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converting Dell 6850 server to home desktop use

A

Angaria

Junior Member
Just snagged one of these off ebay with 32gb of ram for a price I couldn't resist. Will be using it to run some simulations in matlab, working in Illustrator and dishing out mp3's. (basically a scientific computing system 🙂

Two questions:
1.) I'd like to run dual 24" displays and apparently it only has pci-express and pci-x slots. Is there a compatible video card that will support dual 1900x1200 screens? (mainly I'm seeing cards for pci-express 2.0 and I'm not sure if they're compatible.

2.) Planning to install the OS on a RAID 0 array - are SAS or SCSI drives recommended?

Link to spec sheet if needed: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/PE6850_specs.pdf
Thanks!
 
Angaria said:
1.) I'd like to run dual 24" displays and apparently it only has pci-express and pci-x slots. Is there a compatible video card that will support dual 1900x1200 screens? (mainly I'm seeing cards for pci-express 2.0 and I'm not sure if they're compatible.
Click to expand...
PCIe 2.0 is backwards compatible with PCIe 1.0. You just won't have the available bandwidth of PCIe 2.0, not that it matters much.

AFAIK, all graphics cards support dual displays.

2.) Planning to install the OS on a RAID 0 array - are SAS or SCSI drives recommended?
Click to expand...
Have you considered getting an SSD instead?
 
SSD would be about the same price, but can I hook them up to a sas/scsi system?
 
Last edited:
Angaria said:
Just snagged one of these off ebay with 32gb of ram for a price I couldn't resist. Will be using it to run some simulations in matlab, working in Illustrator and dishing out mp3's. (basically a scientific computing system 🙂

Two questions:
1.) I'd like to run dual 24" displays and apparently it only has pci-express and pci-x slots. Is there a compatible video card that will support dual 1900x1200 screens? (mainly I'm seeing cards for pci-express 2.0 and I'm not sure if they're compatible.
Click to expand...

You can use PCIe 2.0 cards in PCIe 1.0 slots. Be careful to get a GPU that doesn't require 6-pin power connectors, as the server almost certainly doesn't have any.

Angaria said:
2.) Planning to install the OS on a RAID 0 array - are SAS or SCSI drives recommended?
Click to expand...

First you need to check to see if the server has a SCSI or a SAS backplane. If it has SCSI, then you'll need to use SCSI drives (which will probably be old and expensive). If it has SAS, you can use SAS or SATA drives.

Angaria said:
Link to spec sheet if needed: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/PE6850_specs.pdf
Thanks!
Click to expand...

According to the spec sheet, the server's power supplies only accept 200-240V input power, so you may be screwed if you live in the US. Also, that sucker is probably going to be loud.
 
OP, no offense intended, but I'm confused... why would you buy a system like that when you appear to know next to nothing about computers?

Daimon
 
6850 is already few years old. That seems to be the same series as my older PE2950's (read hitting 4-5 years old now.) There will be no power cables in that thing for video cards (or nearly anything for that matter.) The powers supplies attach to a distribution board that attaches to all the devices (most of them via hard docking connectors with a few cables none being molex or anything otherwise standard.)

That machine comes from a time when you could choose SCSI / SAS backplanes. You need to find out what disks it had and acquire the caddies for them as well. SCA SCSI drives have more or less vanished from the market at any decent price / size ratio.

Basically you bought what would likely be a good (to overkill) home server but it will not convert to a desktop. It will likely be very expensive to make it runable again unless you happen to have that series of drive caddies laying around and it happens to be SAS.
 
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