New Low TDP Server
I’ve had na all purpose home server in a desktop gaming case. I have an X99 workstation consumer grade motherboard with an Intel Xeon E5-2690 v4 and 128 gb of ECC ram. It’s certainly more than enough for my personal projects and services that I use daily.
A few months ago I’ve bought 2 3090s to dabble with local AI models. I’ve deployed ollama in a proxmox LCX container. I was able to run 70b models like ollama3.2:70b or qwen2.5:72b. All good and well but the system was drawing close to 100 watts on idle. Most of the services I have in it should run almost 24/7 and even if the video cards are not used they consume quite a bit of energy. So I decided to put together a lower TDP rack mount server for services that need to run 24/7. Then I could re-purpose the old one as an AI server that I can program to auto shutdown after some time and power back on in the morning.
I decided to start building this when I saw an ad of an old server online. It had an almost new Inter-tech 3U case with all Noctua fans and Noctua cpu coolers for the same price of a brand new case. So I picked this server up, uninstalled the old hardware, cleaned it nicely. I sold most of the old parts, but kept the case, Noctua fans and coolers.
What I run doesn’t require much CPU power but uses quite a bit of ram. I found this pretty old motherboard on ebay that has 12 ram slots which supports ECC registered modules. I installed 192 gigs of ECC ram to it. It supports Registered ECC so it wasn’t very expensive.
An interesting feature of this board is that it supports 4 channels of ram. However, the ram speed dropped to 1866 Mhz when all the slots are used, even though the specification says it shouldn’t.
It has IPMI, and a nice remote management UI. I updated BIOS and BMC firmware to the latest through the management UI which was a breeze.
As I said I wanted this to be low TDP but the motherboard only supports Xeon E5 series CPUs. So I looked for the lowest TDP cpus in among these. I found this Xeon E5-2630L v4. It’s certainly not great compared to modern cpus but it has 10 cores, 20 threads and a TDP of 55 watts. But it has 1.8 GHz base frequency, and 2.9 GHz boost clock. Most probably a decent modern gaming cpu with half the cores can easily outperform this one, but you can’t buy that for 30 euros. Also, I won’t run any cpu heavy applications on this machine.
The board has 12 ram slots and they are pretty close to the cpu socket. The cooler that came with the old server is Noctua NH-D9DX i4 3U, which has 90mm fan. It didn’t fit between the ram slots so I’m using the cooler without the fan. The case has a fan wall so I connected on of the fans there as the cpu fan. The cpu has 55W TDP and it doesn’t get very hot. Though, if I upgrade it, I’ll have to buy an 80mm fan for the cooler.
Unfortunately, the PSU is placed horizontally in this case which blocks, 2 pcie slots. I’m only going to use 2 slots for now so it’s not an issue. But it’ll have to install them pretty close to each other. Quadro P2000 and an X520-DA2 network card.
Logging, and monitoring stack will live in this server so I need some durable SSDs as I plan to write quite some logs and metrics. I bought Intel D3-4610 enterprise ssds hoping that they’ll be more durable than consumer grade ones. I’m planning to turn on logs for all firewall rules just for fun. I’m also going to store all application logs and syslogs on this server, as well as metrics. I’ll deploy both prometheus and InfluxDB to have the ability to use both pull and push based metric collection. Some applications like pfsense and PVE can push logs to InfluxDB natively. For publicly exposed services I’m going to use prometheus to collect metrics as these services live in a separate network which can’t access internal networks.
So this is how it looks. It has been running 24/7 for quite a while. The only time when the CPU is taxed is when Immich runs background jobs for the new images. It’s super silent, though the noise of the nas masks it. Soon I’ll install a SPF+ network card once I start upgrading the network to 10G.