I have an original OG HL15 with the X11SPH-NCTPF and a Xeon Bronze 3204.
I’m thinking about upgrading to something like a Xeon Platinum 8268 for HomeProd services and NAS, they seem to be have a good price/performance metric, are their other options I should consider?
Regarding “Resizable BAR”, the X11SPH-NCTPF doesn’t support it an I found ReBARUEFI and I was wondering if anyone has tried this? I obviously don’t want to brick my server but if it works and is a proven solution that would be awesome. The ARC B50-B70 Pros look like a really good option but the only work with ReBAR.
Any tips or advice on either of these subjects would be greatly appreciated.
These seem to be a good value on the used decommissioned server market. The thing to watch for is that is a 205W TDP part, so you’ll need to upgrade your thermal solution and/or PSU. The passive cooler I think 45HL provided for the 3204 won’t be sufficient. You could also look at the Gold 6230 or 6242 for less heat output. Look at passmark and compare which cpus for the socket that you can purchase have the best price/performance in the TDP class you are interested in;
Personally, I tend to look at CPUs more by performance/watt since thermals and acoustics are a factor in my lab. Look for retail used parts and not ES or QS engineering samples.
I haven’t tried this, but my understanding is this should actually work. At a minimum as long as your IPMI is working I think rolling back is relatively easy vs bricking your system. I would have thought there would have been a hardware component to this, but apparently not, it’s just PCIe-related BIOS code that isn’t being backported by vendors, especially not for server class motherboards where ReBAR is/was a gamer thing. You may have seen it, but here’s a thread specific to X11 for that project