enjoyfebruary Posted January 14, 2013 Share Posted January 14, 2013 I got a couple of used XServes for super cheap on eBay. I am going to use one as a VMWare Server for remote employees. The other will be a simple file server since I can do both SMB and AFP as opposed to our Win SBS 2011 server which can only do SMB. The one that will be for virtual machines I felt that I would need a little more power to handle the out of office employees. I bought a pair of Xeon e5345 CPUs for $40.00 on eBay and they certainly did the trick. Here are the before and after Geekbench resultsBefore - http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/1814845After - http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/1533559Quite an improvement in my opinion. Went from four total cores to eight. As temps go; idle temps are around 35-42c. I also used Arctic Silver 5. OSX System Profiler does not recognize the CPU name. It gets the number of cores and speed right but it lists "Unknown" as the name. However, Geekbench and the virtual machines both see the CPU speed and name correctly. For $40 this was a great upgrade. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WhatTheTech Posted January 29, 2013 Share Posted January 29, 2013 For $40 this was a great upgrade. You've got that right!! Do you mind me asking for a general figure on how much you spent? I'm looking into buying one but have no gauge on the used Xserve market. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G-rom Posted December 13, 2013 Share Posted December 13, 2013 Hello Before link is dead. Do you manage to install a mavericks OS since you now own a 64bits processor ? I have an old Xserve1.1, and would like to upgrade it with such improvements. Regards, Jérôme Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
reukiodo Posted June 2, 2015 Share Posted June 2, 2015 Do you manage to install a mavericks OS since you now own a 64bits processor ? It's easy to install Mavericks or Yosemite in target disk mode if you have another supported Mac, but you'll need to use tiamo's boot.efi replacement for it to boot on the Xserve. You might also want to install a newer graphics card (if you plan to use the GUI at all, even remotely) as it greatly improves the smoothness of the UI, but this is not necessary, especially if you're just using this as a remote server accessed mostly via SSH. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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