Was thinking of making a revolting desktop. I'm working in bioinformatics, and do coding and casual music production - so something with a bit more welly than my 4210U... Hopefully.
Basically, I was thinking either two Optron 6276's (maybe getting a 4 socket and later adding CPU's) - That, or two Xeon X5650's. What say people?
Also, cooling seems a little interesting - not sure what heat sinks I can put on socket G34 / 1366 (heard that the MOBO makers can use different mounting holes?). - I'm making my own case, so I'm looking at just passive heatsinks on the CPU's with strong intake providing air.
Also, looks cheapest to get pulled ECC DDR3 used than unbuffered DDR3 on ebay - any pointers? Not looking for obscene stability (though it would be welcome...)
Any general advice on using old server hardware is welcome! R
Looks good - only thing is I can get a LGA 1366 dual socket blade mobo for £30 (so USD ~40). Chips are around the same - what kind of performance change will the newer chip bring? Also, there are pairs of the Opterons for £50 (so 4 opteron 16 cores for £100, ...$140?)
If you're up to it you can actually buy a used server from eBay for around $220. Mine came with the two drives, 8GBs of DDR3, and two xeons (Sorry I can't recall the model). I stressed the crap outta that machine for 72 hours straight. Ever since she's been running perfectly.
Like mentioned before, it is easier and cheaper in the long run to just grab a full retired server. This PowerEdge R710 would be a great. It has loads of goodies in it for all kinds of fun for a decent price and you don't have to worry about little things like the heatsink. But do remember, used server equipment has been used in an entirely different setting than consumer stuff. This stuff has been powered on for long periods of time, even years. Milage may vary.
You can also look at full servers from https://savemyserver.com they are refurbished but come with 2 year warranties and some have build your own options.
If going with LGA 1366 (which in my opinion is generally better than Opteron) you might be better off with 2 x X5677 or X5687 quad cores rather than the hex-core X5650 (Assuming you won't be over-clocking). When I last used them X5650 felt unbearably slow compared to a Haswell chip in single threaded workloads. After replacing a pair of them with X5677's things felt better with minimal loss of multi-threaded performance despite the loss of 4 cores - thanks to the much higher clock-speeds.
A single E5-2670 would be a good chip, especially if you could somehow over-clock it a bit too - turbo boost all cores or similar.