About
All Feedback (76)
- plusdrives (2908)- Feedback left by buyer.Past 6 monthsVerified purchaseThank you for an easy, pleasant transaction. Excellent buyer. A++++++.
- juluplus (58063)- Feedback left by buyer.Past 6 monthsVerified purchaseHope to deal with you again. Thank you.
- quarrymotusa (37323)- Feedback left by buyer.More than a year agoVerified purchaseGreat communication. A pleasure to do business with.
- stbagn (791)- Feedback left by buyer.More than a year agoVerified purchaseSmooth transaction. Thank you!
- bimmer8_tw (433)- Feedback left by buyer.More than a year agoVerified purchaseQuick payment & I recommend to all from Bimmer8. Good buyer A++++++
- astrotech1175 (1619)- Feedback left by buyer.More than a year agoVerified purchaseGreat customer, quick pay, smooth sale.
Reviews (1)
22 Dec, 2017
Two-headed, fire-breathing dragon
1 of 1 found this helpful Being a workstation built on server components, the Dell Precision T5400 is meant to be reliable, capable of running 24/7. In my case, I was looking to upgrade my MythTV server, which runs all the time, and I intended to put a pair of retired nVidia GeForce GTX 970 video cards to use for cryptocurrency mining. I also had a pair of Intel Xeon X5460 CPUs (3.17 GHz) on hand, so the T5400 with its two 16x PCI-E slots looked to be the perfect solution for my situation.
At present, I have Ubuntu 16.04 installed, and I'm running xmr-stak using the two X5460 CPUs and two GTX 970 GPUs to their full capacity. The hash rate, quite surprisingly, is very close to what I'm getting with my newer gaming computer with an Intel Core i7 7700K (all cores running at 4.5 GHz on an ASUS motherboard) and a factory-overclocked nVidia GeForce 1080 Ti. The only downside is the T5400 with the older GPUs and CPUs consumes about 600 Watts of electricity and pushes out a lot of hot air while mining Monero. By way of contrast, my newer computer system pulls about 260 to 300 Watts while mining with xmr-stak. Despite the greater power usage, the T5400 with two GTX 970s is still a profitable rig for mining and it makes use of older parts that would have otherwise been idle in my closet.
Regarding physical-installation of the two GTX 970s, I had to use some small, adhesive rubber pads on the cards to keep them sufficiently separated. Otherwise the fans of one card would scrape against the back plate of the other. Also, I could not close the T5400's expansion card-retention door and card retainer because the video cards were too tall, but that's not a real issue as they are held firmly in place with the included screws, so I just left the door open on the back and removed the retainer. Because of the length of the GTX 970 cards, the drive bays have to be in the tower orientation, not the desktop orientation, for the DVD drive to be installed. This was easily done, but I had to order a tower-configuration-style drive panel here on eBay for $7 delivered as the unit I bought was configured for the horizontal desktop orientation.)
Electrically, the included power supply drives the GTX 970s just fine. I had to use two 6-pin to 8-pin PCI-E power cable adapters, but the 6-pin connectors provided by the T5400's power supply each have three 12-Volt leads--the same number as an 8-pin connector and one more than the 6-pin standard requires--and, according to the T5400's specifications, can each provide the needed Watts, so the cards are getting as much power as they need.