twizmwazin

While component selection for servers is fairly complicated and highly specific to what you are doing, generally any normal hardware can be used as server hardware. There is server hardware that has additional features that are very useful in server applications (ECC memory support, multiple NICs, IPMI, etc), none of that is actually required. What you will find advantageous though, usually, is very high CPU core counts. Many server applications, unlike desktop applications, are designed really well to fully utilize many CPU cores. So, depending on your budget, it may be in your interest to look at a platform that allows you to have more than 4 cores, such as X99, X299, a Xeon platform, or AMD's Ryzen platforms. On another note, if you are going for cost effectiveness, there are great used servers that can be had off ebay. I recently picked up a server similar to this one: http://www.ebay.com/itm/SUPERMICRO-6016T-MR-1U-SERVER-2x-E5504-24GB-NO-HDD-CSE-512-X8DTL-I-/172669033834?hash=item2833e05d6a It has been running well, the only issue is that it sounds like a jet engine about to take off. Buying a used unit like these will be much cheaper than building a new server.

That might be the wrong link.

What is Deborian? Do you mean Debian? Also I'm assuming you aren't referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS My vote is on CentOS for servers and Fedora for desktops

I'm not sure if OP ever resolved this issue. If you haven't I'm going to have to throw another vouch in for FreeNAS 9.10 (and soon 11). I too got burned by corral, installing it on my brand new nas with ssd storage, expecting near-gigabit speeds for smb and nfs. I eventually scrapped it and installed 9.10, and it has been running like a breeze. I updated to the release candidates for FreeNAS 11 and it has also been working excellently.

I'm not sure why you are against using ebay. For used server equipment there are some excellent deals. I recently bought a barebones server similar to this one: http://www.ebay.com/itm/SUPERMICRO-6016T-MR-1U-SERVER-2x-E5504-24GB-NO-HDD-CSE-512-X8DTL-I-/172669033834?hash=item2833e05d6a That will come with 2 quad core CPUs, 24GB of RAM, and everything else minus a hard drive. If you've got a spare drive from an old laptop or whatever you can add that and have yourself a good server for well under $200, and it even would come with some enterprise grade functionality like ECC memory and multiple NICs, if that matters to you. The only drawback is that the fans can be quite loud, as is typical with compact server hardware, so if you are going to be running this is a main part of the house it might be a slight drawback.

My current graphics card is a r9 270X. I'd like to update to have better amdgpu support under Linux.

The Z2's camera looks awesome and Debrand has a skin for just about anything.