid 5 (10tb). This only gives you space for one complete backup of of the fast storage and with the other 3 5tb drives in raid 5 you have resiliency but no backups. Total capacity would be about 14tb in this config. This is without a $1,000 1080ti if you want to do rendering. Just the extra hardware is $1,120 aside from the server, assuming you find one with 64gb of ram and 2 xenons 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR3 PC3-8500R - $86 Intel Xeon E5-2680 2.7GHz 20MB 8-Core 2 x 52 ($104) If you include the NAS shown in video and asssuming you want 5x capacity (70tb) for backups it adds an extra $3,660 Synology 12 bay NAS DiskStation DS2419+ - $1500 Seagate IronWolf 6TB NAS Internal Hard Drive - 12 x 180 ($2,160) Bringing total cost to $5,320 with the parts used. Without power consumption. I understand that this isn't a build video and it's essentially just saying look what I built for the channel but this could have easily been titled "building the "bigboi" virtual server" without the mention of cheap or modest or anything that implies that this is affordable. Yes you can get a ton of power out of a sub $500 server and that is freaking amazing but without storage that power is applied to nothing.

On the west coast of the US where we are it's $.11/kWh

How is it misleading if $300 gets you a dual Sandy Bridge Xeon machine with 16 GB (upgradeable to 512 GB!) of RAM and a 500 GB HDD? That's what I call a good deal, and plenty for most people.

@@GRBtutorials because you're not factoring in that people probably don't already have that chip, that RAM, etc. You used a lot of parts and supplies that didn't come with the $300 purchase from eBay...

Jeremy Graslie No, they said it was all included in the price. They upgraded the RAM to 64 GB because of their requirements, but 16 GB were included (2:15), and the Xeons were included as well.

Configured 2x 2Tb hdd, 64gb ram and 3gb gpu for $355

I just looked for this exact build. Im seeing a ton of bare bones builds.

Still be proud! If it serves its purpose for your needs then that’s great!

Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for subscribing!

same situation here! looking forward to seeing everything else you guys have!

@@2GuysTek I want to build this out for a Data Science personal work station. What kind of Nvidia graphics cards can I put on this? Preferably two of them, with each one having 12gb ram

@@lutherhill2405 there are a ton of 16x PCIe slots in this chassis, so you could easily throw two RTX Titans into this box and power them without an issue. The PSU is rated at 1300W so even with two giant cards consuming wattage, you'll have a lot of power budget left over!

2GuysTek excellent thanks. I will definitely be building this out over the next year.

This is a great idea! Let’s see what we can do in the future! Thanks for the suggestion!

That's great to hear! It's really important to us that people get something out of our work, thank you for letting us know the video helped!

please look at other channels to, the make some stuff the wrong way.

@@juri14111996 huh?

@@adamsiek6438 kzfaq.info The have great videos about freenas and xcp-ng.

@@juri14111996Oh I am. Not concerned about learning, from the video. I'm in IT with tons of certs. If I was going to set something up I would read the docs. Videos are great, but no one video will cover everything. I'm just was entertained by it.

That’s great! We originally were thinking about using T3600s!

That’s awesome! This keeps us going!

Awesome! Glad you found the video and that it helped! Consider subscribing!

Couldn’t have said it better!

@@IJoeAceJRI ofcourse you can; the hardware surrounding it (in that weight class, mind you) will just go "thanks for all the fish" in a few months - while running, and you depending on it

@@IJoeAceJRI generally, it's not the CPU that burns down, but a power supply, a disk controller fails, stuff like that. neither is a problem if you have hardware redundancy (edit #3, sorry.) of course you could run a server with a 1600 on a decent mobo and you'd be fine. but you couldn't run it with a terabyte of error-correcting RAM and at 100% load, 24/7, for years. "home NAS" vs "business machine, needs to make money"

Thanks for watching!

Awesome! Good luck!

I had been doing this with servers for years too, but never seriously considered using workstations till now! This has been such a success that I probably will never go back to server hardware again. Thanks for watching!

