THIS PC IS CURSED! - HPE Z6 G4 and Xeon 8251C!
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- Опубліковано 14 жов 2024
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What do you get when you buy a barebone HPE Z6 G4 Workstation, an undocumented Intel Xeon Platinum 8251C, and 192GB of HPE-branded DDR4 REG-ECC. In my case, it was just a box I could toss money into. I should have bought a boat...
But first... What am I drinking??? I can't remember, but it was a lot.
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HPE Z6 G4 Workstation: ebay.us/uCazRi
Intel Xeon Platinum 8251C: Unavailable
HPE 32GB DDR4 REG-ECC 2666: ebay.us/Y2plWb (Compatible part number from HPE Manual)
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I'm sorry to say this but I did enjoy this. Not everything has to have a happy ending, not everything works the intended way on the first try, that's just life. I learned once again about the sunk cost fallacy, and we as viewers get content, which also works for Jeff. So, silver lining? Maybe? Thank you for making a video about this Jeff, and not scrapping the idea altogether. I'm sure the motives are not all altruistic as you get paid by UA-cam, but I thank you anyway
Hey! I own this workstation! Got excited when i saw the title since there arent many videos featuring it. My CPU is a Xeon Silver 4116 and it works great with 32 gb of RAM and a Quadro P5000 for productivity stuffs. Also, theres a power button in the back, so technically you don´t need the front i/o card to power up the unit.
I forgot about the rear power button! And I use it pretty much every month :D
These are the videos we do like bro. We have all had these computing moments, it's all part of the hussle, Cheers, keep that chin up
Jeff, I love this kind of video. All of us knocking around in the basement have been there and it’s a little reassuring to know we’re not alone. Please keep making these so we can suffer together! 😂
I'm surprised HP didn't use Torx screws to hold the CPU socket cover on.
How about proprietary screw type, with screwdriver head in the shape of an H and P
@@crispycrusader1 LOL!! 😂😂👍👍
@@crispycrusader1 shhh, don't give them ideas?
Actually I would appreciate the use of torx screws as standard pc screws.
@@vollhorst140 Torx FTW! I don't get the Torx hate.
... well ok I did have one Torx screw from a laptop that was already stripped hard, and getting it out was a massive ordeal. But that single experience doesn't make it worse than the dreaded experience of having to deal with Philips screws every day.
A mechanical pencil with a metal barrel works great for straightening pins. You'd want to have several sizes, but it's a great thing to have in your PC Maintenance Kit
That doesn't work so well with denser pin counts.
I used a pair of tweezers for an lga 1155 socket. I only used one side basically as a teeny pick. It's been going strong for 8 years. I don't know if this socket has denser pins though.
The pins on a lga socket are not the same as the pga pins on a cpu so the mech pencil only works with pga
I miss the old days, where Intel boxed CPUs came with a rake. You could straighten pins with those and a small flathead screwdriver and some fine point needle nose pliers.
I use a dental pick and a microscope
The double intro as everything started to go wrong was brilliant. I'm dying in my office. Your pain is our gain, good sir!
This is why I always look for Supermicro. Dealing with proprietary Dell and HP parts is just always a pain.
I'm a Supermicro fanboy, however, they do have their own proprietary crap to deal with as well. It's just a fraction of what Dell/HP/etc have. PSU's, drive trays, fans, etc are all proprietary with Supermicro. They're just not douchebags about things like motherboard form factors. It's hard to complain about their PSU's though since they've been the same for over a decade now and are basically cross compatible with all of their chassis.
@@jlficken I beg to differ. I'm a 4P wierdo, and they most definitely use odd form factors to guarantee usage in only supermicro cases. Ask me how I know lol.
@@shadowflash8519 Supermicro does use proprietary form factors in some of their systems but they're open about it and the proprietary motherboards can usually be used in different types and generations of case.
@@shadowflash8519 You are correct that they do have some proprietary MB designs for their multiple node chassis as well as some other chassis where they flip the PCIe slots horizontally. I should have mentioned that...my bad!
Happily, the chassis that most people will use for a home lab and/or data hoarding such as the 216, 826, 836, 846, and 847 happily use standard motherboard sizes.
I currently have 2x846, 3x836, and 4x216 chassis at home. I'm going to be adding 2 dedicated 20A circuits to my office this winter so I can actually have them all running at the same time
😂
@@jlficken even with their few proprietary motherboards and systems, they make parts readily available for not too much on their e-store.
