Dual Core Xeon E5-2630v3 in a Corsair Carbide 200R Chassis

[Beaster]

The following is a personal system I just build as a hybrid Home Test Bench Server and HTPC VM host.

I needed the configuration to support VT-d so I could virtualize the media player without needing a second machine in the living room.

I live in Hong Kong so living space is always an issue.

The machine is super quiet and based on the latest power bill better than the previous machine.

The Corsair Carbide 200R is a surprisingly cheap case for the quality and in my opinion not a bad option for a HTPC case if you have it setup in a desktop configuration, the face plate is featureless which I think is a good thing.

 

I had some minor issues getting the H60 Coolers into the chassis, Corsair recommends the 330R or the 300R for top mounted Liquid coolers. It's not really possible with most boards to mount the 120mm coolers in their intended locations on the case. In my case I reversed the position of the fans, making them push, rather than the original push configuration. Also I moved the mounting point to the topmost location on the grill. Corsair in their wisdom (fluke) used a grill pattern that matches the screw layout of the 120mm fan mountings. You can, with a bit of testing, move the cooler mounts around to suit your needs. Since I didn't have washers for the mounting of the fan to the grill I opted to use what was on hand and replaced some of the corsair supplied larger thumbscrews from the backplane card slots and used them to mount the fan. This actually works out rather well, as you can easily remove the fans and radiators for cleaning when required.

Possibly the only downside of this case is the fact that the grills are not all filtered and dust will get into the case and over a long period of time foul up the radiators. It is just a matter of washing them off once a year to get the best out of them however.

 

Specs:

1x Asus Server Motherboard Z9PA-D8

2x Intel Xeon E5-2630v2

1x Corsair Carbide 200R Chassis

1x Corsair AX 860i power supply

2x Corsair H60 liquid CPU coolers

1x IBM M5110 Raid Card +2GB Flash Cache + Cache Capacitor

2x ATI Raedon 2GB 6540 Video Cards

4x 16Gb Samsung ECC Dimms

 

Transferred 2x 3TB WD Sata Drives from old system

Transferred 2x 1.5TB WD Sata Drives from old system

Transferred 2x 64GB Kingston SSD Sata Drives from old system (to be used for Raid R/W Cache)

2x New 250GB Plextor SSD for Operating System (ESXi 5.5)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 12, 2014 by Beaster

[ccokeman]

Pretty powerful little PC you have built there.  

[Braegnok]

Vary nice,.. I would love to have a quite server,.. my old Dell PowerEdge sounds like a vacuum cleaner.