Case for EE-ATX SuperMicro mobo? Excessive PSU?

[btrcp2000]

So I think I painted myself into a corner by not understanding the fine print, and ordered a used SuperMicro X9DRi-4LNF+. It needs an EE-ATX format case, which appears to be an SM proprietary thing. Let know if I'm wrong, but not the end of the world.

Assuming I'm correct, I have located a used SM case that would solve other issues, not too spendy. It has 2 1200 watt PSUs though, and I can't imagine needing all that from one let alone 2 (would probably sell the second). Am I wasting power if I plug in a 1200 watt PSU that only pulls 600-700?

Intent is to run Sage, several other dockers, and at least 2 windows VMs (one for sage driver passthru, one for daily usage), would like to have plenty of capacity as I learn about other things I can do with it. Here's how things are shaping up otherwise in addition to the board:

2x Xeon e-2660 v2, 32 GB ECC RAM
SSD for boot, maybe 5 HDDs incl storage and parity
Sage needs to run Gemstone and an increasing number of mini-clients (currently 4 HD100-200-300 and 2 miboxes)

[EnterNoEscape]

SuperMicro power supplies are usually better than 90% efficient, and half of the maximum output is usually the sweet spot for optimal efficiency, so you likely will not be wasting electricity. The power supplies should also last longer than if you spec'd them to exactly what you need.

[wayner]

I can't imagine that you will even be pulling 300W as your CPUs have a TDP of 95W. So two of those gets you to 190. Allowing for 10W for each HDD adds another 50W - plus maybe another 50W for the Mobo. That gets you to 290W. Maybe memory and SSD will use another 10W to get you to 300W. But I don't think having the 1200W PSes will be an issue but I think they do work more efficiently around 50% as ENE mentioned.

You don't explicitly mention unRAID but you do mention Dockers so I assume that you are using SageTV for unRAID Linux? If so that is a good idea given lots of clients. With a 64bit Linux OS you can use more than 1GB for the Java heap size - I would suggest 2GB in your instance. I have tried running about a dozen miniclients simultaneously and never used more than about 2GB. IMHO this is the biggest advantage for Linux over Windows as with Windows SageTV only use 32bit Java which means the 1GB limitation on JVM heap size.

You might want to run Ubuntu (or another Linux variant) in another VM if you think you may want to play around with Linux and it can be useful for other stuff, like hosting web pages.

[btrcp2000]

Yep, this is all about unraid. I needed a h/w refresh anyway as the current setup is 8+ years old. I concluded it didn't make any sense to put any $$ in a 32 bit system. 64-bit requires new CPU, which requires a new mobo/RAM, etc etc.

I have goofed around with linux before, mostly just installing on my kids chromebooks so they could play minecraft, but this will be my first unRaid build.

[BobPhoenix]

Chances are the PSUs are redundant - as in if one fails the other will take over. You might find it hard to replace them. The opening for them may be proprietary as well and a standard supply may not fit and mount.

[btrcp2000]

never thought about redundancy. Hoping it can run on only one, but they are definitely non-standard. Otherwise I am unintentionally building the most failproof vcr ever conceived.

Oh well, I already clicked and paid, so we will find out next week!

[BobPhoenix]

Note even if the mount for the PSUs are proprietary you can just have the PSU loose in the case if you choose to go with standard ATX supply. There may also be a mounting bracket for a standard supply that SuperMicro could send you if you request/purchase from them. The redundant supplies are usually half height of the regular supplies and are hot swappable. So if one dies and the other takes over you can just pull the bad one and replace it without turning the server off.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by wayner

You might want to run Ubuntu (or another Linux variant) in another VM if you think you may want to play around with Linux and it can be useful for other stuff, like hosting web pages.

There are a number of apache and nginx web server docker templates. No need to run a VM just for serving web pages.

[wayner]

I guess not but I have a bunch of scripts that I run via hitting web pages and I could never figure out how to do the configuration, etc to make python scripts run through the dockers.