Gibson Upgrade Chronicles – Part 1
The time has come to upgrade the Gibson, for two main reasons. I’m running out of resources for the projects I’m trying to simulate, and the Broadwell CPUs in my existing hardware will be deprecated with VCF 9, which is on the horizon. There’s going to be a lot of labbing and learning required when VCF 9 drops, so I’ll need to be ready.
I’ve had a great experience with refurb/ex-corp DellEMC servers, so I’ve landed on the R640 platform. Most of the R640s found on eBay come with the Skylake 51xx/61xx series of CPUs which are slated for deprecation, but these boxes will take a Cascade Lake 62xx series so with a couple of AliExpress upgrades I should be able to build a beast at an affordable price.
Some alternative options for others that might be looking at a homelab are the DellEMC R740 but these were pricier than the R640s at the time of writing. In the workstation space you can get a quieter machine such as a Dell Precision 7920 or Lenovo P920 but these were quite a bit more expensive than an R640. There’s also Proliant DL options from HPE but I tend to avoid these as HPE lock their BIOS updates behind a paywall which requires a maintenance contract.
Since I’ll be replacing the CPUs anyway, I’m looking for the cheapest R640s on ebay, ideally with a decent amount of RAM already included. I found a couple of single socket boxes with 128GB RAM for $850 AUD.
The DellEMC R640 Technical Guide details the supported CPUs, here’s a list of the supported CPUs with a $/core, $/GHz and TDP stats. Based on this, the Gold 6262V processor looks like it’ll give the best bang for buck with 24 cores, plus it’s only 135W so I’m hoping this won’t impact the noise levels too much – higher TDP = more heat output = server fans making a racket.
So here’s my BOM:
| Description | Price AUD |
| 2x Dell R640 – Single Socket Xeon Silver 4114 / 128GB RAM / No Disks | $1,700 |
| 4x Intel Xeon Gold 6262V (AliExpress) | $600 |
| 2x 128GB DDR4 2666 Upgrade Kits – 4x32GB (eBay) | $470 |
| 2x 2 Port 25Gbit rNDC NIC (eBay) | $60 |
| 4x SFP28 DAC Cables (eBay) | $130 |
| 2x Arctic MX-6 Thermal Paste (eBay) | $30 |
| TOTAL | $2990 ($1495/server) |
This upgrade will bring the Gibson from 56 cores up to 96, a pretty significant uplift. Single threaded performance will be about the same due to the low clock speed (1.9GHz), but for nested VCF the more cores you can throw at it the better.
Stay tuned for part 2 – the build.