Picking Up Cheap Servers for Home Use

[BillHicksRIP]

Does anyone have any experience of picking up ex-corporate equipment for home use? There's tons of Xeon and Opteron-based servers going for buttons on auction sites and am wondering whether it's worth a punt on one for home use. I've built previous ESXi rigs on regular PC kit but some of these servers are dual-Xeons going for practically nothing. Any stories to share?

 

[BillHicksRIP]

Yeah, I'm resigned to continue building my own but am fed up trying to put together a home system with more than 16GB. I've spent weeks trying to find the right combination of kit which will tick all the boxes for a beefy server which will last a good while as well.

Needs to be able to run 24GB
A tri-channel X58 mobo with all 24GB loaded can only run the memory at 1066 or 800. I need to find out if it's possible/worth it to underclock 1333MHz DDR3 down to 1066

Needs to support VT-d as well as VT-x
Trying to find out for absolute certain if the mobo and CPU must both support VT-d has been a challenge. The Socket 1366 i7-9xxx CPUs that would go into the x58 boards do not support VT-d if you check on Intel's site. Other sources have said only the mobo needs to support it.

Need a hardware RAID 10 card which will run under ESX 4.1
Another bloody nightmare. The Whitebox HCL are all out of date and need revising for ESXi 4.1

Need at least 2 GBe cards.
The only bit I've got sorted!

I can't hang on till the end of the year for the purported quad-channel DDR3 SB chipsets to arrive but am bashing my head against the wall currently. I can pick up an IBM X3655 with dual Opterons and 32GB for £200 which is the reason for this post.