Great discussions and info in this thread!
Just wanted to share my DL580 G7 build, wanted to run 11 cards, but settled with 9 after hours and hours of struggle.
Mining etherium at ~ 255MH/s. Ran Cryptonight at 1650H/s with 4x E7-8837, but stopped since i switch to SimpleMiner from hiveOS (had to prioritize gpu stability).
So 4X E7-8837 at 130 watts each is around 520 watts, correct? Maybe not too much to worry about if electricity is cheap or free but I just wonder if there are still better price-to-hashrate-to-power options. I mean $20 for the 8837 is really awesome but then there are strong processors at 65 Watts instead of 130 Watts that are more expensive but might pay for themselves in power costs over the course of a year.
I've been trying to decide on a configuration for my next mining build that would include stronger CPU hash capability.
Thank you for your contributions here. I really enjoy this thread.
Actually I was able to buy 20x E7-8837's for $218 or $10.90 each. So a set of 4 cost me $43.60. I have bought five DL580's and will keep three for mining and sell the other two for profit. HiveOS has a limit of three free rigs.
You are correct in that more modern processors do use lower power and produce about the same hash rate in four core what these 8 cores do. The problem is that is a single processor. If you want two processor then you need a workstation class computer. Go to four processors puts you into server class systems. And modern versions of workstations and servers are magnitudes higher in price that of the HP DL580 servers that I and others here have purchased.
Why I purchased three DL580's for mining is that each has 11 PCIe slots, 4x 1200 watt power supplies (the server balances the load for efficiency and redundancy). The added hashing (1650 H/s on Cryptonight) using the 4x E7-8837 processors is a bonus.