Jeff when server arrives busted: "Welcome back to Craft Computing as always Iiiiiiiiiimm pissed."
This why I rarely buy HP equipment. For those that like and understand them, great but they're very different from what the rest of us are used to.
Yeah they are a pain to work with even in the best case senario, if you plan on using just the motherboard out of HP / Dell system or upgrading any parts be ready to rewiring a lot of connectors and/or use many adapters.
Though in some cases it can be worth the headache for a dirt cheap high performance system if you know what you're doing, I put together a solid budget gaming rig for my nephew for ~$200 with an i7-4790k and a GTX-970. Only thing I really had to do different was use an adapter for the 24pin on the PSU, and adding a regular ATX PSU also solved a few of the other proprietary headaches in addition to powering the 970. But you really have to know what exactly you're dealing with beforehand if you don't want to end up with a pile of scrap.
HP, Dell, pretty much every OEM has stuff like this in their lineup.
Got some older dell precisions that have the flipped wiring for the 24 pin, negating the use of any off the shelf PSU, plus a proprietary wiring harness with a bunch of weird stuff coming off it that doesn't exist on any other PSU.
The newer ones use 'common slot' PSUs, and a few different power distribution boards depending on model and options.
Not going to get into the nightmare that wiring harness is.
The worst is the side panel's add in card retaining assembly. Forget using a gpu that's not full length with a vertical power plug, such as the p106-100 i happen to own.
All OEMs now make that kind of bs where everything is non-standard and not documented and in many times not interoperable between their own product lines. Gotta ensure they go straight to the landfill once the support contract ends so everyone buys new product, you know
Agreed the HP consumer lineup is a pain but their workstation offering are excellent in their value and quality. But this new case does appear to be a pain, lol! And their memory game is pure BS!
if you start tinkering with enterprise grade hardware, you will sometimes be surprised… and stop buying before reading all specs, delivered parts, measures etc - but if you know what you do, you will save so much money and have fun.
Many headers can be rewired (well not as craft did hehe) or just buy cheap adapters do it, yaddi yaddi yah :)
Often thousands of Workstations go to surplus year by year as they are sometimes just one year used, but you have to think before buying. Jeff did many mistakes for entertaining purposes hehe.
Cheers, Pepe
Oh my god dude that sucks! But thank you for sharing it. Even if we didn't end up with a cool machine we did get a cool video with a very good learning experience for everyone involved.
Surprised you weren't just swigging straight from the whisky bottle by the end!! Kudos for sticking with it that far!
You don't know what was in that coffee mug
If it all can't be returned, I'd definitely cover shipping to have it. I love doing board-level repairs on things like this
As someone looking to buy/built a Z6 G4 this video gives great insight at the potential issues. I had no idea ebay sellers don't include the ON switch in barebone workstations.
Looks like you need an old priest and a young priest.
I should have caught on when the repair manual was written in Latin.
the proprietary power compels you! the proprietary power compels you!
Oprietarypay emorymay!
Send it to Hops and Brews.
Exciting! I've been wondering what's the next platform to look at beyond X99 Haswell / Broadwell gear! EDIT: Looks like I'm sticking to my Z440 for a bit longer 😅
Yeah, either Z440 or 1st/2nd Gen Ryzen seems to be the ticket still :-)
The frustration with this build is palpable. Sorry for your luck, Jeff. You made the right call. It's best to walk away instead of throwing more money at it.
You’d be surprised the memory pickeyness, especially with DDR4. I had a full set of working Cisco memory in a Cisco b200 m4 all OEM, pulled it out and put it into a gigabyte server, flagged a dead dimm, Cisco servers said they are all perfect after returning the dimms to Cisco…
the thing with lga 2011v3 is that it had *such* a range of qualities of silicon, with suh a range of core counts and clock speeds, that there are still some really powerful options for it floating around, waiting to depreciate in price. Dont count that platform out quite yet
Hey im glad you made this video, now we can see the actual pitfalls of trying this on your own. I think we've all done this at some point. HP sucks....hell, ill take it. What's the shipping to Baltimore?!
Ps I'm gonna sub on patron, keep em coming!