@@2GuysTek Ive ironically used servers as workstations.... Fujitsu servers, that I have used all happily run windows 8 and 10. found this out by accident when I booted up a spare drive in mine by accident. Hyper v works very well and the two SAS cards I got for free :) work well. even has a dual screen graphics card and sound. I work as an IT engineer so comming across"old" tech is a work hazard and one I often benefit from. seconhand is great.

Glad you enjoyed it!

We have a Nexcloud instance that we use for transferring and syncing data between Jon and I. It looks, functions, and does everything Dropbox does - but has so many more features and apps to it! We even run a kanban board on it! It's completely free, fully functional, and regularly updated. If you have storage on your R720, and you have a good Internet connection give it a shot!

Hi Micah, thanks for the comment! We did have to add a discrete GFX card as the chassis didn't come with one when we bought it from eBay - That being said, the card we put in it was very, very low end, just a basic Nvidia 2-port Quattro we had laying around. Regarding the SAS connections, the board has 2x mini-SAS connections which would let you do a total of 8 SAS/SATA connected drives. You can connect those however you'd like, with 4 going to the hot swaps and then 4 more going to a high density 5.25" disk bay like we used. The built-in disk controller only does a software RAID, which isn't supported by ESXi, so if you want to do a proper RAID-5, 6, or 10, get yourself a RAID card for cheap on eBay as well to allow you to build the array of your dreams! We didn't test 10TB disks, only 5TB, but I don't see a reason that they won't be supported - this chassis isn't old enough that it would have a limitations on the disk size. Here's Dell's specs for the platform: www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/sln290764/hardware-specifications-for-the-precision-t7600-desktop-workstation?lang=en

AMD Ryzen™ VR-Ready Premium

It's the magic of virtualization! There is just so much power in modern hardware these days that we just don't unlock running one OS on it at a time. A platform like the T7600 is a great place to play with virtualization and fully unlock all of that potential with multiple VMs at a time! Thanks so much for watching and the comment!

Love it! They will *CLAP* pump you up!

Thanks for watching!

@@2GuysTek You're welcome. :) Hope you'll get more fans coming in.

Thanks for the question! In ESXi you only use the stick to boot the hypervisor and that's all, so think of it as the ESXi boot disk and nothing more. ESXi loads into memory and stops using the USB stick after that initial load. All VMs are stored on 'datastores' which are disks that are connected to the host via SATA or network-attached via iSCSI or NFS. I'm not an expert on Proxmox, but I'm willing to bet it has a similar feature to do the same thing. Typically a hypervisor (a generic name for an OS that just runs virtual machines) is designed to be small, light-weight, and run with the smallest footprint possible to leave as many resources as possible for the VMs it's running.

Do you have a video showing how to install ESXI on the computer

Thanks for the comment and watching! We think the same thing!

how did you do it ? does your software work with ESXi ? ... I have a R720 too, but it's loud as hell, I can't use it at home at all

We released another video talking about the VMs that we run and what they're used for. We only lightly touch on the performance though: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/n9mjp8Vlnb-ydps.html That being said, we'll add this to the list of ideas! There is a lot of interest in how well systems like this perform. Thanks for the comment!

Thanks! We hoped it gave you some ideas for your own #homelab!

@@2GuysTek I have 2 x E5-2687W V4 got them from eBay cheap these dual CPU workstations are amazing!

That's great! I always have a chuckle when I read about people who build out these giant #homelabs in their homes with data center gear. I mean, I've been there, but I'm glad I moved away from rack servers to workstations that have a ton of power, don't destroy my power bill, and are practically silent! Thanks for the comment! -R

Thank you!

