Price of older Supermicro motherboards

[zis8snbt4p]

Hi,

I am just about to buy my first components for my first FreeNAS Home server and as an overly excited individual got around to getting the shiniest thing I could find i.e. Supermicro X12 series M/B. You can see my choices here if you want

Now as the cost rose, I got a hint of cold feet and I thought that maybe I should rethink my approach a bit.
Maybe I shouldn't spend all this money and I started trying to research whether dropping a generation (LGA1151 vs LGA1200) is going to make an impact (30-40% reduction for the system)

Surprisingly (and anecdotally) I didn't find it to present any significant savings mainly because a lot of the X11 motherboards are still priced north of 200GBP when X12 series can be found for 270GBP.

Does this match your experience as well? Am I doing something wrong in my searching? I tried newegg, amazon, ebay and google's shopping feature.

 

[Jailer]

Buy used stuff off ebay. I just put together a esxi system using ebay parts that consisted of Supermicro X9SRI-F motherboard, Xeon E5-2680 V2 CPU, 64GB memory and a CPU cooler off amazon that totaled $360. You can save a bunch of $$ vs buying parts new and for a NAS they will work just fine.

 

[zis8snbt4p]

I hear you Jailer, I am just surprised that either you go 7 years back to save $$ but it doesn' look like you can save 20-40% by going a couple of years back.

 

[Jailer]

That's because the performance of stuff a couple years back is really close to what's available today.

 

[jgreco]

That's because the performance of stuff a couple years back is really close to what's available today.

Although it is also worth noting: the performance of stuff a couple years more back is really close to the performance of stuff a couple years back. And actually over the last 10 years, while it has gotten better, it's nothing like the rate of improvement was in the '90's-'00's.

We needed some additional lab capacity here so I recently purchased two hosts each with dual E5-2697v2, and then some Supermicro Twin^2's that each host four nodes, also E5-26xx v2 stuff. It was kind of painful to only pay $160 for each of the E5-2697v2 CPU's when I had purchased one prior to release day back in 2012 (or whatever) for more than $2000.

 

[zis8snbt4p]

Thanks for your input.
Are you not concerned at all about buying such old equipment? What about power consumption?

 

[jgreco]

I have more problems with new gear. The old stuff is already burned in, infant mortality, the babies have died long ago, and the stuff is basically just getting into the "long tail."

Power consumption? Don't be silly. It was the Nehalem stuff and before that blew watts. Sure, newer stuff is incrementally better, but it is also insanely more expensive. How much would it cost you to build a 24-core, 48-thread server with 512GB of RAM, with 4TB of SSD on a decent RAID controller, 4 x 10GbE networking? My answer is $2,219. It runs 330 watts at full tilt, not counting any drives that one might add to it as part of a virtualized FreeNAS. Go see the quote on that from Dell.

The problems you're going to face with older hardware primarily revolve around deprecation. For example, ESXi 6 deprecated support for a bunch of the hardware in the 10-year-old HP DL365's that one of my businesses donated to somewhere, which kinda sucks. But the hardware itself? Looks nearly as shiny as the day I pulled it out of the boxes, new. Works fine, never flaky, occasionally a drive dies. Keeps running.

Likewise, VMware has made some threatening noises about deprecating CPU's that might cover Ivy Bridge. That would kinda suck, but ESXi 6.7 will hang around awhile, and 7.0 still supports the LSI 2208 controllers, which are probably my biggest issue.

 

[survive]

Like Jailer posted above, I also just updated to an X9SRI-F in my NFS & block storage filer. There's no shame in buying used & as others have noted you aren't going to be burning up tons of power on the older procs.

When I was shopping around I found that single socket 2011 boards actually cost a lot more than the dual socket boards. Keep in mind dual socket boards are massive, E-ATX is loosely defined at best & they need a second 8-pin "CPU" power cable.

This system used be be based on a Supermicro X9S-SCL, a similar but way older platform than the X12 you selected. I found I outgrew it as I centralized more & more of my VMware storage. I loaded up on cheap DDR3 EEC & some nVME Optane drives. That's were these older "big" platforms shine, so many PCI-e lanes & so much more expansion!

-Will

 

[ThreeDee]

Being that I'm a bit on the "poor white trash" side of things .. I tend to get/try things on the cheaper side and see if/hope they work out .. I took a chance on some Chinese knock-off stuff (in sig) and it's been rock solid .. only having to reboot with a couple updates to TrueNAS. DDR3 ECC RDIMM's are super cheap. The motherboard, CPU and 4 x 8GB that came with the board was $125.. I sold the 32GB and got 4 x 16GB sticks for about $70. Video card was $10 off of Ebay and $25 for the HBA card. Not very everyone, but I paid about $10 a TB for the used drives that I run.

..purchased a cheap NVMe SSD for a boot drive (board didn't like my initial M.2 SATA drive though).

I have up to 8 people streaming off of my Plex at a time from the 25-30 or so friends and family "subscribers" ..

anyhoo .. if it's just a home server and you are on a tight budget .. check out my sig for stuff .. and stuff

 

[jgreco]

you aren't going to be burning up tons of power on the older procs.

Well, Sandy Bridge or newer (Supermicro X9). Once you get back to Nehalem (Supermicro X8 and before), it gets a bit ugly.

When I was shopping around I found that single socket 2011 boards actually cost a lot more than the dual socket boards.

On the used market, yes, the UP boards cost a lot. This is generally because single socket servers tended to go E3, and single socket E5 was sort-of aimed at workstation more than server, so there isn't a glut of UP boards pushing prices down.

