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A new arrival

Recently my Homelab got one big new upgrade - consisting of an nVidia RTX A2000 (6GB) and an Intel Core I7-7800X. Why such an upgrade though? Why the move away from a stable Enterprise platform to HEDT?


Background

I love hosting my own game servers, folding@home and need Active Directory. So let's save power and run all that on one machine.

Before the upgrade I used my very first server plattform for this. An odd chinese "X99" Board with some 6 core Broadwell Xeon, 32GB of ECC DDR4 memory and an nVidia GT 710 as a pixel picasso. It worked fine for Windows Server 2025 and some lighter game servers (even those struggled at times), but that was about it.



An image during the upgrade

The Upgrade

Soooo I needed something that was affordable, with ideally many PCIe Lanes, that has relatively high single core performance and ideally an upgrade path.

So I remembered something from when I started getting into the joy of Computers: The legendary Intel I9-9980XE

It uses the Intel X299 platform, with most of the CPUs for it being Skylake or Skylake-derivative based. I started looking and the powers that be blessed me with a cheap bundle consisting of the following:

Of course, 2 sticks of RAM on a Quad-Channel platform is less than ideal, so I started looking in my stash. I found another kit. With the exact same part number.

So I decided to use both for a total of 4x8gb DDR4 2666MT. (Sadly memory training fails sometimes at that speed so I went down to 2400MT, still decently fast though)

The last piece that is missing from this "Infinity Gauntlet" of a Server is a proper Graphics Processing Unit expansion card to run folding@home on. So I went with a used nVidia RTX A2000 6GB (Jesus Christ, get a proper naming scheme like the old "Quadro" one ffs), which I got for half the price of a new one.

Unboxing it from the PNY B2B/System Integrator packaging was quite the experience, significantly simpler and more environmentally friendly than your average Gaming GPU, also comes with no frills or goodies.

End Result

Well, here it is: The final configuration.