I look after data centres full of servers for a living.......These are entry level servers designed for Small Office environments...I have one of these Del T20's and another workgroup level server similar (a HP one) under my desk at home. Both are quieter than the Dell desktop PC sitting next to them....

​This is designed to sit next to a desk and is quiet

I think I'll bite. Best price with no cashback offer i've seen
Have some heat that man.

no HT on this CPU

Bargain

Geekbench looks good single:3293 multi:10334

Good deal!... £100 cheaper than Dells outlet price:

http://outlet.euro.dell.com/Online/SecondaryInventorySearch.aspx?c=uk&cs=ukdfb1&l=en&s=dfb&sign=PXhcOSHtr1T4IOw%2fPR7UdW9lswg62vBFl83P76FNKIijtcBb2ZpZ%2fZBp9WtHdngatn5znxy8BJYBOv2cj4laHYhyktwYTBtQTqUQ8DZ0tlrazHmcFBIUM5ulKddMILU67e52it78BfOyDcoPI7MJ6hMhd8YiuHj%2fcH%2bCsOU9n8vTysGmlgE9mBztRgnUnhJby3uyJ9CSR4mmE2KpbdRkxA%3d%3d

Good price but not the best Home server out there, lack of front drive bays and DRAC are disappointing as is the single NIC

I bought one to replace an ageing HP ML110G7 and ended up using it for a different purpose as the old ML110 is a far better server. Now discontinued but plenty of near new on ebay....

This looks like a great deal.

Has anyone here bought a tower server and upgraded it for their home PC?

the Pentium version of these is actually fairly quiet at full load

​This is designed to sit next to a desk and is quiet

The HP ML110 G7 mentioned in post #7 is NOT quiet once temperatures rise (even in an English summer!).

I've tweaked the fans on my HP so it's ok now but the T20 is quiet as delivered, both Pentium and Xeon versions. If anything the side panels tend to vibrate a bit which are annoying.

Most of the current generation of "entry-level" tower servers (like the T20, Lenovo TS140/150, HPE ML10 Gen 9, HP Microserver Gen8) are intended for siting in offices and hence have pretty low noise levels. I have a couple of TS140s (one as a desktop and one as a server) and they're very quiet. They also tend to be pretty efficient power wise as well.

If you find a tower server like this loud, wait until you hear 1U server which is actually meant for a Data Centre (this isn't). Lots of 40mm fans spinning at up to 10,000 RPM will make a lot of noise. Enterprise HDDs are lout too.

I look after data centres full of servers for a living.......These are entry level servers designed for Small Office environments...I have one of these Del T20's and another workgroup level server similar (a HP one) under my desk at home. Both are quieter than the Dell desktop PC sitting next to them....

my dell t7500 is really quiet. as you say, towers are designed for offices?

That's good to hear.

I do a lot of video work so I'm keen on getting one with a lot of cores (and threads).

I might check some out on eBay as well. Some bargains to be had.

Cheers - tempted to add an extra 4GB RAM

And Dell T20 does not require ECC RAM - I've got a mix if ECC/non-ECC in my Pentium version and 16Gb non-ECC in the Xeon

I have one with 16gb ram. Lovely little home media server running plex. Not really explored its potential yet.

I don't know why 'they' make it so hard to see the inside of this server. It's one of the most important views IMO

Quote:
Although the case is deeper than your average desktop midi tower, the positioning of the MicroATX motherboard relative to the bottom drive cage means you won't be able to take advantage of the extra depth. PCI-E cards have 265mm of space before they grind against the cage.
The E93839 motherboard has two PCI-E x16 slots, one of which is full speed and other of which runs at x4, as well as PCI-E x1 slot and a PCI slot. PSU is a basic 290W model, so bear that in mind before planning any power-hungry upgrades.

These are actually pretty silent I have a couple in my office as development machines

7000+ PassMark CPU points is amazing for almost £200. I've got a TS140 and it really flies with 5-6 VMs running. Just slap a RAM upgrade and SSD in and you'll be sorted.

Heat!

​This is pretty quiet, I use one as my home desktop. Much quieter than the old one it replaced. Put a 750ti in it, extra 16GB, SSD boot drive and 3TB of extra storage. Very happy with it.

Just my plan too
What OS are you using?

4GB of memory for this is about £44 on Crucial, about £82 for 8GB.

A buyer might want to factor those costs when considering buying this. It might be better to look for something with some more memory already in it for a slightly higher price.

It supports VT-d, which makes it great for vSphere. I pass PCI-e SATA and USB3 adapters straight through to a Xpenology NAS VM. This meant I could move my 4 disk array from a physical Xpenology server directly to DSM hosted on a VM.

Good idea but how are you backing up?

Can this take standard DDR 3 Ram ? or is DDR3-SDRAM different ?

Would this run windows 10 for example?

