Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Colocation and Data Centers : Need comment on Dell PowerEdge SC1420 server

[jt2377]

they have PowerEdge SC1420 server for only $499 with free shipping.

i like the spec. Intel Xeon 2.8ghz, 512mb DDR2, 80gb SATA. is this a fair price for it? how's Dell's server? i like to buy it to dual boot Win2003 and CentOS.

does Dell server have any problem with CentOS?

[Eiv]

Wow, nice price. Does anyone know how many of those can you fit into a 42U cabinet?

[David]

Where do they have that price? :b

[Vortex-Steve]

Can't find that price anywhere, did you get a special offer?

[qps]

Go under small business. It's the promotion on the front page. It's only a single Xeon, though.

We have quite a few of them and they are high quality. You can't go wrong.

[Vortex-Steve]

Oh right, I got it confused with the SC1425 which you won't find for $499!

[jt2377]

Originally posted by Vortex-Steve
Oh right, I got it confused with the SC1425 which you won't find for $499!

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellsto...1420sapp&s=bsd

the price is not bad even for a single Xeon. it can also make a beefy game machine if it come with AGP or PCIe port.

does anyone know if it come with AGP or PCIe port?

[jt2377]

Originally posted by QuickPacket
Go under small business. It's the promotion on the front page. It's only a single Xeon, though.

We have quite a few of them and they are high quality. You can't go wrong.

do you know who's memory chip they use and if it come with AGP or PCIe port? where can i score another 512mb DDR2 to bump the total ram up to 1gb? their price to bump up the ram is a bit expensive.

[Jay Suds]

It's only an extra $100 to go to 1GB of ram, which is very very resonable for an additional 512MB of DDR2 Reg ECC, in fact it's below cost.

[DoubleD]

Its $100 due to the double ram promotion, adding another 1GB for 2GB total is +$600. It would be way cheaper to add the 2nd GIG from Crucial.

But that is one hella deal. $988 for Dual Xeon 2.8 1GB 80GB SATA

I might get one for my desktop if its PCIe capable.

[lockbull]

I got one of these around Christmas to use at home. Overall it's a nice box at a very good price, but there are a few idiosyncracies. I don't really need a high end graphics board, but it's obvious Dell did some things to this machine to cripple it for gaming/workstation usage. It's not hard to see why if you go price a similarly configured high end Dimension or Precision workstation--this machine offers more power for less money.

There is no AGP slot, and the PCI-Express slot is oddly configured. Basically the main PCI-E slot is a 16x length slot with pins for a 8x, and it has a plastic divider in the middle so only 8x boards fit. What this means is that you can't use any PCI-E graphics board (which are all 16x length) without modding the slot and removing the divider. You can find forum discussions on this topic if you search Google. Apparently the newer SC1420 machines have two plastic dividers, making it even more difficult to mod. So unless you mod the PCI-Express slot, you're stuck using an outdated PCI video card. I don't play games or do any heavy graphics/AV work, so that works out fine for me.

[jt2377]

Originally posted by Jay Suds
It's only an extra $100 to go to 1GB of ram, which is very very resonable for an additional 512MB of DDR2 Reg ECC, in fact it's below cost.

are we looking at the same configure? it stated $300

[jt2377]

Originally posted by lockbull
I got one of these around Christmas to use at home. Overall it's a nice box at a very good price, but there are a few idiosyncracies. I don't really need a high end graphics board, but it's obvious Dell did some things to this machine to cripple it for gaming/workstation usage. It's not hard to see why if you go price a similarly configured high end Dimension or Precision workstation--this machine offers more power for less money.

There is no AGP slot, and the PCI-Express slot is oddly configured. Basically the main PCI-E slot is a 16x length slot with pins for a 8x, and it has a plastic divider in the middle so only 8x boards fit. What this means is that you can't use any PCI-E graphics board (which are all 16x length) without modding the slot and removing the divider. You can find forum discussions on this topic if you search Google. Apparently the newer SC1420 machines have two plastic dividers, making it even more difficult to mod. So unless you mod the PCI-Express slot, you're stuck using an outdated PCI video card. I don't play games or do any heavy graphics/AV work, so that works out fine for me.

kool. thank for the info. is it possible for you to attach a pic of the motherboard? i want to know the layout of motherboard.

[Eiv]

I never brought a Dell server before. Are you allow to add aditionall CPU, ram and hdd yourself. They addon is rather expensive.

[(Stephen)]

The Dell 1420 is a nice unit, technically you can add the items yourself.

CPU can be purchased from online souces for $100-$150 less than dell charges for an additional, but teh heatsink on the dell isa different size. You might be able to just change the retention brackets and move on.

RAM is DDRII (not the ddr 2, not standard DDR) Registered ECC, and the motherboard requires that. And the Dell hard drives currently are Seagate Cheetah 7200 RPM SATA's, not bad at all, but for the prices they charge you can get a WD Raptor or 16MB cache Maxtor drive.
The board has a SATA softRAID Adaptec CERC 2s chip built in, it works fine with windows, but not linux (you can use linux soft raid), you can also purchase a true RAID card from Dell.

I am uploading a gallery of photos with comments in the photos, it will be up shortly.