Starting a Dell Poweredge 2900

When those 8 fans start a spinning up, it's a torrent.

This is just a Dell PowerEdge 2900 that came with initially a single core 1.6ghz xeon if i recall right, with 4x1GB DDR2 ECC 667mhz ram along with a Seagate 15,000rpm SAS 146GB drive. It was for some stupid reason, used as a wheel alignment machine in a napa mechanics shop. They paid a stupid amount of money for this thing.

Anyways i rescued it from being tossed in the dump. Decided to modify it in 2011/20012. I managed to snag some Xeon E5450s and an extra dell heatsink. I then took a soldering iron and melted the plastic plate and the pci-e slot on one of the 8x slots in order to install a dedicated 16x GPU, i then also installed a sound card. While i don't have it currently installed i also opted for a USB 3.2 pci-e add-in card too to expand the rear IO and get a bit more performance since all the other ports are USB 2.0 only.

This system was then sold to a restaurant for 24/7 video recording, stuffed with 4x 2TB Sata drives and later an additional 2x 6TB drives for the video footage to be recorded to, as well as doubling as an office system to do payroll, POS server tasks, and variety of other 24/7 tasks, including being the internet radio.

The system was used until 2022 when the restaurant was sold and the new owner demanded a "quieter" and faster machine since the dual cpu (8 cores) weren't doing their job as fast as they demanded. Coincidently even with the newer machine that was built, they were somehow expecting to be able to go through 12x 4k cameras at 64x speed without the system hitching, honestly that's a ton of data and video decoding, so even with a new machine while certainly faster, was still hitching just as much.

I of course reinherited the poweredge, filled to the brim with dust and actually cinnamon powder being the most noticable scent. The insides were filthy and this video is taken after i pulled most of it apart, put much of it through a detergentless dishwasher, Fair bit of manual scrumming, tons of alcohol and paper towel and q-tips, scrubbing of every individual fan blade and using the q-tips to scrub every part of the board as well that i could reach.

The northbridge heatsink unfortunately at some point, fell off, one of the soldered loops that the retention clip holds onto popped off the board and the heatsink fell off. So i scrubbed the chip as best i could to get the caked on hardened thermal paste off and waiting for a thermal adheisive oversized heatsink to mount direct.

The system now starts up and boots fine, though i think the cmos battery finally failed as it's registering incorrect dates and settings were reset. I'm also going to attempt to see if i can get 16GB or so of the DDR2 ECC memory from somewhere and swap the 15k rpm cheetah drive with a 870 evo.

At the moment it's nothing more than a toy. CPU thermals are registering 28-30C (MX-6 thermal paste)