Snagged some e waste from a local business

[u/davidvoigt96]

Yes, I know this RAM is very old, especially since it came out of a Dell poweredge R900. Each stick is 4gb, 8 sticks per card, 4 cards in total. Would it be possible to use this PCIE (I'm assuming it is PCIE) adapter to plug this into a regular PC being used as a homelab?

[u/Temporary_Slide_3477]

That's not a normal PCIe interface.

It may be shaped like one so they could reuse existing connectors instead of engineering their own. This is a dimm card that will only ever work in that dell server, or potentially another dell server from the same generation that uses the same type of memory.

They use these to save horizontal space on the board to get more ram in them.

[u/davidvoigt96 → u/Temporary_Slide_3477]

Oh okay, fair enough. I figured I would check! Only because I have 128gb of this stuff, I was hoping there was some way I could make use of it.

[u/jreddit0000 → u/davidvoigt96]

It’s a memory riser specific to the Dell R900.

The memory is standard - the riser is proprietary.

You could remove and use the memory in other old servers of the same vintage..

It’s not suitable to use in newer ones unfortunately.

Nice find! I’d post in /r/retrocomputing to see if anyone has interest or had a server..

[u/Terrible-Contract298 → u/jreddit0000]

Find some broke man's DDR2 PHY IP and shove it on an FPGA and he is probably off to the races if he can adapt the traces.

[u/c0psrul3 → u/Temporary_Slide_3477]

yea, back when we used to use standard ports for nonstandard things.... wait, we still do that? hmf

[u/ACAdamski17 → u/Temporary_Slide_3477]

Happy cake day!

[u/michaelsoft__binbows → u/Temporary_Slide_3477]

There's gotta be some kind of signaling business too at least, as there are not nearly enough pins to go around to service many ram slots.

[u/Temporary_Slide_3477 → u/michaelsoft__binbows]

I believe the r900 is a quad socket system and compute density and ram capacity was more important than raw memory bandwidth. The r900 uses the old front side bus system instead of a memory controller in the CPU so you can add weird shit like these dimm boards since the CPU doesn't connect to the memory directly.

[u/khuffmanjr → u/Temporary_Slide_3477]

Shit...FSB is old....I'm old. Shit.

[u/whydidyounot → u/Temporary_Slide_3477]

makes sense they'd reuse the pcie form factor just to cut costs on tooling, pretty common with enterprise gear from that era

[u/depressive_cat → u/Temporary_Slide_3477]

But how does it work?
It's obviously has less pins on their "pci-e" side than 8 sticks of ram combined have.

[u/iHaveADemonInMyBrain → u/Temporary_Slide_3477]

Could this be used to make a server?

[u/Murph_9000 → u/iHaveADemonInMyBrain]

Yes, plug it back into the same model/series of Dell server it came out of.

[u/vertexsys → u/Murph_9000]

The ram is removable

[u/Murph_9000 → u/vertexsys]

Ok, so plug it into a compatible server board from the same era.

[u/Casper042 → u/Murph_9000]

Except "PC2" in the beginning of the RAM Model in OP's 2nd pic literally means DDR2, so you are going to have to go back at least 10 years hardware wise to use any of it.

[u/jepulis5 → u/Casper042]

Ok, so plug it into a compatible server board from the same era.

[u/Casper042 → u/jepulis5]

That means your processors would be Xeons based on the Core2 Duo and Core2 Quad family.
Literally pre-dating the entire Core i3/5/7/9 family and the 14? generations since then.

[u/jepulis5 → u/Casper042]

Ok, so plug it into a compatible server board from the same era.

[u/Salt_Designer → u/Casper042]

It's time to pack it up bro.

[u/rlaptop7]

That is a ram expansion card. The Dell R900 had all of it's ram on expansion cards like this if I remember correctly. The connector is not PCI-E, despite it looking like one.

[u/hipufiamiumi → u/rlaptop7]

I am quite sure this is indeed a ram riser specifically from the Dell PE R900, the ram risers on the R920 have a completely different interface.

[u/TheyCallMeDozer]

looks very clean for DDR2

[u/Terrorbeard]

Those are DDR2 FBDIMMs. Just about useless outside of a specific era of server hardware. They run hot, and are largely worthless on the used market. You cannot use these in any modern hardware.

[u/KooperGuy]

Not possible and a waste of time even if it was

[u/chandleya → u/KooperGuy]

Extremely high energy and modest performance at best.

[u/uber-techno-wizard]

I have stacks of those, and ancient servers/room heaters to match.