Thanks for the question! The T7600 really has been a quality system for our needs. The platform has been entirely reliable since we put this video out. We actually just replaced it recently though, here's the video for that: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/qMiEq5Nev9C8d3k.html if you're interested. And to be honest with you, the only reason we upgraded was to continue to stay current with the hardware support from VMware moving forward beyond ESXi 7. We did miss not having a DRAC/iLO/OOB interface for the host. If there was a way to add or install and out-of-band management controller then the system would have been practically perfect. When the decision was made to move to something newer we didn't go with another Precision T-series because the cost was just too high. Sadly the world has caught on to the value of using a workstation as a virtual server and now the prices for what you get are even higher than a rack server with more power (which is why we moved back to a rack server).

You're 100% right on the ECC RAM requirement - That's an important catch, thank you! The R710 server we were running as the primary ESXi host had compatible RAM as they're around the same generation. And to your question about why a T7600 over a T7610? It was just money. At the time there were no 'affordable' T7610s on the market. In some cases they were like $300-500 over the $300 T7600 we found. Unfortunately now it looks like even finding a T7600 at the price we bought ours looks hard to do. I did find one almost identical to the chassis we bought but it was going for $400. ebay.to/31k2AGq I'm hoping prices settle back down here soon. Thanks for the question!

We're big fans of Synology! In fact, we use it as part of our ESXi datastores via NFS mount for VMs with large disks that don't need to be super fast (just big!) Regarding virtualization on Synology - I've never used it myself, but considering the lower power nature of the Intel Atom C2538 in our DS2415+ we probably wouldn't get much running. To your question about what we're currently running, at this moment we're running 10 VMs. 4 Ubuntu VMs, 2 Windows Server VMs, pfSense, 2x Windows 10 Pro VM, and a vCenter server appliance. All have a variety of different amounts of RAM, disks, and vCPUs associated with them. Thanks for the comment!

There should be more SATA connectors available, if not, buy this: amzn.to/35WNAVv

Here's a link to a similar product to the one I used. Unfortunately the one I used doesn't seem to be available anymore: ebay.to/2RS2O4C Thanks for watching!

When we tested power consumption it came in at ~400W of power. And because this is a workstation, it was designed to sit at a desk in and office, so it's quiet.

This would be a perfect option for that! In fact, I wouldn't recommend buying a rack mounted server as you'll likely have restrictions that would prevent you from installing two full-length GPUs. Workstations like this one have plenty of GPU length for cards and this system has a 1300W PSU so it has plenty of power budget for 2x 1080Ti cards.

When dealing with issues like this, start simple - if you suspect you have RAM issues, put a single stick in (per CPU), and boot the machine. Does it come up? Is it stable? Increase the RAM additions until you find the bad slot. To your question about the PSU, no you do not need a UPS - for the PSU to fully consume 1300W of power you'd have to have that system under a significant load with internal peripherals (like GPUs) that required that high of wattage. If you do get the system up and running also consider upgrading the BIOS to the last released version. best of luck!

i just found 3 HP Proliant G6 with betwen 144 and 200GB Ram, each Server has dual CPU installed. just no drives. but its fine storage will be in a storage only Server.

How many VMs Ryzen 5950X can run?

@@sirs4878 i'm currently using ryzen 2600 (not X) running proxmox with 64GB ram. i have 5 VMs and 2 LXCs running. CPU resource wise, it's barely hitting 15% usage. though i'm not running anything "heavy". mainly pihole, VOIP server for home, proxy server, docker server. i'll run out of ram before i worry about cpu usage.

It sounds like maybe you have a bad embedded disk controller. By default on our system, the drives were available individually but could also be configured into a software RAID, which is awful of course. All of the channels on the mini-SAS were working for us, but software RAID isn't supported by ESXi and we wanted RAID. In the end, we ended up picking up a PERC H700 for something like $60 on eBay. This gave us the RAID we needed and the performance we expected. We've played with the H310 in the past and it's always been a disappointing card. Good luck!

Hi Bruno, I did some searching to see if I could find the exact one I used in that video. Unfortunately it's no longer available on either Newegg or Amazon in the US. However, I found this one here: amzn.to/2TTWmeM which looks so close to what I used that I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't built in the same factory in China. It's on the pricey-side, but the density is phenomenal! Best of luck! -R

@@2GuysTek What's the biggest SSD you've been able to throw at the T7600/T7610?

