A year ago I was working for a company that used such PC in the cloud services. 10 months of renting that cost about the same as buying an equivalent laptop. It wasn’t good.
If you mostly need a machine for word-processing and do something intense for an hour a week there might be a possibility of saving money, but for regular use no way.
Also if you have an office where people occasionally need a powerful system then just buy one powerful PC and have them share.
7430 is a nice system. I’ve done a lot with 7400/7410/7420 systems and some of my friends use them daily for programming.
Sure 16G is a restriction in some ways and some compilers take so much ram that make -j10 will fail on 16G but it’s still pretty decent.
What OS are you using? Linux works nicely on 16G, Windows is usable but not so good.
Thanks for the information, that’s an unusual situation that you got yourself into. ;)
I had followed the advice of Dell support and unplugged everything including very unlikely things like NVMe devices and RAM and it still happened. It turned out to be the power distribution board.
I replaced the Power Backplane board J14R7 0J14R7 and it’s been running for just over 24 hours. As it was an intermittent fault I don’t count this as proof that it is fixed (I’ll wait another couple of days to be sure) but previously it never lasted 8 hours so it seems most likely.
The old Power Backplane had no puffy capacitors, no scorch marks, and no other indication that it was faulty. I also used all the same cables so it doesn’t look like a cable issue.
Thanks for your comment it helped give me confidence to spend the money on a new board. The other option I had considered was to just buy another system that would take the CPUs I bought.
The PSUs have lights on in the normal manner, they both have green lights when the machine is unresponsive. The power is probably OK, it works well enough for many other systems. The PSUs are configured in a redundant configuration, I’ve tried it running each of the PSUs separately and running both. Tried running both from a Y cable and from separate cables. I’ve tried switching the PSUs between bays. None of this changes it. But all on the same circuit.
There’s nothing in the iDRAC logs related to it or at the same times.
Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll try it on a different circuit but I have to put it back together again.
This seems similar to the spammers who deliberately use bad spelling and get significant facts wrong in their scam email. They don’t want someone who understands things to get to the second stage and waste their time they are trying to get dummies who will fall for it.
I think that the company in question would treat their employees badly and they don’t want someone to accept a job offer and then quit when they learn how abusive the work environment is.