I seen the flame... I SEEN IT!!!!


The connector between the back plane and the motherboard toasted itself.

I heard the zzzzzzzzzzzzz then a pop then the inch tall flame then the smoke.

Good thing I was right there to unplug it and it was out in about a second, no obvious damage except some smoke stains on the underside of the board but both motherboards and the back-plane are toast and will not power on.

Don't know if it killed the four E5-2650L v1 cpu's or 32 sticks of ram but the hard drives are ok.

I will get around to test them later.

I have three that I bought back in 2017, they were new in the box with a production date of mid 2013.

I'm still running the other two servers.

Maybe time to upgrade to maybe some Xeon V3 servers.

Several years ago I was working on a pretty high end box running AutoCAD and I heard a loud pop and immediately smelled what I would describe as "burnt band-aides" but nothing happened. Later in the day I went to lunch and the machine went to sleep and it never woke up again. It popped a capacitor on the motherboard and cooked the drive in the process. Luckily I had saved to the server which not my common practice.

Xeons? Yawn.  Overpriced and under performing.

The new 3rd gen Epyc's are the way to go.  Far better performance, more pci-e lanes, better memory controller.  All for less money.

Had a bunch of supermicro servers do the exact same thing.

Used older Xeons are much cheaper that Epyc's.

I usually run two or three generations behind simply because they are so much cheaper and I do not need the latest and greatest performance.

My Proxmox server runs on a couple  E5-2620 V2 cpus that were about $12.00 each LOL.

Plus DDR3 ram is super cheap.

Ahh, good point.  If this is coming out of your own pocket, buying used definitely makes sense.  I'm used to work shelling out for my big toys.

Yep its for the house, so cheap and good enough is good enough.