**Dell PowerEdge T20 Mini Tower Server - Owner Thread**

[canyadigit]

Bumpppp
Like others in the forum, I'm the owner of a T20, purchased from a coworker a few years ago and have finally unearthed it from the closet.
I believe it's stock inside + 4 x 8Gb DDR3
My boss convinced me to stick with booting TrueNAS Scale on this and treating like a media server + Home assistant box + streaming. I bet I'll get good use out of it, with minimal set up effort.
I have a few sata drives as well, so I aim to transfer the OS somehow onto them eventually with a USB to SATA transfer kit. Anyone every have any luck with this? I assume it's common enough of a process.
Although I'm shying away from making this a gaming rig, I am curious; with a stock psu and cpu, is it worth it to stick a meager gpu in this thing without other significant upgrades? I'd go the windows route if that was feasible enough. Any risk associated with it? I'd also want to add an audio card.
Any tips are appreciated, this thread has inspired me to not simply get rid of this thing and to make something out of it.

 

[WeirdG]

Bumpppp
Like others in the forum, I'm the owner of a T20, purchased from a coworker a few years ago and have finally unearthed it from the closet.
I believe it's stock inside + 4 x 8Gb DDR3
My boss convinced me to stick with booting TrueNAS Scale on this and treating like a media server + Home assistant box + streaming. I bet I'll get good use out of it, with minimal set up effort.
I have a few sata drives as well, so I aim to transfer the OS somehow onto them eventually with a USB to SATA transfer kit. Anyone every have any luck with this? I assume it's common enough of a process.
Although I'm shying away from making this a gaming rig, I am curious; with a stock psu and cpu, is it worth it to stick a meager gpu in this thing without other significant upgrades? I'd go the windows route if that was feasible enough. Any risk associated with it? I'd also want to add an audio card.
Any tips are appreciated, this thread has inspired me to not simply get rid of this thing and to make something out of it.

A 75W GPU should work fine. I'm sure you can push to 100W without much issue. I used a GTX 1650 with the stock PSU without any issue. The only issue was the Xeon processor was the bottleneck, so I upgraded to a 4790K.

 

[canyadigit]

A 75W GPU should work fine. I'm sure you can push to 100W without much issue. I used a GTX 1650 with the stock PSU without any issue. The only issue was the Xeon processor was the bottleneck, so I upgraded to a 4790K.

Thank you for the reply. Did the GPU require any additional cooling or hack of the PCI port? Also is the CPU a simple swap?

 

[WeirdG]

Thank you for the reply. Did the GPU require any additional cooling or hack of the PCI port? Also is the CPU a simple swap?

No... I just made sure it was a two fan GPU with no power connector I believe. Refer to my post below.

**Dell PowerEdge T20 Mini Tower Server - Owner Thread**

, post: 31948401, member: 3370"]Yup, see my old post here It's not quite as easy as a straight swap unfortunately :( Here we go

forums.overclockers.co.uk

This is the video card I installed.

TUF-GTX1650-O4GD6-GAMING｜Graphics Cards｜ASUS Global

TUF Gaming graphics cards add hefty 3D horsepower to the TUF Gaming ecosystem, with features like Auto-Extreme manufacturing, steel backplates, high-tech fans, and IP5X certifications. And itâs all backed by a rigorous battery of validation tests to ensure compatibility with the latest TUF...

www.asus.com

You should also be able to upgrade the CPU to something like a 4790K and still use the stock fan or the fan that comes with the CPU.

Use a PSU calculator to determine your power requirements (it should give you a rough estimate). In the end, I only had a CPU, GPU, 2 sticks of memory, and a SATA SSD connected. I disconnected the optical drive and anything else that wasn't needed, because I didn't want to push the PSU. It's only a 290W PSU.

Power Supply Calculator - PSU Calculator | OuterVision

Power Supply Calculator - Select computer parts and our online PSU calculator will calculate the required power supply wattage and amperage for your PC.

outervision.com

 

[easyrider]

Has anyone managed to add a Thunderbolt card to the T20?
cheers

 

[AyeAyeAhoy!]

