# hostname sleipner

A relatively cheap but high quality server-class machine with 64GB of RAM in a small enclosure. Reasonably quiet and cool, only 58W when idling.

• Motherboard: Supermicro H8SCM-F (µATX form factor) — C32 socket, 6xSATA, 1xPATA, 7xUSB (2.0 only), 2xGigabit-ethernet, IPMI, 1xDSUB. No audio.
• CPU: Opteron 4284 "Valencia" — Eight 3.0GHz cores (but only 4 floating-point units), 4x64kB shared L1 instruction caches, 8x16kB L2 data caches, 4x2MB shared L2 caches, and one shared 8MB L3 cache. Thermal design 95W.
• RAM: 4x 16GB Samsung registered ECC (M393B2G70BH0-YK0, rated 1600MHz but running at 1066MHz).
• Cooler: Noctua NH-U9DO. This is a necessary component since the Opteron comes without heatsink and fan. It's a huge monster, weighing more than half a kilogram, and the flesh-colored plastic fan only makes its appearance more scary. And installing it was almost like an IKEA experience. But it is quite effective. To be on the safe side, I used a piece of hemp string to anchor the top of this thing to the chassis. Don't want the CPU socket to get ripped out of the motherboard when I move the box around...
• Case: Supermicro SC731i, bundled with a 300W power supply. Easy installation, easy access. Dimensions: 36.2cm x 18.4cm x 42.5cm.
• Disk: 2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.14, 2TB (ST2000DM001) and a 60GB Intel SSD 520.
• Optical drive: Samsung SH-S203B. SATA. Not sure if I needed this, but the 5.25" bay looked so empty :-)
• Extra graphics: PowerColor Radeon HD5450. I got this card mainly to see how it would perform, in case something slightly better than the onboard VGA was needed. However it adds about 13W of power consumption even when idling, i.e. 71W idle power instead of 58W.

BIOS settings: I changed the SATA type from "Native IDE" to "AHCI", and "SATA IDE Combined Mode" to "Disable". Booting from the SSD device didn't work before I changed these. There is no IDE device in the box, so I don't really care which one of these settings was the culprit.

Important security note: By default, IPMI is enabled and bridged to a connected LAN port if the dedicated IPMI port is not connected. It automatically configures an adress and a gateway via DHCP. So unless the machine is firewalled or NAT'ed, anyone on the Internet has full access to IPMI by logging in with the default credentials ADMIN/ADMIN. In such a situation you have to pull the power plug or change the password to be safe.

The motherboard is also available without IPMI, so why get the IPMI version for a desktop build? Two reasons: it's more convenient if you decide to use it as a headless server, and you get much better sensor monitoring via IPMI than through e.g. lm-sensors.