[Guide] Anniversary 2.0 "SNAFU" - Server Needs a Friggin' Upgrade

Looking for some feedback on this build. I already have all my drives, one of the coolers, the PSU and the P2000 on hand.
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I use this site for references and compatibilities. Keep in mind that this is a memory sales site and not the direct references from the manufacturers.

CPU:The 2696v2 is a OEM CPU, most boards wonā€™t support them. Iā€™ve heard good things about Lenovo/Dell boards supporting them though. You might wanna look at the 2680v2 (half price, 2 less cores, but officially supported) or 2697v2 (similar price? but fully supported)

RAM: Iā€™d go with 4x16GB to take advantage of the quad-channel layout, unless you had a really great deal on those LRDIMMs. LRDIMMs also suffer from a speed reduction in some configs (check the Supermicro manual - memory section), so the 1866MHz may not shine through

PSU: Does it have dual 8-pin CPU cables?

Cooler: The X9DAiā€™s layout has both CPUs quite near each other. Are you mounting the 212s horizontally (ie exhaust up) or vertically (CPU1ā€™s exhaust feeds into CPU2ā€™s intake)? If the latter (and given the high TDP CPUs), temperatures may be a problem for the 2nd CPU - I suggest liquid cooling OR getting other coolers that can be mounted horizontally

Case: L4500s are pricey now

I see quite a few deals on Samsung 16GB RDIMMs, they go for around $28/16GB?

Ebay

Thatā€™s not true. Boards that support the E5-2600 v2 will support the E5-2696 v2.

Oh, thatā€™s interesting

Iā€™m referencing this supermicro thread, although this ebay listing review (under bigchewtech) says the X9DRi-LN4F+ works.

Itā€™s possible the original poster had a hardware revision that was incompatible, such as R1.00 when they needed R1.02 for V2 support. This is different than the BIOS revision.

Supermicro isnā€™t forthright with this information.

A post was split to a new topic: X11SCL-iF CPU recommendations

Will the Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 work as well as the original Enthoo Pro for a tower build consisting of the original GA-7PESH2 mobo?

Yep, it will!

Not sure what youā€™re asking exactlyā€¦

I have added more RAM, and filled out all the disk space. I now have 5x14TB disks + others. I am now running Proxmox VE and working on Ceph these days. This server has served me very well, no pun intended. I am using this as my primary ā€œall-in-oneā€ server and am planning on expanding past it to running multiple nodes. The 2.0 SNAFU is a great guide and still very much valid AFAIK. Iā€™ve also added an RTX 3060 that Iā€™m using for Mining/streaming/gaming. Hope that adds clarity. Best!

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Hello,

Sorry for the bump. I was going to upgrade the X9DRH-7TF Iā€™m currently running with E5-2630v2 chips (which came with the board when I purchased a couple years ago) to the E5-2687W v2 SR19V

The board has firmware 3.0b currently, would I have any issues if I did so, the board came with E5-2630v2 and heat sinks and fan along with it. Would I need something beefier?

I just order parts to build my first server based on the anniversary 2.0 guide. My interest is that of a hobbyist. Iā€™ve never worked in a server environment before and expect to learn a lot of new things. I first functional objective is to stream videos t various devices in my house. In doing some research, I am somewhat intrigued by the home automation possibilities.

My question for the moment is what operation system to choose Ubuntu or Unraid seem to be likely choices. I am looking for recommendationsā€¦

What drew you to this particular guide

my son recommended the serverbuilds site and the anniversary guide seemed like it is aimed at building some pretty generic servers.

Iā€™m not exactly sure what might constitute a ā€˜genericā€™ server but for the most part we make recommendations based on specifics of what one wants to accomplish with their server. In this case it seems to be serving video locally and home assistant.

For those starting out we recommend Unraid for its ease of use without the loss of the ability to do relatively advanced things later.

Thanks for your recommendation. Hopefully as I get deeper into things and learn more, I can be more specific.

Hello and welcome.

The anniversary 2.0 guide is based around the V2 E5 Xeons which are a bit outdated by now. Its more oriented towards a production web / database server and it sounds like what you are interested in is more of a Media server. If you didnā€™t already have the parts we might have directed you to checkout the NK 6.0 which is a more current media server build.

That said the E5 Xeons and the LGA 2011 platform are very impressive. You get a ton of cores, RAM capacity, and PCIe connectivity. Even the older V2 Xeons should be able to handle most anything you are likely to throw at them with a couple of execeptions.

The 2 main drawbacks you may encounter for a home media server are:

  1. Lack of Quick Sync Video transcoding. If you are planning on doing a lot of transcoding you will need to either add a PCIe GPU for transcoding or use an additional standalone QSV box to run plex.

This isnā€™t a concern if you are going to be watching the media at original quality but depending on the playback devices you may need to transcode say a high quality video down to something a lightweight playback device can handle.

  1. The E5 Xeon server will also draw quite a lot of power. Depending on the power costs where you live you might want to look into your idle power consumption and consider if you want it running 24 / 7.

Those things considered you are going to have a beefy high core count server that will be a lot of fun to build and use.

For the OS I would recommend Unraid. It is a great converged NAS / Media Server / docker + VM host OS that has a very user friendly interface and a large mostly welcoming community around it making it a great OS for someone starting out.