[sf-lug] Dell workstation offer on BALUG's hardware list

[Rick Moen]

Quoting aaronco36 (aaronco36 at SDF.ORG):

> Am offering to give away a Dell Precision T5400 desktop tower
> Workstation PC (system box only).
> Listing is at the bottom of Michael P's/BALUG's Offered/Wanted:
> Hardware, etc. wikipage https://www.wiki.balug.org/wiki/doku.php?id=balug:offered_wanted_hardware_etc
> Note that email listing is using the same SDF.org address as am
> using now for correspondence.

In case people are not adept at reading about hardware, this is a pretty
sweet premium-workstation-class box, circa 2007.  The 8GB of ECC RAM is
particuarly impressive for the era.  Expandability is medium-good
(again, for its era):  It has two PCI-E (8 GB/s) slots and some USB 2.0
ports,   An guessing that you add RAM in banks of four matched sticks
(eight sockets, and I assume they're currently each occupied by a 1GB
stick of DDR2 (aka PC2-5300) fully-buffered 667MHz 240-pin 1.8 volt ECC
SDRAM DIMMs.

(Specs note that "NOTICE: Full-length heat spreaders (FLHS) are required
for all DIMMS.)  RAM for this motherboard _must_ be ECC, fully buffered
DDR2 sticks marketed for servers.  You cannot used 'regular" desktop DDR2 memory.
And I take it they're serious about the heat spreaders.

In these cases, one question I always ponder is 'If I wanted to max out
system RAM (which in this case is eight 4GB ECC sticks, total 32GB), how
much would it cost?'  Why?  Because in my experience, the most important
limiting factor for effective service life is usually RAM capacity.  You
find yourself say 'Damn, I wish I had more RAM' long before you say that
about CPU grunt or I/O capacity.

Answer:  $60 + tax plus shipping.  Example:
https://www.amazon.com/Komputerbay-FB-DIMM-DDR2-PC2-2RX4-240-Pin-Heatspreaders/dp/B005HIWD
+5U

If you do that and put a cheap SSD SATA or SAS) into this thing you
might be happy for most of this decade without new-and-shiny envy.

Anyway, a box that was really good 14 years ago, available for free
today, is IMO excellent and still useful.