Modernize a 10 year old server into a high performance video editing/HTPC workstation

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• published: 08 May 2016
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homestudio9k.com/headline-news Dell PE SC440 was popular 10 years ago, and you will be surprised that it still works smoothly after being upgraded. I bought several brandnew Dell PowerEdge SC440 entry level servers when it was discounted by Dell online shop. I immediately upgraded them after purchasing during year 2009. Most of them had Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 4 g ECC RAM, two 7200 rpm WD hard drives. They were good in their days. Now they seemed a little bit outdated. So I decided to modernize them. PE SC440 has a very solid mid tower case, the PSU is not bad, and the server has 5 expansion slots, 1 PCIE 8X, 1 PCIE 4X, 1PCIE 1X, 2 PCI. I decided to treat my SC440s like barebone systems, to change CPUs, to expand RAMs, to add SSD internal hard drives, and to add graphic cards. PE SC440 motherboard has single 775 socket. After some online research, I found out that Intel Core 2 Quad 6700 can be recognized by this motherboard. Core 2 Quad 6700 has 4 cores with a CPU passmark of about 3000, which is pretty usable in many scenarios. You can buy used or reburbished Core 2 Quad 6700 for 40-80 dollars at early 2016. I bought mine here: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 Quad-Core Processor, 2.66 GHz, 8M L2 Cache, 1066MHz FSB, LGA775. I then increased the RAM from 4GB to 8GB. It is important to have dual rank ECC unbuffered RAM. Otherwise the RAM will not be recognized by the motherboard. A set of 8GB ECC unbuffered dual rank RAM costs about 80 dollars at early 2016. I bought mine here: 8GB KIT (4 x 2GB) For Dell PowerEdge Series 6950 (ECC Unbuffered) 830 840 850 860 R200 T100 T105. DIMM DDR2 ECC Unbuffered PC2-5300 667MHz Dual Rank RAM Memory. Genuine A-Tech Brand. SC440's motherboard has 4 SATA I port onboard. In order to take advantage of fast SSD internal hard drives, I decided to add an adapter on its PCIE 4X slot, so that two SATA III ports are available for internal SSD drives. You can then connect your SSD drives to the SATA port on this card using SATA cables. I bought my expansion card here: SYBA Combo USB 3.0 + SATA III 6Gbps, v2.0 PCI Express, x4 Slot Controller Card Model SD-PEX50055. SC440's PCIE 8X slot has the 16x physical length, but there are small blocks inside the slot. You either need to saw the block off, or like what I did, buy a 8X video card. I found out that this 2GB GT720 card is the best available graphic card for a 8X slot: EVGA GeForce GT 720 DirectX 12 02G-P3-2724-KR 2GB 64-Bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x 8 Video Card. The abovementioned video card blocks the PCIE 1X slot on SC440's motherboard, so I have only two PCI slots left. To fullfil these two PCI slots, I either added a sound card or a USB card like this: Rosewill RC-103 - 4 + 1 USB 2.0 PCI Adapter (Four External + One Internal Ports). One of my SC440 had a bad CPU fan. Since Dell has a proprietary fan connector, I bought this adapter to connect a standard quiet PWM fan on SC440's motherboard: PWM cable adapter, PWM connector converts to Dell proprietary 5 pin 4 wires fan connector, black sleeved, 9.8 inches long, ship from Los Angeles. Now my SC440 is totally modernized. I will write in a following up post on how I install ubuntu studio and xbmc/kodi on it to turn a SC440 into a high-performing HTPC. I was really surprised at how smoothly xbmc runs on this 10-year old entry-level server, which is a great leap forward comparing to my previous experience on a raspberry pi 2 based openelec media server. The advantage of this upgrading route versus building a new PC: 1. It is fun to explore and learn from this upgrading process; 2. It is still cheaper than building a new one starting from scratch; 3. The BIOS has some interesting and useful server features, like: wake-on-lan, etc. The drawback is the relative high idle power consumption (about 40 watts) due to the 45nm CPU processing technology of Core 2 Quad 6700. I will write later on how to smart manage power consumption with simple coding.