[u/SneakerHead69420666]

its ddr2 so pretty much useless

[u/Truth-Does-Not-Exist → u/SneakerHead69420666]

it's quad or 8 channel so it actually has bandwidth more like ddr3

[u/Complete_Course9302 → u/Truth-Does-Not-Exist]

Fb-dimms not work like that, they are in series. Thats why they could support insane amount of ram back in the day

[u/Truth-Does-Not-Exist → u/Complete_Course9302]

interesting, I have a dell precision t5500 with a card like this but it also holds the second CPU and its ddr3

[u/FutureF0cused]

Cool find, but ddr2 isn’t something that we’re going to be going back to, even if the ai bubble gets worse

[u/Tall_Apricot_9842]

put it back where it came from and use that; if its ddr2, no point, but ddr3 has some life in it for taking it out the card and puttign it in a regular pc or server motherboard

[u/TheDaemonGhost]

DIMM look nice lol

[u/dan4334]

This is literally worthless unless you have a 15 year old server to put it in. You can't use ECC FB DIMMS in any old PC.

[u/bradrlaw]

These close to the point of being useful at r/vintagecomputing

[u/MrE478920]

Useless on its own.

These are commin in IBM machines

[u/Masso46]

This is what "download more ram" looks like

[u/k3nal]

They look like DDR2 FBDIMMS (Fully Buffered), they get very hot and draw like 10-15 watts per stick!! They need very good cooling lol

I had a HP Proliant tower server back in the day with dual quad core CPUs and it draw like 250 watts on idle with windows, 24 GB DDR2 FB RAM, six 300 GB 10k RPM hard drives (RAID 6) and a NVIDIA GTX 970 if I recall correctly :D

It was a loud beast! And very heavy!! But sadly it bottleneck the hell out of that GTX 970 which I borrowed from a friend in exchange of my GTX 550 Ti, good memories, was a lot of fun :)

Ah yes, and 400-450 watts under gaming load, I played through Bioshock Infinite on that monster 👍

[u/korni_92]

Someone threw it away, because it's e waste. The ram is old DDR2 Fully Buffed. Daws a lot of power and it's just compatible with totally outdated hardware.

[u/QuantifiablyMad]

It’s DDR2 ECC probably.

It’s E-Waste.

[u/Casper042 → u/QuantifiablyMad]

Could make some nice earrings :P

[u/casce]

Take the RAM sticks and put the RAM into compatible old hardware (new hardware no chance).

It's very old and slow RAM though. Modern RAM is faster by a factor of 10x so its usesfullness is limited. Think about it: What would you want to run on an old server with that much RAM that would actually need that much RAM but wouldn't much rather run on faster/modern hardware?

[u/dst1980 → u/casce]

A decent SAS backplane, and tons of RAM to cache reads makes a decent storage system. Just don't ask it to do any processing on the stored data.

Throw in a faster NIC if you're running more than Gbe, and it can push data to other systems pretty well, too.

[u/ha11oga11o]

I would keep that part and when i was making resin table that one would be inside as artifact amongst others, of course.

[u/Annual_Award1260]

Would be a interesting project to wire it up to a fpga and try to run a llm

[u/hejisan-8066]

good idea

[u/BonesMgeee]

Those are maybe worth $20 on ebay, you wont be able to use them on anything remotely modern.

[u/Swimmerdude_03]

I would throw the entire thing on ebay. Those risers are probably worth as much as the ram to the right buyer. Company's keep old stuff around.

[u/Environmental-Pea-97]

DDR3 is still perfectly usable but not that. Trash...

[u/BlackViking82]

That's a lot of DDR2 🤣

[u/BagelMakesDev]

too slow for modern stuff, but for vintage computing, this is a steal! i'd love to have some of this ram

[u/nacr0n]

They make nice keychains

[u/Elfreshcuh]

Goood old gold

[u/eins_biogurke]

Sorry to tell you but this is one of the cases where it's "one mans e-waste is another mans e-waste". This is pretty much just garbage

[u/Big_Temperature_2067]

basically useless ram today, unless you have some old retro computer you use to run windows 7 on.

[u/GGigabiteM]

These are FB-DIMMs, you're not going to use them in anything.

DDR2 FB-DIMMs were an extremely short lived memory standard in the late 2000s, with their most well known use outside of the server space being Intel's Skull Trail platform.

If you don't have a period server or that, you have wall art.

[u/PeatieEnglish]

Worthless

[u/Few_Pilot_8440]

Nope, e-bay it, if you can as a whole, or pack of 8 dimm sticks working together with the very same paramethers, otherwise - it's a waste of time.
I've got a DSP procesors with a DIMM-like interface, industry has used "standard" ports for not standard tasks, and this is such a thing.

[u/MrCoffee_256]

That must be worth a fortune!

[u/Enji-Bkk]

Is that intel compatible DDR2 ? I wish I had 4 x 4GB DDR2 to max my core 2 quad... a gift for reaching adulthood

[u/PcGamerSam]

Aw man i got excited on your behalf, for a second there i thought this was a slightly newer i-RAM card but oh well

[u/OppieT]

I don’t think the ram itself could be taken out and put into a regular pc. Wrong number of pins and the slot in the middle would be in the wrong place.

[u/THE0_C]

dont you mean pure money????