Shaner2015

Just a quick update, found a couple more decent deals that fit in my budget and parts requirement. I got the 750w non-modular psu for $30 CAD plus shipping, and an evga GeForce GTX 560 ti 1gb graphics card to handle movie streaming for $25 CAD plus shipping. So far for the PSU, 2xCPU, GPU, motherboard, 16gb of ram and a 160gb HDD for the OS has cost roughly $120 Canadian with shipping. Not too bad if you ask me, so I should come in right on budget or under!

I'm hoping to run 4x3 TB SAS drives with a PCIe controller, and yes I already have a cooler, ECC ram, an OS hard drive and a few other bits. You guys are probably right about the machine taking up too much power to run 24/7, but I had the idea to essentially run it certain weekends or days I want to game with friends on a dedicated server for Minecraft, stream a Lord of the rings marathon without buffering or have the ability to store massive amounts of data off my main PC. For the price of the board plus the fact that I already had most other parts around made it worth it to me to use an old server that isn't as power efficient or strong as a newer board.

Hey thanks for the reply! I have fudged around quite a bit with the LGA 775/1151/1156 platform and for some reason I'm addicted to trying to make shitty machines decent again. So although I am aware there are better deals for better boards with faster chipsets etc, I really enjoy socket 775 and wanted to try my hand at server building. Probably a waste of money for most people but it brings me joy!

Hey guys, first post here so I will try and keep it short and sweet and stay within the forum guidelines. I recently won an eBay auction for an older dell PowerEdge t300 server motherboard socketed for the LGA 775. The board came with a xeon 3323 cpu for $32 Canadian shipped to my door. With this in hand, and having to happen to have some spare 16gb ddr2 ECC ram I thought it was a good time to tackle my long awaited multi media server. Essentially on a budget of roughly $300 Canadian I plan to put this machine together to be able to stream movies and music as well as have a massive amount of hard drive space for all my needs. That being said, I don't know much about server hardware. I know this board takes 24 pin ATX and 4 pin cpu so that's not a problem, but there are a few connections I don't recognize ( see zoomed in picture of large blue plug on the top right above the ram slots). Also, can anyone point out if there are SAS hard drive connection points on this board? It was an option from the factory but I am not sure if this one has it and don't know how to identify them. Either way, more to follow in the coming weeks, hope to have it running Ubuntu by Christmas