I really like the idea of getting a cheapy home server and using it as a base - component costs alone make this a good idea. I'm very new to building my own PCs however. Has anyone got a good component "stack" of GPU, SSD, PSU etc that would be compatible with this?

Got mine on a deal a while back for around £180 (after cashback), runs brilliantly with Windows 10. Is very quiet with 4 drives and a GTX 1050 Ti, also upgraded to 32gb Ram.

I have a couple of 4TB external drives connected to the USB3 adapter passed-through to DSM. I run a nightly backup of 'important' stuff to these drives, really important stuff is also sync'd to cloud storage using the native capabilities of the Synology OS.

You should never have primary and secondary copies in the same location let alone on same machine. A theft, fire or virus could take out everything in one fell swoop.

Can confirm. I use it for gaming too. Have a 1060 with a modified mobo cable for power. Runs silent when playing The Witcher 3 on high settings at 1080p

Servers Direct, foggy brain though it was over a year ago !!!
http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/dell-poweredge-t20-tower-server-xeon-e3-v3-244-89-174-89-after-cashback-serverplus-2303497

Thank you.

I wonder what the price was back in January - Dell had £80 cashback back then.

Does this have built-in GPU on the Xeon processor or do you have to buy a GPU card?

​Windows 10, not home edition

Possibly stupid question - would it be worth putting 2133 ddr3 in this or would it bottleneck somewhere?

You shouldn't make assumptions about the trade-offs i'm prepared to make between cost, operational complexity, operational risk and the value I place on the data.

I consider the majority of my data to be transient and replaceable; it's therefore not worth the time, effort and expense of backing it up.

Purchased yesterday, replaced the ram with 16gb of old ddr3 from the spares box, added a gtx 1060 with a sata to 6pin cable and I now have a very quiet new gaming box.

I think the 1060 requires a separate 8 pin PCI-E power cable which the T20 lacks.

One of these widgets will let you swap out the PSU for a standard ATX unit...

https://www.moddiy.com/products/Dell-OptiPlex-3020-PSU-Main-Power-24%252dPin-to-8%252dPin-Adapter-Cable-%2830cm%29.html

Yes. Entire system at full load would pull around 200w.

I wouldn't stick anything meatier than a 1060 in there, though.

Apologies - forgot to add that you will need a sata to 6pin adapter. Widely available on eBay and Amazon.

there was a server up the other day. it was a lenovo with the same Intel Xeon processor but with 16gb ddr4 ram and 2t storage for just £201

I guess that's me told lol apologies was only trying to advise.

would this be any good as a replacement to an old desktop, just for playing 5+ year old games on?

You are correct in stating that the PSU can cope with the overall power draw. However, I'd be a little wary of using a Molex to PCI-E adapter as all of the power from the PSU is routed through the motherboard - if you look closely at the picture in post #24 you'll see that the hard drives are powered from the motherboard, not the PSU.

I'm not saying that you can't power a 1060 with a molex to PCI-E adapter, but there is a risk that you fry the motherboard when trying.

Not 100% sure what you mean. The PSU has sata connectors to power the hard drives, with separate sata data cables connecting the drives to the motherboard. I.e. A traditional setup. Unless I've misinterpreted what you are saying.

The 1060 works fine, but I wouldn't try anything with a larger power requirement, due to what the sata power cable is capable of safely delivering

The PSU in my T20 doesn't have SATA power cables attached, the one in the picture in post #24 doesn't either. The SATA power cable is plugged into the motherboard just to the right of the DIMM slots - if you trace the black/red/yellow cable you'll see that it doesn't go anywhere near the PSU.

Do you have a T20 with a PSU with SATA power connectors?

Ordered Friday, arrived today.
It's sat next to me on my desk and all I can say is wow, it's quiet.
Much better than the Packard Bell desktop it's replacing.

Took another look over the weekend, and you are absolutely correct - Not sure how I missed that.

I got one of these a couple of months back for about the same price after cashback. Running MacOS Sierra very stable on it. Maybe I was unlucky but there is a bit of a whir from the fans - by comparison the Lenovo TS140 is silent (I own both).

I have just done exactly that, bought the cable and be careful the case isn't wide so i went for a slimmer psu:-

http://www.ebuyer.com/756495-evga-650-bq-power-supply-110-bq-0650-v3

quote=Berhwale]I think the 1060 requires a separate 8 pin PCI-E power cable which the T20 lacks.
One of these widgets will let you swap out the PSU for a standard ATX unit...https://www.moddiy.com/products/Dell-OptiPlex-3020-PSU-Main-Power-24%252dPin-to-8%252dPin-Adapter-Cable-%2830cm%29.html[/quote]

I'm after a server to get to grips with Windows Server from 2012 to 2016, is this any good or anything around the price or even a bit cheaper if poss, Thanks

Not actually played with Hyper-v, might have to have a look at that. Thanks