Fan Powers On Their Retired World Of Warcraft Server Blade

Comment by cracklingice

Now they run them from one AMD Epyc.

Comment by MorbidFable

I heard new world could use some extra servers, let them rent it out lmao

Comment by thefrostmage

Comment by AddictedPoi

When players are fighting a world boss near the raid entrance to Sanctum of Domination, it is impossible to quest in Korthia because everything is so laggy. I can believe that a number of potato servers are still in use over at Blizzard.

Comment by Contrive

Comment by Ced42

I bet one of the guys working at blizz swapped the CPU's out and took them home, figuring no one would ever turn these things on and maybe even figured it would be a great laugh down the road when someone realised.

I doubt it. The Opteron 275 actually came out first in May 2005 at a retail price of $1299 each. It was pretty powerful at the time. I think the benchmark listing is just showing the first date it appeared on their site. In the early days of WoW, $2600 just for the CPUs was a pretty penny. It's just that there have been a LOT of advances in the last sixteen years.

Comment by exxcalibur85

Certainly it brings back memories...

That's an HP Compaq ProLiant BL25p blade server. I was decommissioning them like 10 years ago. They can only run in p-Class blade enclosure which supplies its power and connectivity. I doubt that he can get another housing but good luck.

Normally the disks are wiped clean before decommissioning even physically destroyed sometimes, but still the data may be recovered by professionals. Considering the server operating system the data has no importance at this point of course.

Comment by CarrionCarcass

Comment by Murzac

I don't see why it wouldn't be legal. It doesn't contain any of the old data, it's just hardware. The only fancy things about it are that it has WoW's logo on it, and it has the history of having been a server blade for WoW back in the day.

Comment by Salvadore

As web developerI would this is not cool at all, it's just booting up some old server, to do pointless tests on!

Comment by Thagesthoughts

Why wouldn't it be? There's no game data on the hardware; this is effectively no different from digging out your dad's old 512MB-hard drive PC from the 90s and getting it to work again. The only inherent value is it's a collector's item, so in this hypothetical, your dad's old PC was very well maintained over the years and kept in good condition.

If someone wants to use what's effectively a souped-up potato battery for whatever reason, it having once served as a WoW server doesn't stop someone from doing so.

Comment by Lomedae

Is this legal? It sounds like they're going to try to actually use it.

Lol. Obviously it is they were auctioned off by Blizzard years ago. They are free to do with it what they want.

It's a server. Blogging Is Good For Your No data is present.

Comment by Kelras

Its wild to think that Blizzard used to run their servers from these absolute pos relics.

Amazing!

And nowadays their servers are in bigger disarray than back when they used to run their servers from these "absolute pos relics" x)

Comment by Alixie

wow

Comment by slashtwo

Too cool!

Comment by Ectothrix

Remember Dark Age of Camelot? When they launched they had a few desktop computers running Windows Server. Talk about overloaded LOL

Comment by Kondey

This is so cool! Blogging Is Good For Your

Comment by quizmaster121

Possibly purchase others and restore them to working order---well they ain't getting my Grizzly Hills one :)

I've had it for over a decade still trying to find a good place to display it... just so heavy its hard to find the right spot

Comment by Scrotacious

Based on the boot screen, this blade has two AMD Opteron 275 CPUs, which came out in 2008. That means this server is from the 2008 time frame.

You can find it here at this link, showing a score of 839.

For comparison, a Ryzen 9 5950X scores around 46116, while the top of the line AMD EPYC 7763 scores 87,767.

So, yeah. Back in 2008, you were running WoW on a potato that was being served by a mashed potato.

You don't know anything about server and distributed computing do you?Depends on what the blade was tasked with. If it's handling something like chat, or a logging server, you don't need a balls to the wall machine.