Dell Server Tower

J

JCNiest5

2[H]4U
Joined
Apr 25, 2005
Messages
4,093
So, awhile back, my workplace threw away some older Dell Server PCs, I took home a few two towers and two rack servers, and now I'm reviving a T7500, which came with one X5607, a 1366 socket CPU with an option for a second one. I searched around the internet and found out it can run all the Xeon up to the highest 6-core CPUs, so I managed to grab an Ebay item, which came with a matched pair of X5680, not the highest speed in that series. I ordered a 2nd CPU Riser Card and behold! The Ebay seller only mentioned the riser card, but when it came in, there is an X5680 in the socket! So now, I have three X5680. I'm gonna play around with this "used to be expensive" gadget and have some fun with it. Windows Server 2019 runs nicely on it now, but no driver for this super old nVidia Quadro FX1700 video card, which came with only 512MB of DDR2 memory. Memory-wise, awhile back, I ordered a Server memory kit that said "6x4GB=24GB," but lo and behold, the seller mistakenly mixed in two 8GB modules with four 4GB, so it's a mixed and match for a total total 32GB for now. I wonder, can a server motherboard take regular non-ECC memory?

The other tower (T5400) has one Xeon E5405, one of the racks (PowerEdge R300) also has an E5405, and one (PowerEdge 2950 Gen III) has an X3323.

What else can I do with these gadgets?
 
From what I'm reading there's mix information if those model can or can't support ecc. Per dell community and manual it states the system does not support non-ecc memory. But I saw some video of people bypassing it.

https://www.dell.com/community/Desk...-ECC-RAM-un-Dell-Precision-T7500/td-p/3837269

There's a lot you can do with those old server. You can convert them into beginner gaming rig. With the x5680 or x5690 and a 1070 these can perform pretty decent. Now if you want to make them into servers you can install dual CPU and run them was a vm host. You can also play with firewalls like pfsense. Depending on the amount of tray you have. You can create freenas or storage server. These old server can still perform pretty well as long as you upgrade some of it's older hardware.

Here's a reference for building a gaming rig with the T7500
https://www.greenpcgamers.com/technology/make-my-precision-t7500-in-to-a-gaming-computer/

If you're interested in some ddr3 10600 8gb ecc sticks let me know.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the link! So this thing is still useful to some degree. The memory price in the first link is outrageous! Good thing there's Ebay. I think for now, I'm just gonna use the 32GB I have. Should i decide to add more later, I will let you know.
 
I got some 10600R and 12800R in both 8g and 16g varieties that came out of dell/hp hosts (most of them R710/R720) if you're interested pm me.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top