I just picked up a T7610 with Dual 8-Core Xeon e5-2670 CPUs (Total 32 threads), 256GB RAM. 1TB SATA3 7.2k OS Drive and 3 6TB SATA 3 7.2k Drives for my VM data store - pretty rocking system.

Thank you for watching! Consider subscribing!

@@2GuysTek done

With a decent GPU it would perform fine as a gaming rig as most of the heavy lifting in gaming is done on the GPU. It would run Win 10 fine, but Microsoft doesn’t support the processors in that box for Windows 11. There are workarounds but YMMV on that.

@@2GuysTek Thanks for responding :) Today, I just purchased an old Dell PowerEdge T320, Intel Xeon E5-2470 v2, 48GB DDR3, H310, 8x 3TB SAS. I'm just waiting for delivery now. Will look at upgrading the GPU as suggested. Maybe, something like an RX 570/580 from Aliexpress, or used on Ebay. I have to ensure compatibility with the box first. I heard there was an issue with having to change a power cable if the GPU is powered from the Dell PSU. I have no idea at this stage.

This chassis has a 1300W PSU, but we never - even when fully loaded - came close to that consumption. We'd been asked quite a bit over time how much the system used while running and if memory serves it rarely crested 300W of usage. Of course, what you put into it will affect the consumption, so if you toss in a couple high-powered GPUs your mileage will vary. Best of luck and thanks for watching!

Upgrade to am4

I second this question...

@@AchwaqKhalid I found it here the links www.ebay.com/itm/293199542565 www.amazon.com/dp/B00TL4US8K/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_u9amFb1DV8AHK

That's a great idea! You're the first to ask, but we'd be happy to do a run through of it's life and workload running ESXi! Thanks for the suggestion!

Great questions, here's some answers: 1) The server is upgradeable, but only within its current generation. This is a first generation (v1) E5-26xx Sandy Bridge Xeon and while Intel made the v1 chipsets capable of running v2 CPUs, Dell does not and locks the BIOS to only allow v1 E5-26xx CPUs. That being said, you could always get the best CPU of that generation to throw into this chassis, those would be the Xeon E5-2687W CPUs which are 8-core CPUs - Still pretty fantastic chips and probably pretty affordable. 2) To your GPU question - The workstation has a 1kW PSU in it, so it's capable of running a pretty good variety of GPUs. Keep in mind that Dell says it has 600W-worth of PCIe power for GPUs. I can't speak to whether AMD's crossfire will work or not. Here's a link to Dell's hardware specs for the T7600: www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000139598/hardware-specifications-for-the-precision-t7600-desktop-workstation This is a great system for the price and still is a great performance, though it's getting old by today's standards. I hope this helps! Thanks for the question, consider subscribing, and best of luck! -R

@@2GuysTek Great stuff and thank you so much for sharing your vast amount of knowledge with a incredible fast response . To me that is very rare and speaks highly to your character . I’m subscribed and will be looking forward to watching more of your content . Kind regards , StrokerAce

It quiets down and is no louder than a normal workstation.

We made a video walking you through step-by-step! kzfaq.info/get/bejne/j86Iprtl0LC3Y4E.html

I want to know that as well ! ... it's a shame you haven't got an answer

Check the video description, you can find a link to it there! Thanks for watching!

Thanks for watching!

We used BIOS boot as the boot method, and we targeted an internal USB stick inside. This was v6.5 of ESXi. What is your boot target? That generation of Precision host doesn’t support booting from NVMe, so you need to use a SATA-cabled disk.

@@2GuysTek wow thanks for responding back so quick! I actually got it working today using version 6.5 update 3, from the custom ISO Dell EMC download option in VMware’s site. Was able to copy a license key I had from a 6.7 version host I had so we’re up and running 🙌🙌 . Was hoping to use v7 but it sounds like there’s a lot of jumping through hoops to get that to work on the T7600.