Has anyone managed to add a Thunderbolt card to the T20?
cheers

I could well be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the processor gets involved in TB, so no.

TB cards are never usually just plug in PCI-e expansions ,- they usually require mobos with specific TB headers

 

[Dandle]

Just a quick one. I've had to reinstall my host I've upgraded to ESXI 6.7 but as its no longer supported I cant get a license key for it. Is anyone running ESXI 7.0 or 8.0 on a T20 or are there compatibility issues?

 

[itsthejb]

Happy to have found this thread as a (still!) proud owner of this machine, which I got for an absolute bargain (~€250) in 2017

Xeon e3 1245 v3 4 cores 8 threads max turbo 3.80 GHz

Would you say this is objectively the highest power CPU that the machine will accept? Passmark is about 32% higher, so seems like it might be worth the hassle?

I just got back from failing to install a Broadwell v4 in the machine. Needless to say - not compatible! Hey, I'm a software guy, not so much a hardware guy!

 

[Silicon Si]

Happy to have found this thread as a (still!) proud owner of this machine, which I got for an absolute bargain (~€250) in 2017



Would you say this is objectively the highest power CPU that the machine will accept? Passmark is about 32% higher, so seems like it might be worth the hassle?

I just got back from failing to install a Broadwell v4 in the machine. Needless to say - not compatible! Hey, I'm a software guy, not so much a hardware guy!

It will take a e3 1275 v3 @ Turbo 3.90 GHz but they are more expensive I have used both there is no real world noticable speed differance between the two.

 

[Dandle]

Just a quick one. I've had to reinstall my host I've upgraded to ESXI 6.7 but as its no longer supported I cant get a license key for it. Is anyone running ESXI 7.0 or 8.0 on a T20 or are there compatibility issues?

just for info, I now have ESXI 7.0 running on the T20 with no issues.

 

[Armageus]

Would you say this is objectively the highest power CPU that the machine will accept? Passmark is about 32% higher, so seems like it might be worth the hassle?

In theory it should take any of the Haswell based E3-12xx v3 Processors

List of Intel Xeon processors (Haswell-based) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

models ending in 5 or 6 e.g. 1225/1245/1286 all have integrated graphics, whereas all the others do not and will require a separate PCI-E graphics card


As above though, there isn't a huge amount of difference between them (as all have the same amount of cache, and all have Hyperthreading except 1220 v3, 1225 v3 and 1226 v3, and only 600mhz difference between the slowest and quickest)- so just a case of searching out the best priced model

 

[Silicon Si]

I would add that the e3 1245 v3 is a big upgrade on the standard e3 1225 v3 you can get them second hand on a certain site for £40 or less i saw one today for around £20

 

[itsthejb]

Thanks for the input on that. I've actually put a GTX 1650 into mine, so in theory I don't even need integrated graphics anymore. However, I thought I might as well max out this thing, so I've gone for a E3-1275 v3, for about £50. Could've got a 1270 for half the price, but weeellll souping this thing up is kinda for fun and the amounts aren't huge. Might as well have the graphics in case it makes life easier in future.

 

[DJMK4]

Is the performance increase good from upgrading the processor ? I use mine for ESXI my VMs for labbing network environments

Is it a big jump from the E3 1225 v3 Xeon which I have installed to the 1275 ?

 

[Dandle]

I've just moved from a 1225 to a 1245 which gives me a slight speed bump and hyperthreading. I paid £20 for the 1245 and sold the 1226 for £7. I also a put a four port sata 3 PCIE card in which was £14 and works perfectly with ESXI and the VM's.

 

[itsthejb]

Is the performance increase good from upgrading the processor ? I use mine for ESXI my VMs for network labbing..

Is it a big jump from the E3 1225 v3 Xeon which I have installed to the 1275 ?

I'm actually current quite disappointed with the upgrade to the 1275. A fair bit of this is going off the stats on a comparative Geekbench https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/19813739?baseline=19545154

Anyone able to show that I'm wrong about the lacklustre change?

