Intel S2600CP2, 2 x E5-2630 and 32 GB DDR3?

Hey everyone,

New to the community but have really enjoyed learning from the lurking I’ve been doing over the last little while.

I’m looking for feedback on some items from a local Kijiji (Canadian Craigslist) seller. For an ask price of $500 CAD (approx. $380 USD), they are offering:

Intel S2600CP2 motherboard: (Similar-ish to the popular GA-7PESH2 minus 10 gbe NIC?)
Xeon E5-2630 (x2)
32 GB of DDR3 ECC (16 x 2GB)

From what I can tell this seems like a fairly good deal, with a rough price out of $250 for the mobo, $100 for the CPUs and $50 for the RAM (All CAD). These are comparable prices to the anniversary build for the same features, which is tough to do in Canada since shipping and import charges really ruin the price to performance ratio.

Obviously the value to me depends heavily on my use case, and I think the fit is pretty good. I run an Unraid server with a typical Plex stack that servers about 5 households. I typically have 3 - 5 transcoded streams on a given night. Currently I get by with an old repurposed gaming PC that runs an i7 920, 16 GB of DDR3 and a GTX 1050 that saves my bacon with hardware encoding. So I would see a jump from 5k to 16k in passmark, with lots of upgrade upside in terms of RAM and PCIE expansion that I don’t have currently have. Also my current hardware is getting on to 10 years old (maybe only 2 years of 24/7 use though) and I’ve read that generally that is about as long as you should trust consumer grade.

Anyways, just looking for feedback and if I’ve overlooked something that would lead this to being a terrible mistake. Cheers

Seems OK. I dunno how US prices translate into the CA market, though.

We’ve used that board before in a build, you can find it here.

That was my impression of it, not an insane deal but not bad either. I think if I can get him down to $400 CAD it would be worth my while.

As an FYI, general expectation for CAD prices is the US price x 1.3 - 1.4, which is the current conversion rate. It is rarely economical for us to buy main stream stuff online from US sites, as Canadian retailers generally try to match US prices.

The ram make-up is less than ideal. I pay about $12 per 8GB stick, and that would be much better than 16 2GB sticks. 32GB of RAM would be fine if it weren’t filling all the slots.

I agree, 2 GB ram sticks are less than ideal, so I was pretty happy when he told me that there in fact 8 GB sticks (same price). I’m contemplating 64 GB total, if I can get them for $12.5 a stick

Much better with 8gb sticks.

Ended up getting the motherboard, the 2 CPUs and 64 GB of RAM (4x16GB) for $380 CAD (~ $290 USD). I’ll post the final build once everything is together and up and running.