Hi Brian! Thanks for the comment! The T7600 has 16 total DIMMs available in the dual-proc config, here's a link to Dell's specs on the model: www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/sln290764/hardware-specifications-for-the-precision-t7600-desktop-workstation?lang=en Thanks watching!

I'd recommend joining our Discord server and start the conversation there! Here's the link: discord.gg/Y9PB9pq

The system comes with a 1000W PSU, that’s quite a lot of power.

That's awesome! It's amazing how much power you can get for your money these days! Thanks for watching!

Electrical rates are different in different parts of the world, so this is a tough question to answer. Where we are we're charged .11 cents a kW/hr. This system uses about the same amount of power as a high-powered desktop and as such we don't notice it's power consumption any more than our other desktops. Thanks for the question!

Here's a more concrete answer: At the current run rate, the system is using around 300-400W depending on its workload. The UPS reports that at the current run rate it's consuming around $1/day or $30/mo depending on the number of days in the month. Like I mentioned earlier, here where I live in the US 1kW/hr costs $.11.

Sorry I just double checked they are 4tb each.

We love recommendations! Thanks for the suggestion!

The biggest reason is that working with ESXi as part of my #homelab keeps me sharp for working with VMware professionally in my day job. Thanks for watching! -R

@@2GuysTek why not a seperate Storage only Server?

@@juri14111996 we technically have that already with our #Synology NAS. We use NFS datastore mounts from ESXi to volumes hosted on the NAS for VMs with big slow disks. Unfortunately the NAS only has a 4x1Gbit LACP trunk to the network so it's read/write rate isn't anywhere near what we can store on the internal NVMe.

100% yes it can. In fact it actually has rubber feet on the backside if you wanna change the orientation.

@@2GuysTekBecause of space constraints my desk isn't that large. My solution was to rack everything. I have a 25U startech rack in my mancave. So far all that's in it is my media server and my daily driver. I've been wanting to learn linux but didn't want to mess with dual booting. Since the T7600 is dirt cheap and will fit in my rack, Ebay here I come! Next stop Pop!Os.

You running Linux? Windows? FreeNAS? Thanks for watching!

@@2GuysTek I'm running a domain server in WSE 2019.

Sadly enough that’s EXACTLY what happened!

Great question! I'll connect up my kill-a-watt to it and give you the running consumption. The 1300W capability of the PSU is overkill for the standard workloads we throw at it with ESXi and no high-end GPU consuming power. Stay tuned! -R

@@2GuysTek yay thank you

@@Airbag888 Okay, sorry for the delay. The system currently pulls around 400W on average, depending on how busy it is. Considering the PSU is rated for 1300W, I'm well below the maximum consumption of the system! One thing to add, my UPS estimates the total cost of running the system and week-to-week looks like it's estimated to cost me ~$7 and some change, or a bit over a dollar a day to run. Not bad!

@@2GuysTek Thanks man! Appreciate the feedback. 400W is indeed well within the PSU's limits. I was curious as for my needs of a home server I'm looking for a much more frugal home server (20-30W idle and 70W load) that can still accomodate 64GB RAM or more. Cheers and keep up the good work!

@@2GuysTek In germany this would result in a total electricity cost of 3$ per day, making a grand per year. As you said, the Ryzen 3900X has even more performance and would cut the electricity cost in less than half. So depending on where you live, a new system might be the cheaper alternative.

That one in particular was purchased from Newegg and doesn't seem to be available anymore. However, this guy here: amzn.to/2RMi9U8 looks essentially just like it and connects the same way. It's a bit pricey, but for the density you get, it's amazing!

~400W average draw

Measured at the wall the system uses ~300-400W, so it's like a typical desktop PC playing games. Thanks for the comment!

All great points! Thanks for the comment! You're right about that goofy door thing. Thankfully we're not running a GPU with that much height either.