Hi! LONG time lurker, first time asker for helper. ;)

My apologies if this has already been answered many times over. I searched and failed to find pertinent info, so I am grateful in advance for your patience.

Over the last 10+ years or so I built 25-30 machines for family and friend by ordering parts from places like New Egg then installing whatever version of Windows happened to be current at the time. I am NO authority on ANYTHING computer-related, just a man who reads and follows the instructions. Any problems were solved by using my new best friend Google and searching for answers in forums just like this one.

My question: Why would I NOT want to buy a refurbished server like the one below to use as my DAW host? Heat, noise, weight, and aesthetics won't be an issue, since the computer will be in another room. Installing Windows wasn't a big deal for me, but are there other OS issues I need to know? What about electricity costs? Not compatible with Nuendo/PT/etc.?

At this point I don't even know what I don't know, so your input will be GREATLY appreciated. TIA!

PS Replace the word "dot" with ".", minus the quotes, of course, but then anyone qualified to guide me here would have known to do so before he/she turned 5 years old, huh? ;)

http://www dot eBay dot com/itm/Dell-Poweredge-R510-Server-2x-6-Core-X5650-2-66GHz-64GB-RAM-2x-64GB-SSD-12x-2TB-/391624945319?hash=item5b2eaa6ea7:g:vWoAAOSwT~9Whbtb

 

Last edited: Nov 23, 2016

APart from being an overpowered beast for what you're doing with audio, it lacks some of the things we just cum to expect in a consumer PC. Mainly IOs.

VIdeo out is VGA/D-sub onry. This is might be fine for you, and slightly blurry screen, but if you ever want to expand to dualhead, you're SOL (unless laggy USB display, anyone?). Servers are meant to be headless , ie, accessed over RDP/VNC/etc. The inbuilt gfx might be very shitty so some plugins might not run.

Not many USB ports, so if you want to plug in your USB gear, you'll need to get a lot of dongs.

Don't expect room for standard PCI(e/x) slots.

I'm not even sure there's a standard 3.5mm anal hole.

There's reasons why normal ppl don't use servers - simply cuz they're not made to be consumer PCs.

I'm not really sure how you'll be using the PC 'from another room', will you be using remote audio or running wires? also, there is a possibility some DAWS may freak out over multi-CPU. Consumer windows may not allow multi-CPU use & apps on server windows may not behave as expected.

 

Last edited: Nov 23, 2016

As a server pc, for farming plugins and vst instruments its great for the main pc its rather outdated and unpractical.
I would not buy it.First what junh1024 said.
The second reason is age, x5650 is basically comparable to an i7 3770, its not as powerful as it seems.
For that money i would go rather with a 6 core i7 6800k and 64gb of ram, new ssd and hdd.
Newer stuff will run better.
http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-6800K-vs-Intel-Xeon-X5650/3607vsm355

 

You would fail to use up all the CPU & ram consistently unless you're doing something rediculous with your audio. Performance per watt & dollar is great, this is what servers are designed for, otherwise, the consumer UX is pretty crap.

 

You should also note this hardware is not designed to run graphics pretty much at all (and NI & Waves use quite a lot of graphics horsepower in their plugins). Also it's made to be running 24/7. Which means stuff like POST check (this thing that counts how much RAM you have in your computer after you turn it on) can take minutes, because they'd rather have your computer run after 10 minutes than have it crash after 3 years of running non-stop (for servers, which could be counted in thousands in a big cluster, you don't want to be running around searching which one crashed). It's also high-performance, but for multi-threaded processing. So basically servers are great for doing thousands of simple things, but they really suck at doing one thing fast. They work great when 100k users connect to a website at once and they just send that website to them, but not so much when you want to run a DAW on them. I'd say it's more of a pain in the ass than it's work. Stick to consumer hardware - you don't need server-grade, and most likely you don't want it, either.

 

You do realize that servers are NOISY. Not a tiny fan noise, actual, loud, NOISE... Those are designed to stay in a server room, the fan will be at full speed all the time. I don't feel it will work in your use case. Oh and expect to triple the AC bill :P .
(As an UNIX sysadmin, I work with hundred of those, I/Os speed, ram access, and general power is neat though)