I'm getting ready to put together a server for a VERY small office (of only 3 computers). They will be mostly hosting Quickbooks files and some other software over the network on it. 1 of the systems will be in another city about 300 miles away which will be connected via a hardware VPN. I've never really dabbled with server motherboards, but in the past they seemed to serve a much more useful role. Back in the day a server board gave way to optimized drivers, chipsets, ECC, RAID and of course for the higher end, a second socket for dual processors. But when looking at it these days, it seems almost pointless to purchase a server board/chipset unless your going to be slapping a Xeon or Opteron in it. Is this for the most part a fair assessment or am I missing something? I realize that if your servicing a network with a good number of users and load that a server specific CPU may be a must, but in this case it just plain out isn't.
I'm thinking that either a little i3-2120 should cut it, or maybe... an i5 just to give them a little room to grow. Due to all of the talk about bulldozer being "really a server chip", and the fact that its supports ECC ram, is this something to consider over an Intel setup? This customer really wants to pinch a penny and find a nickle.