My first server!

After I was done needing the fire hazard CUDA box (the class ended, I got an A, go me!), My devolpment as a computer geek required that I run my own server. For bonus points, the server needed to be a sketch as possible, cheap, and have really poor performance. Luckily I was already well on my way. Before I got the the server, I needed a working desktop. Therefore my 'nice' components went back in the InWin Chopin. I made a few changes: New CPU cooler, better cable management, and a proper heatsink on the M.2 SSD:

Turns out that normal sharpies are great for correcting the bland brown and tan that Noctua likes so much. There is not much to say about this version my main PC. It worked. The server on the other hand... The CPU was an AMD A10-7800; 4-cores (no SMT) 8 GPU units (GCN) 65W. While it should be a decent chip, There were a number of factors that led to very poor performance. First, it was operating on a single channel of 1600MHz DDR3 for a total memory bandwidth of 12.8 GB/s. In comparison, my current (2021) setup uses dual channel DDR4 at 4000MHz for a total bandwidth of 64 GB/s. Second, the CPU cooler was very bad, and really meant for a 40W CPU, not the 65W A10. This resulted in significant thermal throttling. Third, the CPU architecture was from early 2014 built with a 28nm process, thus it was quite slow. I did try an mitigate the poor heat sink, and it helped some but not enough. In the following picture you can see the result in all of its glory! I used the generic gray power supply from a 2004-era HP desktop:

All this complaining about performance, but what does it mean? I put some version of Ubuntu on the thing, and set it up to run a plain Minecraft server. The server struggled, and crashed often while hosting three players on LAN. This is Rasberry-Pi levels of performance. I did get some basic Network Attached Storage (NAS) stuff working, but it was also slow and the silly thing did look like a fire hazard. So I scrapped it. Learned a lot of useful stuff, I'm sure...