Be glad you didn't try the DIY power button solution. At least with the HP workstations I've worked on.... it knows if you aren't using the proprietary panel and won't POST if it's missing (it gave me an error and would just reboot and get the error again if I pressed the button to ignore it). There's a reason HP workstations are so cheap on the used market, it never ends up being worth it.
straight to the landfill
theres a power button on all the g4 series hp boards also I have my Z6 working in a Mac pro tower using a modded power header
Your perseverance is remarkable. Love you showing the pitfalls of building a system like this using proprietary components. I’ll trade you beer for the computer and then no shipping since I’m local 🎉😅
I did a CPU upgrade for a Cisco Hyperflex cluster of four nodes and on one of the sockets a few pins got bent due to the mounting system being strange and slightly off. Now the cluster could have been fine with two nodes down, but it wasn’t, due to some Cisco crap with their software.
Long story short, two of the eight CPUs were DOA, and we didn’t find this out until the motherboard was replaced.
The pins weren’t too bad until my boss learned over to look and got a microfiber cloth tangled in the damaged socket…
We managed to get three nodes online after some more swapping with the Cisco tech and it was another week until the fourth node was online.
The whole thing was stupid due to many layers of poorly considered configuration and design. I still recommend the vast majority of customers get a SAN and used VMWare clusters due to how awful the experience with hypercpnverged can be. They just aren’t as tolerant of failures as a traditional setup.
I'm sorry to see all the trouble you've had, we have these at work and the z8. When they work they are great. Hope you're able to get it working.
The problem is 8251C is a 240W TDP processor and Z6 g4 MB supports up to 205W TDP as most LGA 3647 motherboards. Also TDA is different. Which means the whole setup was destined to fail. Probably everything could work if you used a standard CPU. ASRock has MBs that are compatible with that propriety intel CPU like EPC621D8A, EPC621,EP2C621, and Gigabyte with MU71,MD71.
But he used a low spec Xeon Silver near the end with the same no boot. I don't understand why he wanted to buy another cpu when it is unlikely to be the problem.
I have the HP Z8 Skylake Xeon, big brother to G6 and I got super excited when I saw the video title, since these weird Cascade Lake Xeons show up all the time on Ebay for cheap. I think it ultimately wouldn't work though, because the 240W TDP is too high
I got lucky and upgraded to a 6248 for about 120$ on a Z6 G4, well worth it both in terms of IPC and if you'd like to play with Optane persistent memory and that kind of stuff
Glad you made this video. because after seeing this I won't be touching one of these systems from HP in anything but complete working order. It reallly is a good case study on how system builders cost more in the long run, even IF they are good value up front, which often they just are not.
Sorry about your loss. Thanks for sharing.
Don't give up on it yet, this sounds like a fun video series in the making lol
Though seriously very entertaining video the only thing missing is the smoke test that actually had smoke
Keep it up!
This is exactly the kind of video I wanted to see. Keep it up Jeff.
As i remember xeons have memory controller inside the processor. Because of this memory issues can be caused by memory slots, memory sticks AND issues with processor and it's socket.
Holy crap what a build that was great video Jeff!!
Actually liked this video. You showed what it's like for the rest of us go through People who aren't UA-cam famous, who don't get free GPUs/CPUs/MoBos from sponsors, who have to scrounge from friends or ebay to get parts to build a PC.
It’s possible that’s just a short in that corner of the CPU. From my experience sanding through CPU’s there’s generally no routing that far out, so you could probably file the corner off and have a working CPU.
Nice addition of the Tek Syndicate pint glass! I miss their channel circa 2016 before all the drama
I have old HP gear from before the turn of the millennium and it is exquisite - full schematics. I wonder what reason HP engineers will give for their proprietary nonsense as of late. This video was no failure - it just reminded me (and others, I suspect) to avoid proprietary gear.
it's not an engineer decision, and it's to push their support contracts so when something breaks they can come with one of their weird and wondrous proprietary spare part
Got a sledgehammer? Got a driveway? Percussive Stress Relief
This is so representative of what I'm going through right now. Got a second Supermicro 836 case that was set up as a JBOD with an EL2 backplane. First, got my SQ power supplies...saw a newer 1.2k watt model the seller said was compatible. Nope. This is where I learned Supermicro has two different size edge connectors for the same format RPS. So I found the PDB that supports those. Nope, won't fit on this chassis. Had to bend over the mounting tabs. In the meantime I ordered a bare 836TQ backplane. Nope, it won't fit on the same bracket as the EL2. Now I'm stuck trying to find a bracket, which seems impossible--can't even find a part number for it.
When it rains, it pours.