 

[Armageus]

Is the performance increase good from upgrading the processor ? I use mine for ESXI my VMs for network labbing..

Is it a big jump from the E3 1225 v3 Xeon which I have installed to the 1275 ?

As per my post above, other than the Non-Hyperthreaded parts (1220v3, 1225v3, 1226v3) there isn't a huge amount of performance difference between them. Therefore it's better to look at which part is the cheapest (1245v3 - £30 at the minute) rather than paying double for a 1275v3 that is a tiny amount quicker

I'm actually current quite disappointed with the upgrade to the 1275. A fair bit of this is going off the stats on a comparative Geekbench https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/19813739?baseline=19545154

Anyone able to show that I'm wrong about the lacklustre change?

Something very wrong with the multicore score on Geekbench there. Going from a 4 thread part to a 8 thread part shouldn't be slower.

Passmark is far more reflective:

Intel Xeon E3-1225 v3 @ 3.20GHz vs Intel Xeon E3-1275 v3 @ 3.50GHz vs Intel Xeon E3-1245 v3 @ 3.40GHz [cpubenchmark.net] by PassMark Software

 

[itsthejb]

As per my post above, other than the Non-Hyperthreaded parts (1220v3, 1225v3, 1226v3) there isn't a huge amount of performance difference between them. Therefore it's better to look at which part is the cheapest (1245v3 - £30 at the minute) rather than paying double for a 1275v3 that is a tiny amount quicker



Something very wrong with the multicore score on Geekbench there. Going from a 4 thread part to a 8 thread part shouldn't be slower.

Passmark is far more reflective:

Intel Xeon E3-1225 v3 @ 3.20GHz vs Intel Xeon E3-1275 v3 @ 3.50GHz vs Intel Xeon E3-1245 v3 @ 3.40GHz [cpubenchmark.net] by PassMark Software

Thanks for the input, yeah! No doubt the 1245 is better value, yeah. I believe my logic there was "might as well max it", considering the difference isn't a huge amount of overall cash. Although I've currently got a v4 I can't use ‍. Anyway, doing this majority for fun and experience

 

[itsthejb]

Hmmm this is getting interesting. I decided to download the Passmark trial to see what values I got. The results are significantly under the archived stats:

Intel Xeon CPU E3-1275 v3 @ 3.50GHz (x86_64)
4 cores @ 3900 MHz  |  31.3 GiB RAM
Number of Processes: 4  |  Test Iterations: 1  |  Test Duration: Medium
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
CPU Mark:                          5222
  Integer Math                     15371 Million Operations/s
  Floating Point Math              10893 Million Operations/s
  Prime Numbers                    35.1 Million Primes/s
  Sorting                          11203 Thousand Strings/s
  Encryption                       1285 MB/s
  Compression                      75714 KB/s
  CPU Single Threaded              2345 Million Operations/s
  Physics                          569 Frames/s
  Extended Instructions (SSE)      4477 Million Matrices/s

Memory Mark:                       1802
  Database Operations              2719 Thousand Operations/s
  Memory Read Cached               27757 MB/s
  Memory Read Uncached             13673 MB/s
  Memory Write                     9550 MB/s
  Available RAM                    2069 Megabytes
  Memory Latency                   48 Nanoseconds
  Memory Threaded                  20320 MB/s
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

PassMark Software - Display Baseline ID# 5030329

www.passmark.com

So I got 5222 on the CPU mark, whereas I should be getting in the 7000s according to https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E3-1275+v3+@+3.50GHz&id=1979

What could this mean? Something in BIOS settings I need to change? Or might I have a dud/fake, even??

 

[Armageus]

PassMark Software - Display Baseline ID# 5030329

www.passmark.com

From your own link:

Baseline has been excluded from average results due to anomalies in the submitted results. [Num CPU Processes - Tested: 4, Expected: 8]

Sounds like HT Technology is turned off in the BIOS - this would limit it to 4 processes rather than 8 and would make it score basically the same as an E3-1225v3