Help me finish building my monster...

[bigredshark]

So, over the past year or so I've collected a large box of freebies that suppliers have chucked in with server orders I've placed and some other stuff I got at the same time with a healthy discount.

I now want to chuck it all together into a workstation for home, it'll run both windows and linux at various time, I'll use it for compiling stuff for work, some rendering and video re-encoding for myself and the occassional game.

What I have is basically as follows...

6x 72GB 15k SAS Hard drives

HP e200 PCIe SAS Controller

2x Xeon x5160 Processors

8GB RAM (in FB-DIMMS)

which is all great (I'm particularly looking forward to putting those drives in RAID10) but I don't have either a motherboard for a desktop which will take the processors and memory (and graphics cards and such will depend on the motherboard.)

So, what do you reckon I should do with this little lot??

 

[BillytheImpaler]

Have a look at mobos from Tyan and Supermicro, as they usually have the best DP workstation 'boards. No matter what mobo you get you'll end up with a PCI-e 16x graphics card.

EDIT: The MSI 5000X Speedster-A4 looks promising as well. It has a 16x slot for your graphics card and an 8x slot for your SAS card. The price isn't half bad either, all things considered.

EDIT2: You should be honest with yourself though. You've got a pair of, essentially, 3 GHz Core 2 Duo processors and 8 GiB of RAM with poor latency. You might be able to sell the RAM and processors and make back enough to get a Q6600, a more consumer-oriented motherboard, and 8 GiB standard DDR2. You could then take the proc to 3.6 Ghz and stomp all over the DP setup. Don't let my DP rig know I was talking smack about them though.

 

[bigredshark]

Have a look at mobos from Tyan and Supermicro, as they usually have the best DP workstation 'boards. No matter what mobo you get you'll end up with a PCI-e 16x graphics card.

EDIT: The MSI 5000X Speedster-A4 looks promising as well. It has a 16x slot for your graphics card and an 8x slot for your SAS card. The price isn't half bad either, all things considered.

EDIT2: You should be honest with yourself though. You've got a pair of, essentially, 3 GHz Core 2 Duo processors and 8 GiB of RAM with poor latency. You might be able to sell the RAM and processors and make back enough to get a Q6600, a more consumer-oriented motherboard, and 8 GiB standard DDR2. You could then take the proc to 3.6 Ghz and stomp all over the DP setup. Don't let my DP rig know I was talking smack about them though.

I think the important point I forgot to mention was, it being christmas and having to buy presents, I don't want to spend a silly amount of money on making this into a desktop. If I had piles of cash to spend on something like this I'd just go out and buy a mac pro (or a HP xw series workstation but you get the idea...

I'm curious as to how good the xeons will be in comparison to a more consumer orientated rig, I've occassionally (only occassionally, I promise ) used development boxes at work (hp dl380 G5s) to do some video encoding and they really fly. In theory I have the parts to replicate this setup in a desktop, so it *should* be pretty quick. Are there any benchmarks out there showing xeons vs regular core 2 parts??

Thanks for the MSI board as well, that looks promising...