Blabbering
I’d like to first start with a big thank you 
to the discord community for all their help and answers to my silly questions.
For some background, I’ve been a PC gamer and have been building my own gaming PCs since my first 486 133Mhz machine back in the early 90s. I’ve probably built about 10+ rigs over the years, but I have to say this has been the most fun I’ve had building a computer in 15-20 years. I just built a new gaming rig in January and spent a lot of money on top of the line parts…and it was rather unsatisfying, cause I really didn’t have to do much research or much work. It was like putting together a Snap-Tite model tie-fighter - sure it looks cool when done, but was done in 15 mins and didn’t have to paint it or cut anything or glue anything or swear at decals for hours on end.
So, as a result of building the new gaming rig, I had my old rig, which was an i7-2600K with a 750GB SSD, EVGA GTX970 OC GPU, a Corsair 600T White case, a bunch of Cougar super quiet 120mm fans, etc. It was beefy enough, so I put plex on it and had leeched some movies from a friend and was running that for a few weeks. Meh - it worked, but stuttering video and such (variety of causes that I learned later through this process - but at the time my brain said to build a dedicated box). My buddy and I both started looking for how to build a better plex.
I did some research, and more research, and more…finding serverbuilds.net and JDM_WAAT subreddit and other resources, we both got in deep.
About 3 weeks later (after probably spending too much time during working hours researching) I had ruled out build a pre-build based on some discord discussions, but mostly videos where I heard the rocket-engines that are the proprietary fans in most rackmount servers. I’ve been in dozens of data centers and know how loud it is - but when you have a standalone server in a house it’s a whole different beast.
So, I settled on the NSFW build and given a pretty loose budget and my tendency to go bigger than I know I need, I ended up with below.
Part List
| Component | Part | Price | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Case | Corsair Graphite Series 600T Arctic White | - | Re-purposed old rig |
| Case | Rosewill 4U Server Chassis/Server Case/Rackmount Case, Metal Rack Mount Computer Case Support with 15 Bays & 7 Fans Pre-Installed (RSV-L4500) | 152.77 | Old case just couldn’t accommodate all the drives/mobo/cables effectively |
| CPU | Dual Intel Xeon E5-2650 V2 | 120 | OBO shipped locally, sales tax included |
| SAS Cables | 2x Mini SAS CableCreation Internal Mini SAS 36pin SFF-8087 to (4) 29pin SFF-8482 connectors with SATA Power,3.3FT | 26.78 | |
| Motherboard | GA-7PESH2 plus I/O Shield | 185 | |
| PSU | CORSAIR HX Series HX850 850W ATX12V 2.3 / EPS12V 2.91 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply | - | Re-purposed old rig |
| Thermal Paste | Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Compound | - | From recent gaming rig I built in Feb |
| Case Fans | 6x COUGAR Vortex PWM 120mm (CF-V12HP) Cooling Fan | - | Re-purposed old rig |
| CPU Cooler | 2x Arctic Freezer 12 | 47.44 | |
| RAM | 32GB (4x8GB) PC3-10600R DDR3 ECC REG 2Rx4 240-Pin 1333MHz Server RAM Memory | 45.58 | OBO shipped locally, sales tax included (same place as cpus) |
| USB OS Loader | Kingston Digital 16 GB DataTraveler SE9 G2 USB 3.0 Flash Drive (DTSE9G2/16GB) | 6.35 | |
| SATA power splitter | N/A | - | Had enough with PSU and did a couple SATA cable mods to hook to molex |
| SATA Cables | SATA III 6.0 Gbps SATA Cable (SATA 3 Cable) | - | Had many extra from old builds |
| Total | 426.98 | ||
| Disks: | |||
| SAS | 6x 4TB 3.5 inch 7200 SAS SED HDD ST4000NM0043 | 240 | $40 ea OBO - may be able to sell IBM drive trays - great condition |
| SSD | Samsung 840 EVO-Series 750GB 2.5-Inch SATA III SSD MZ-7TE750BW | - | Re-purposed old rig - cache drive |
| SATA | 1x 10TB Western Digital EasyStore (Best Buy Exclusive) External | 169.59 | PARITY DRIVE - got price match on the $160 deal (bought 3 days earlier at $180); Then had to exchange as the drive was bad; |
| SATA | 1x 8TB Western Digital EasyStore (Best Buy Exclusive) External | - | additional storage - already owned from black friday deal |
| SATA | 1x 1TB HGST 2.5"" laptop drive - pulled from laptop when purchased, used to backup things externally via USB3.0 enclosure | - | Used to backup existing docs/backups on 8TB external and move to server once built Did not leave in build - just used as unassigned drive for transfers |
| SATA | 3x 1.5TB WD drives for external misc backup/storage | - | Used to backup existing plex library and move to server once built Did not leave in build - unassigned drives and transfer to array |
| Total | 409.59 | ||
| Misc costs discovered during build | |||
| Tools | T10 Tamperproof Torx bit to take IBM Drives out of tray | 1.9 | |
| PWM Fan Splitter | PWM Fan Splitter Adapter Cable Sleeved Braided Y Splitter Computer PC 4 Pin Fan Extension Power Cable 1 to 3 Converter 10 inches (2 Pack) TeamProfitcom | 9.53 | Needed to support cougar fans in new rosewill 4U case. They can’t daisy chain, so needed something. |
| - | |||
| Total | 11.43 | ||
| GRAND TOTAL | 848.00 |
Pictures
Has Unraid on it and thanks to Spaceinvader One’s videos, I’ve got my VPN, reverse proxy, and some other tweaks going.
Overall - LOVE this server and had a ton of fun doing it. It’s hosting the typical plex media server stuff. I have a VM to play around with Linux again - currently hosting a game server at the moment. I’m also planning on putting the GTX970 card in it eventually so I can game stream to my Nvidia Shields in the house. I keep finding more and more to do with it.
Again, many thanks to the discord channel for all your help, and to the Serverbuilds.net community for providing such great resources!
Shhhh don’t tell my wife!