The Dell T140 as a frankenstation : Compact, Silent and Powerful enough.

A few tips about using the Dell PowerEdge T140 as a frankenstation.

The Dell PowerEdge T140 is a compact mini server which can be purchased from Dell with some decent specs. It turns out that the server is more expandable than the official specs on the Dell site. We will detail this here.

If you're looking to buy a T140, I'd recommend buying it direct from Dell as their discounts are usually better and the system will come with up to 3 years of warranty.

Processors

I like 8 core Xeons because it gives me 16 threads so I went for the E-2278G model at 3.4Ghz.

The T140 uses an Intel Socket FPGA 1151 which means that it will also take a variety of core i3 and celeron chips but there are a few catches:

- The core i3 and celeron cpus for the T140 max out at 64Gb RAM and don't have ECC memory support.

- All of the Xeon SP Gen2 Xeons which go into the T140 support up to 128Gb RAM and ECC memory.

(more on this later)

Due to the above, I would really advise getting a Xeon if you're thinking about a T140.

Memory

This is where it gets interesting. The system (an entry server, really) is listed as '64 Gb Max Memory' on the Dell website.

That is true, unless you get a Xeon because all of those cpus support up to 128Gb DDR4 ECC memory:

So I went ahead and got myself 4 x 32Gb ECC UDIMM sticks:

# memconf 
memconf:  V3.15 16-Jul-2019 http://sourceforge.net/projects/memconf/
hostname: ravenvale
Dell Inc. PowerEdge T140 (Eight-Core Hyper-Threaded Intel(R) Xeon(R) E-2278G @ 3.40GHz)
Memory Error Correction: Single-bit ECC
Maximum Memory: Unknown (DMI incorrectly reports 65536MB)
A1: 32 GB 2933 MT/s Synchronous Unbuffered (Unregistered) DDR4 DIMM, Hynix Semiconductor (Hyundai Electronics) HMAA4GU7AJR8N-WM
A2: 32 GB 2933 MT/s Synchronous Unbuffered (Unregistered) DDR4 DIMM, Hynix Semiconductor (Hyundai Electronics) HMAA4GU7AJR8N-WM
A3: 32 GB 2933 MT/s Synchronous Unbuffered (Unregistered) DDR4 DIMM, Hynix Semiconductor (Hyundai Electronics) HMAA4GU7AJR8N-WM
A4: 32 GB 2933 MT/s Synchronous Unbuffered (Unregistered) DDR4 DIMM, Hynix Semiconductor (Hyundai Electronics) HMAA4GU7AJR8N-WM
empty memory sockets: None
total memory = 131072MB (128GB)

The result, as seen from the iDRAC is priceless:

Networking

I like the X710-DA4 (4 x 10G), I have one in each of my T630 and T640. Turns out it is unsupported in the T140 according to Dell but it works just fine for me.

Graphics

Since this is a 14th gen Dell, I expected the system to complain about non-enterprise GPUs but to my surprise, it didn't even flinch when I added an MSI NVidia 1030 GT to it. The small tiny fan on the 1030 was the noisiest fan in the T140 so I got rid of it and went fanless (it's only a 30W GPU):

# nvidia-smi 
Fri Jul 23 18:40:21 2021       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 460.84       Driver Version: 460.84       CUDA Version: 11.2     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                               |                      |               MIG M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GT 1030     Off  | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| 41%   53C    P8    N/A /  30W |    176MiB /  2001MiB |      7%      Default |
|                               |                      |                  N/A |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

I know that the 41% fan rpm is a lie because that fan is actually sitting on my desk.

So far, neither the T140 nor the NVidia card or the RHEL8 OS seemed to mind that I took the fan away:

Storage

This is where it gets really interesting. I got my T140 with a good ol' PERC H730P.

The T140 has 4 internal 3.5 bays which you could fit with either HDD's or SSD's. There's only one SAS cable from the H730P to the drive bays and hence one of the H730P SFF-8643 mini-SAS connectors was un-used.

Since I didn't want to use HDDs in my T140, I thought I could use 8 x SDDs in my T140 and still stay below the required wattage of 4 x HDDs. There was only one problem: I needed a special cable for power because the T140 motherboard only had -one- PCIe 6pin power connector for the SAS chains.

So, with advice from my friends, I bought two identical 4 x 1 SAS+Power cables for the T140 on ebay and made them as one (for the PCIe power part of the cable):

All I needed was to do some soldering:

To place the 2.5 drives into the 3.5 Bays, I picked some dual SSD adapters on Amazon for each of the 3.5 bays. I had to remove the notch on the original Dell caddies (blue) in order to have enough clearance access to the SATA connectors on each of the SSDs.

When everything was assembled, things looked pretty good.

Room for 8 SSDs! (even though I only had 4 installed at this time).

Noise

All SSD config and no GPU fan made for a very silent machine. It is quieter than my T640 or T630 and only has two fans. Overall, this is a very quiet machine.

Conclusion

That's about it. I've been running most of the service VMs and services for our home from the tiny little server on the top (the T140) when the bigger brothers and sisters are asleep.