I've been considering building a new computer with some seriously good hardware, but I've been considering old server hardware. If I were to choose to use dual Xeon E5 2670's and 64-128 GB of DDR3 ECC memory than I could have a single computer for all of my needs. I do like to game a fair bit, and am looking into using a graphics card such as a R9 290 or such on a server board and if I would have any issues.
Operating system and software wise, I've almost exclusively used Windows. I occassionally dabble into Linux hoping to learn more but have not yet dedicated enough energy into seriously transitioning, especially considering not all of my games are supported, but I will admit, more and more are becoming so. I would consider using virtual machines for gaming and running other OS's that I am interested in learning, as well as providing a clean coding environment for my learning.
If anyone has any experience of knowledge of such a build please feel free to provide me some feedback. As its looking now, it would be about $500 to get 2x CPUs, a motherboard, and 64-128GB of DDR3 ECC RAM. I have left out the PSU, CASE, and HARD DRIVEs for now because I am set on those if I need to get any. Thank you!
TLDR: Might build a badass computer using server hardware. Need to be able to run games, video editing, coding, VMs, entertainment, etc. Any input?