Is this good spec for a new server

[BongoHunter]

Been offered the following and not sure if I should take it or not, spec below;

32 GB ECC (4 x 8GB 2400mhz)
Xeon E3-1220v6
Asrock rack motherboard (unknown model)
4 x 250GB Intel SSD (unknown model)
Season Focus 400w Gold PSU
Noctua low profile cooler

All parts are new, comes with a 2 year warranty

Comes in a generic 4u tower sever chassis for £800

Looking around at what I can buy new from Dell or HP this seems like a good deal?

What say you? Good deal, or can I do better? Looking for something to run K8s in a Dev environment

Many thanks

 

[BongoHunter]

It seems like an excellent deal, especially if it is nice and quiet. Who is selling? Someone you know and/or trust?

Yeah someone I trust, have purchased a lot of stuff from them at work over the years, first time buying something for myself rather than an employer from this seller, but shouldn't make any difference I don't think.

 

[BongoHunter]

Decided that system in the OP was a little bit rich for me in the end and have the following on the way instead

Ryzen 1700 (£140)
Asrock B450 Pro 4 (£75)
32 GB of Kingston ECC (£280)
Crucial P1 NVME M2 500gb (£70)

Will combine with some stuff sitting in my office:

Corsair 230T (used)
Season 550w Focus Gold PSU (new)
Zotac GT 710 PCIEx1 GFX card (new)
Intel dual port NIC (used)

Will add a couple of Intel enterprise SATA drives if needed, but planning on using my NAS if any additional storage needed as long as performance isn't awful.

Costs will be a little less than the system in the OP, but figured that 8 core 16 thread CPU would offer a fair bit more power (double the cores and quadruple the threads), and the NVME drive should help increase disk IO quite a lot.

Not fussed if ECC doesn't work, but found plenty of posts online suggesting it should (so fingers crossed).

Edit: spelling

 

[BongoHunter]

Again, still no mention of what the intended workload is? Given you’ve focused on core count and RAM i’m guessing virtualisation may be a priority?

If so, the Intel i350 is more virtualisation friendly. P1 = Intel 660p in disguise, sometimes the price difference is favourable one way or another. Personally i’d pay the extra and go with a 970 EVO/970 EVO Plus/WD Black, it’s only going to be circa £20ish more at the same capacity, or if you do want the P1/660p then £20 over the Samsung gets you 1TB.

Will be running Kubernetes (aka K8s as per OP), so yes virtualization the use case.

I couldn't find any 970 Evos in 500gb for less than £110, but I guess if the performance is not upto scratch with the P1 I can always get another drive in a couple of months (would love an Intel 900p/905p but quite expensive at the moment).

 

[BongoHunter]

Looks good, the only thing that looks off is that the number of cores and amound of ram don't sync up too well, but as others have said, it depends on what youre trying to do with it.

Decided not to go for it in the end as I had similar concern about the core count for virtualization.

Ended getting a Ryzen 1700 with 32GB of ram and very happy with it, performance is excellent and feels like better value than the E3 Xeon

 

[BongoHunter]

All the bits finally arrived, spec for the moment is:

Ryzen 1700
Asrock B450 Pro 4
32gb (4x8gb) Kingston ECC
Crucial P1 NVME M2 500gb
Intel Optane 900p 280gb
Samsung 840 Pro 120gb
2xWD Enterprise 1TB HDD
Corsair 230T
Seasonic 550w Focus Gold PSU
Zotac GT 710 PCIEx1 GFX card

Storage wise I'm going to use the 840 Pro for OS / boot and then the rest of the drives for some kind of tiered storage setup, which should result in disk intensive stuff ending up on the 900p, the Crucial P1 acting as a lower tier.

Will use the HDDs in raid for snapshots, disk images and artifact storage etc.

Need to find a new NIC, as the Intel one I was planning on using has some issues with one of the ports when I was testing it - so will be limited to the motherboard NIC for the time being.