chuckula wrote:One advantage of the i5: if this truly is a *server* then for light graphical needs you have the IGP right there.
I considered the i5, but when I can get a quad-core Athlon II X4 or Phenom II X4 for less than half the price
and get a board that not only has SATA 6 gbps, but has
six of 'em (and get ECC memory support to boot), I'm hard-pressed to go that route. Especially when you're telling me CPU performance probably isn't the biggest concern...
chuckula wrote:I'm a Linux guy so the word "server" for me == headless so Vishera would be just fine too, but keep that in mind if you need to run Windows.
I haven't decided, actually. I've been poking around with Linux lately, and the fact that I can get a server-class operating system
for free interests me. The holdback for me is that I know how to do everything I want to do in Windows. I can set up a Minecraft Server, I can set up a Mumble/Murmur server (Minecraft and Murmur seem easy enough in Linux, though) and I can set up a Filezilla FTPS server. I'm still lost on VPNs (last I used was Hamachi, and I'd really like to go OpenVPN), but studying.
chuckula wrote:If you don't really mean *server* and want to play games on this thing, then you'll need to consider the GPU too.
Negative. I want hosted services, no games. I've got two good desktops for games -- one for me, and one for my girlfriend. The entire reason FOR this server is so that I can offload some of the work of hosting that my desktop is currently performing (well, not
currently, since the power supply died) to it, and let it go to sleep. I just don't want my desktop running 24/7, out of concern for both reliability of parts (the fan died on my PSU, and it overheated -- thankfully taking nothing else with it), and out of concern for power consumption -- my desktop has a couple hard drives and a Radeon HD 6850 running alongside, so it consumes more power than necessary during periods when I'm not using it and it's just serving external connections.
chuckula wrote:I'd really focus on making sure you have fast storage and good networking. If SSDs are within your budget, then focus on those and you'll be fine. If SSD's are not in your budget, I'd consider getting a more expensive but hopefully more reliable hard drive. The greens sound nice, but WD-reds are supposedly designed for NAS configurations and might work better long-term.
I'm not made of money, but I
do want an SSD rather badly for this build. Not necessarily for storing content (I think HD video can adequately be served to my local network from the low-RPM hard drives), but for fast application performance. Like I said, the 60 GB OCZ Agility 3 was looking rather good, given the performance and the size of it. I think I could probably put and run all the servers off of the SSD, maybe get a 16 GB USB 3.0 stick as a dedicated temp file drive, and store music/video/backups on the hard drive. I figure the low-RPM hard drives would work for my uses (they're also cheaper than most equivalently sized-hard drives), but I'll take a look at the WD-Reds.
chuckula wrote:There are some nice Intel NICs that have excellent drivers if you need to add more networking capability.
I might, if they're cheap. I'm on a budget, but I'm willing to spend the money I need to to get this thing doing well. Additionally, I want it to be useful for a few years -- so adding hard drives as space runs thin is definitely in the works.