Proliant DL380 G3

[John Anderson 99.999]

I just want some thoughts from those that know. I freely acquired a DL380 G3 with two 3ghz processors, ultra 320 scsi, 1 gig ram, two 73ish gig scsi drives, etc.

I am considering making this my prime home desktop pc. This would replace a P4 prescott 3ghz desktop with 1/2 gig ram. My main question is will this proliant perform better for desktop tasks including some occasional gaming and average multimedia and photoshop usage. Am I wasting time and money for extra peripherals on this project?

More details: I have Win XP installed and will have the management drivers installed to control noise and power consumption. I plan to only run it when needed. I'm sure with these provisions it will still tend to be more power hungry and louder than an average desktop. I have XP using raid 1 (1+0) on the two SCSI drives. I desire reliability of mirroring and slight performance boost of reading from 2 drives at a time.

I would need to buy a seperate large drive for storage of documents/settings... mp3 collection, my docs, etc. Also I will need a USB 2.0 PCI card, decent graphics card, and audio card. Probably remove the ILO since I don't need to remotely administer anything. Only 3 PCI slots.

[Heironimus]

No, it probably will not make a good desktop. Yes, you probably are wasting time and money. I would put that money toward a new lower-end PC that will still be a step up from your older desktop.

The DL380G3 predates today's interest in datacenter power savings. It will be significantly more power hungry and louder than a desktop and there isn't much you can do about it.

Unless you have the add-on RIB board you can't remove anything for iLO because it's on the motherboard.

[Ed Meadows]

I second that. While it's low price makes for a good starter server for experimenting or learning, or for making a one-for-one direct replacement of an existing DL360 or DL380, it makes a terrible desktop.

I'm not sure how much success you will have at controlling the power consumption or fan noise. It burns about 280 watts of power at idle while a newer desktop burns less than half that at full load. It is not very expandable, and most components are very proprietary.