I remember spending a few weeks on a board with a lot of bent pins. I could only stand to work on it a couple hours each day. Bent pin fatigue is a real thing. Good news was I did get the board working and I gave it to a friend who needed a pc.
Definitely dropping a 'Like', I learned a few things from this. The thing that bothered me the most was the proprietary connector thinggie. I use a Z230 workstation, and their choice for the standby voltage on their PSUs (11V) is completely beyond me. All regular motherboards will do fine with 5V standby, but noooo, HP needs 11V. I get why they do this - if you ever need a more powerful PSU, you got to get it from them.
There are adapters, that will double the 5VSB line to 10V - close enough to boot the PC. But one should not need to buy one.
This video hit me right in the "this always happens to me" feels...
I have Z4s and Z6s at home and at work. All of these Z6s have the riser board. I didn't even realize that they worked without them. Up until your video, I had never seen a Z6 without one.
A cautionary tale for all of us who are thinking about going down the same route. I did take some grim comfort in soldering problem with the power cable, as I've done similar things myself and thereby ruined what would have been good kit. I was actually thinking about purchasing this very same machine, although I've gone off the idea after seeing the proprietary bits and pieces that it contains (the PSU being a notable example). I guess at the end of the day, there's always a good craft beer waiting to drown our sorrows when things haven't gone too well that day.
Man, HP have really sunk in terms of hardware design quality. Between them, Lenovo, and Dell all being just... horrible as of late, now would be a really BAD time to try and setup a tech-centric company.
Wow, that really sucks. I wish I could say I have never had such a cursed experience, but I think all of us that have been doing this for a while have. You are absolutely right, it is time to move on.
Proprietary bullshit makes me angry, and I've mostly been doing laptop repair lately, so I'm usually pretty angry! Your perseverance is legendary! If you've truly given up though, this would make a good upgrade from the Phenom that my kids Minecraft server currently lives on… assuming I can get it running.
As an HP workstation owner (and I own a lot of them, from z420, z620, z840, z4 g4, z8 g4 and even an old one wx8000) you cannot mess up with hardware configurations. You need to buy the exact part/replacement/manufacturer numbers as listed in the workstations specs / configuration list. Yes I know that they are expensive, but if you are expecting a workstations performance/stability (which is the reason you are buying a branded workstation and not building a custom PC/workstation that may be even faster) then you are prepared for the extra cost/limitations. And this is just a z6 g4. Wait to see the z8 g4... you cannot even use the CPU cooling that you used because of the airflow cover that goes into the workstation. Even a ZOTAC RTX 3080 ti HOLO doesn't fit in because of the height of the GPU. And some info regarding the front panel with the reader. You don't need the exact one (with the reader) you can get just one with the button on it and one with the USB port I think. Also there is a power button at the back of the workstation. Now regarding the error with the ram. Get some ram that the part number is listed in the workstation compatible memory list (and the CPU installed) and it will work.
If the ebay return period has elapsed, the PayPal or credit card periods are typically longer and you can force returns/refunds that way
I'm wondering why HP hasn't updated their Z workstation lines with the already obsolete LGA4189 CPUs and the LGA4677 ones are reaching the market shortly 🤔
Looks like neither Dell nor Lenovo have updated their workstations past LGA3647 either. Could be a lack of demand.
Great video Jeff! socket fixes are always cool to watch! fyi, it sounds like the audio fluctuated quite a bit throughout the video.
Oh god, you had to mention Gen8...
I was a sysadmin for a SMB system integrator at the time of the G8 chassis and it was a clear cut case of HP trying desperately to lock customers into their ecosystem in a time when cloud was slowly becoming a thing. Even the ML series which were basically workstations with an iLO got monetized out the wazoo. New HDD cages, new ram checks, new RAID cards with new licencing (no more free HP 1+0 raid) and it was one of the driving forces behind us pushing all our customers to O365 (that and the end of SBS and the death of the old HP firmware update CDs)
Yeah, I was in a similar situation at that time with a number of my clients. Massively predatory.
if u paid with paypal they cover u for 180 days. most credit card companies do as well if the seller refuses to take it back.
Thank you for this video. You have scared me off from ever trying to get an HP barebone system.
The five pin fan rubbish has been around since at LEAST the Gen 6s from 2008 or so. PS. Try thoroughly cleaning the CPU pads. I had that problems many years ago. Looked clean but no memory detected.
That system deserves the Office Space treatment.
Buying used server hardware is weird indeed.