You can still find some sweet UP E5 like the SYS-1018R-WC0R which are based on the WIO-format X10SRW-F (do NOT buy this unless you understand what you're doing, WIO is a proprietary format). Back when X10 was the thing, I bought a number of WC0R's but also made several custom X10SRW's in various 2U chassis, which have been very good over the years. I liked being able to put an E5-1650v3 into them for lots of core speed at a third of the cost of the E5-2643v3.

The biggest trick to buying on the MP market is that you often have to buy a *system*. Those E5-2697v2 systems I quoted above, I ordered them as dual E5-2650v2 with 128GB of RAM in 16GB sticks with some crap Adaptec RAID controller, for $499. I stripped out those parts (CPU, RAM, RAID) because I intended to put in the 2697's and 32GB sticks and an LSI 9270CV-8i. The $2219 I quoted regardless still netted me those stripped parts as part of the bargain, and I ended up turning around and dumping those CPU's and RAM into the Twin^2 boards. However, if I had tried to buy a CSE-826A-R920 with X9DRi-LN4F+ separately, the price could easily have been that or more with no CPU and RAM. A 16GB stick of RAM is worth about $25 and a 2650v2 is maybe $40, so I was able to strip $200 in RAM and $80 in CPU's out of a system that only cost $500, so the chassis and mainboard only ended up *really* costing $220 if you look at it the right way. If you do the math that way, then my new 2697 systems actually only cost me $1939 each.

 

[ChrisRJ]

What I eventually realized about used systems, is that there are basically two types of sellers. Those who have made a living out of it and therefore ask higher prices. And those that just want to get rid of old stuff, where speed of sales is more important than margin. The latter group is where you find the real bargains. The obvious downside is timing, because things go away quickly. Also, the refurbished sellers have more things in stock and you can usually customize the system. For me personally it is fun to wait until I find something really nice and cheap ;-)

 

[rvassar]

Can the dual-socket Supermicro boards run with only a single processor? I know most Dell's can do this, but you have to populate the memory correctly, and I think you loose half the DIMM slots. Some systems also loose PCIe lanes, which limits configurations, but... If you don't need it...

 

[danb35]

Can the dual-socket Supermicro boards run with only a single processor?

They can, but it's like the Dells you mention--they lose DIMM sockets, and at least in some cases, PCIe slots. Their motherboard manuals are pretty detailed, though, and explain the interactions.

 

[jgreco]

Can the dual-socket Supermicro boards run with only a single processor? I know most Dell's can do this, but you have to populate the memory correctly, and I think you loose half the DIMM slots. Some systems also loose PCIe lanes, which limits configurations, but... If you don't need it...

Yes, of course they can.

You "lose half the DIMM slots" because the memory controllers are built into the CPU's, so if you remove half of the memory controller, you lose half the DIMM slots.

PCIe lanes are more problematic and you have to look at the manual. Almost every modern system is designed so that the second CPU provides a majority of the PCIe slot capacity, especially x16, because, again, PCIe lanes go direct to CPU.

I just picked up some Supermicro 6027TR-HTRF Twin^2 systems which are four nodes in a 2U system. Each node has two sockets, and the whole thing could conceivably run something like 2x E5-2697v2 in each node, for 96 cores in a very power-hungry 2U. However, I simply wanted some bare metal lab nodes, so I populated them using a single processor with some E5-2650v2's and E5-2637v2's we had laying around and 64GB RAM in each node. This makes them relatively power-sippy in comparison. I'm very pleased and anxious to get it deployed out at one of our data centers soon.

 

[zis8snbt4p]

So, I have been searching for a used system with an E5-26xx v2 CPU and it will definitely come much cheaper (the combination of CPU + motherboard) but something that I don't find necessarily much cheaper is DDR3 UDIMM. I mean the stuff is almost half the price of DDR4 for roughly half the speed.
Any thoughts on this?

 

[rvassar]

So, I have been searching for a used system with an E5-26xx v2 CPU and it will definitely come much cheaper (the combination of CPU + motherboard) but something that I don't find necessarily much cheaper is DDR3 UDIMM. I mean the stuff is almost half the price of DDR4 for roughly half the speed.
Any thoughts on this?

Do you need to use UDIMM? The motherboards that support E5-26xx's should also support RDIMM's. You might find those cheaper.

 

[jgreco]

So, I have been searching for a used system with an E5-26xx v2 CPU and it will definitely come much cheaper (the combination of CPU + motherboard) but something that I don't find necessarily much cheaper is DDR3 UDIMM. I mean the stuff is almost half the price of DDR4 for roughly half the speed.
Any thoughts on this?

RDIMM or even LRDIMM is much cheaper. I bought 512GB worth of 32GB LRDIMM sticks recently for $800.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Here in Germany the prices on eBay for DDR3 ECC RDIMMs fluctuate quite a bit. Two weeks ago someone sold 4*32 GB for 130 Euros total and today most offerings are about 70+ Euros for a single 32 GB module. And the same goes for Supermicro X9 boards. Not sure how it is in your geography. But if you can wait and watch prices, real bargains might be possible.

 

[Herr_Merlin]

If you need a good 2nd hand Supermicro system in germany with v2 CPUs and ram. Send me a pm

 

[Inxsible]

I recently scored a Supermicro X10SLH-F for $65 + tax = $69.06. The list price was $124.99 + Best Offer. He had 3 available at the time.

I normally wouldn't make such a low offer -- I only did because I had someone else locally who was selling the same board for $55 -- because one of the RJ45 ports had a broken locking clip. I would have bought that since I didn't plan to use LAGG anyway and would have simply used the other RJ45 port for networking. So I thought I'd fire out an offer for shits and giggles and put in $10 more and explained in my offer comments about why I am offering $65 on a $124.99 price tag.

To my surprise the seller accepted. No muss, no fuss !

So yeah, it depends on the timing and also on how much the seller is willing. Usually helps if you, as a buyer, are not in a rush.