Once bought complete server and needed only the power supplies, it was cheaper than buying those power supplies on it's own.
I bought one that was about $200 more than the Bare bones, it came with a 8 core CPU, K2200 gpu and 32 GB of ram, not having to buy the heat sink and ram was my main reason for spending more. I have since upgraded it to a 6138 cpu. There is a power button on the back of the case.
The 6138 is such a fantastic deal
Despite the outcome, this video is very nice and i was very much happy watching it.
I love the plop sound of that intro, its so pristine and realistic, at least on my elaborate audio setup ... my roommate came over asking why i am opening so much beer in short time, and how i'd manage to make the caps seemingly banging on hard ground when my room got carpet allaround ;-)
Yeah ... After seeing Jeff suffer I'll stick with my e5-2699V4 for longer. Long Live 22-core Broadwell-EP!
...and even if you got another CPU, HP likes to embed non-upgradable (without hardware and hacking) boot blocks that might be too old to support the CPU, similar to their memory lock downs and wi-fi card white-listing in laptops (I modded the BIOS to that one).
Thank you for this, you just saved me a ton of time and money. Been looking at buying one of these to build my first home server, but after seeing this I think I will be avoiding HP with the amount of proprietary BS they require.
Jeff, you always make good and interesting videos. Making mistakes is a part of our life and learning. Keep up with your new videos!
Kickass video dude. Seriously. This helps people learn what gear to avoid.
Sorry for your struggles but thank you.
Hey Jeff, dont be down on yourself! I tried something similar but with a few retired HP Elite 8200 SFF PCs several years ago. I just wanted to slap some 1030s in them and have a few spare gaming setups for when company came over, and oh boy did I regret it immediately. They were plagued with some weird bug where they wouldnt boot and the fan on the CPU would slowly ramp up to max speed, sounding louder than a hair dryer. Had to yank out the CMOS battery until they lost their settings and then they would be fine for a few boots and back to the hair dryer mode. Rinse repeat. It only took a month of that before I threw in the towel. Took the GPUs out and just gave the HPs away. Fun times!
This is the only PC build video I’ve ever seen that has had me laughing all the way through, well done for that!
What happened is very sad :( btw, just a quick tip: at the video title, you say HPE Z6, but HPE and HP are different companies and the Z6 is from HP :)
Man, i feel bad for you, goodluck!
I managed to get this beast cheap in the UK. Upgraded the CPU to W-3235... It's a very fickle machine, I had to upgrade the cooler to the 90mm version you purchased... It works...
Thanks a lot!!!
I have a 6150 gold and tons of ecc dimms, and i almost got me a barebones z6 for them
You just got this out in time to stop me from doing that
As my 6150 is a QS, and my dimms are not hp dimms, but rather SM ones
I will go th asus sage route
This video made me nervous I orderd one of these barebones units about an hour before I saw this. Thanks for the heads up on the lack of power button that saved me from waiting another week. Thankfully my computer seems to work
Less than ideal for sure but that seems to be the HP lifestyle. I find myself contemplating what hardware I will step into next from my aging X10DRi with 2660 V3's for my main EXS host in my homelab. Awesome that you really gave it a shot though, we can't all keep haswells forever 😄
7:07 whoa why did your voice sound like you suddenly went diving under water? With headphones, that was a really weird sensation.
that cup of Raktajino was sorely needed at 14:23
Remind me to rewatch this on halloween because this computer is a horror show
GN ain't the only one who can do spooky builds
I was going to build this exact workstation, I am so glad I didn't , thank you
@Craft Computing
Jeff, anyone who's been in the business of building/servicing computer equipment has likely had this experience and I feel certain that I can speak on behave of all of those folks when I say: Jeff we feel your pain! Some of us never give up until a system works. Some call it good like you did, but all of us feel your pain!
These are exactly the videos I want to see, who wants to see success all the time?
You frickin' earned whatever you make from this video three or four times over.
I would have cut and run at the fan headers 😂😂😂 fair play to you man, this is why I love this channel 😂😂😂
I did this and it works well
And here I'm glad my Z440 from eBay was only lacking due to having come with the ~500W power supply and not the 700W one.
This is a really valuable video. I know not to get one from HP. So yes it did add value.
This was very much a going from a light beer, to a heavy stout, to a whiskey strait from the bottle video.
What i get from the video, sometimes it's more expensive to be cheap, and RTFM. Not doing that has bit me in the rear more times than i care to count.
Don't know if the listing was there when you got this one, but there's a listing for a full system, sans drives, for $400.
Even comes with a w2100 gpu.
Man, I feel your pain. I did a similar build of an HP Z840 several months back. I got the PC off eBay same as you sans CPU, RAM, and storage. I was loading it with two Xeon CPUs and 256 GB ECC RAM. I, too, got the dreaded beep codes indicating a memory problem. I tried every combination of RAM I could think of but it turned out that the 2nd CPU socket had some bent pins that I had overlooked. Why it was throwing a memory error beep code, I'll never know. Once I managed to get all the pins pointing in the right direction (boy was that fun), I was able to get the system to post.
the RAM is connected to the CPU through the socket pins as the RAM controller is in the CPU. So bent pins can cause memory errors or PCIe errors too (also pcie controller is in CPU) and sometimes it's better than nothing (i.e. you can use the system with less RAM or without a PCIe slot).
I bought an HP colour laser printer that the store promised that was mac compatible and drivers were no problem. No driveres excisted and the store could not take it back since I opened it. So that landed on the garbage dump. If you fill your case with concrete, you´ve got a nice boat anchor
There are probably a lot of offers on this video already, but depending on shipping (and if no one else beats me to it) I would give getting it going a try.
Great video, I actually learnt (or rather re-learnt) an important fact.. watch out for oem workstation builds if going second hand..
What a ride! What an adventure!
Sorry about the bad experience. Liked, commented, and subbed.
Engagement received.
A very easy way to unbend pins is to empty the lead out of an mechanical pencil and use the tiny metal barrel to slide over top of the pin and bend it.
before upgrading to ryzen last year my gaming ps was running a 1245 v3 and i was well happy with the little quad cpu
“And this is why sysadmins always drink” LOLLL
This may not be the video as intended but it still good to know some of the gotchas when dealing with server class motherboards.
LOL, I can relate, I had the pleasure of owning a Dell Precision T5610... Unfortunate how these, in principle, great computers become e-waste because of the propriety BS
I have a Dell Precision T1600 that actually came with a standard 24 pin 450 watt PSU. I even got a PCIe riser cable to use my old Sapphire RX 580 GPU outside of the case since it won't fit unless I remove the hard drive adapter cage. I might do this eventually. I even got a new EVGA 650 watt, semi modulate PSU for the 580. All looking good so far...until I noticed the "wonderful" proprietary fan headers of Dell. So much for eventually changing the CPU cooler with a nice ARGB one that I bought...at least not without "modifying" the connector! Same for changing the exhaust fan as well. I just better avoid the same thing happening to me as what happened to our man here when he tried to modify his fan headers! I guess that I will just leave well enough alone for now since this old Xeon e3 1245 stays pretty cool with the standard cooler anyway and can't be over clocked with this motherboard. Be well! 👍👍
Dell and HP's motto is "straight to landfill"
@@marcogenovesi8570 LOL!!! 😂😂👍👍
Jeff, I feel your pain here. I'm currently dealing with a Visio TV which is flickering because of an overheating component. I tried two replacement motherboards from eBay; the first was the same model of motherboard but flashed for a different TV, so column mapping for the panel was completely screwed up. The second was stuck in store display mode and wouldn't come out no matter what I tried.
I have just gone back to the original motherboard and am about to drill a hole in my TV to mount a PC case fan on it. It seems ridiculous, but the alternative is to turn the whole thing into e-waste.
Isn't that the generation of Xeon Process that Intel introduced processor locking (to the motherboard) via PPT (Platform Trust Technology). You might not have a memory issues, you might have a processor (or two) that is locked to the last motherboard it was in. It's a deplorable practice and HP is very well known for having this setting turned on by default.
It's a real bummer you couldn't get the system working, it would have been a very cool project. Honestly, I'm half tempted to take on the project myself since I'm local to the area but after just (fingers crossed) getting my personal rig fixed up again I don't know that I need another money pit in my life.
As someone who also has a fondness for putting GPUs in servers, I always look forward to your projects and I'm sure the next one will work out.
Always wanted to get my hands on a Xenon system to play around with. I hate how limited certain features of consumer systems are.
No free lunch in workstation world. I also learned that the hard way. This july bought a Z8G4 dual 6134 for 1195 euros. Everything is ok, BUT if you need things like an extra m.2 adapter, that's always 100 euros extra...