Martin's new Server

Hi Guys,
I built my current server 3 years ago when i bought my house. It was designed to function as a file server as well as an HTPC (home theatre PC) so serving file out on the network while also being connected to my living room TV to watch YouTube, Netflix, and my old DVD collection which I converted to digital to save space. It was built with 2 considerations:

1. It had to fit in my current unit which was designed for set top boxes etc
2. It had to be LOW power consumption, to run 24/7 and not cost me money!

So this is what I ended up with:

• Coolermaster Elite 110a Mini ITX case
• Asus AM1i-A Mini ITX Socket AM1 motherboard
• AMD Athlon 5350 Quad Core 2.05GHz (25w TDP)
• 8GB Crucial Ballistix Sport (2x4GB) DDR3 1600
• Transcend 60GB SSD for the OS
• Seagate 2TB 7200RPM mechanical drive for Storage

Fast forward 3 years and I have currently bought a new house, somthing much bigger than the previous place, and i now finally have a computer room for my machines along with a cupboard to put networking equipment and a server (more on this cupboard when we start kitting it out, im wiring the house with Cat 6 etc). So it was time for a new server, this time the machine wont be used as an HTPC just purely file serving for now but i wanted enough headroom to be able to do more with it in the future without having to upgrade.

so i hit the drawing board to see what specs i wanted
this time size wasnt an issue, i do plan on eventually putting a rack in but not for a while so i went with a traditional PC case rather than rackmount case for now. Spruce had been using a few "DEEP COOL" generic M-ATX cases for his budget builds for customers and for the tiny price of £15 these cases absolutely look the part, are resonably well built, come with a very quiet blue LED 120MM fan and the door on the front cover was a nice feature so i knew one of these were ideal, and now knew i needed a MATX motherboard.

I was looking at 7th and 8th Gen Intel stuff and to be honest 8th Gen motherboards were far too expensive, then when i look at 7th Gen its more resonable but DDR4 memory at the moment is crazy expensive. This got me thinking, im going to be spending £80-£90 on 8GB of DDR4 memory when my current server which is being stripped down has 8GB of DDR3 so i started looking at Intel Socket 1150 and 4th Gen stuff instead.

eBuyer still has stock of some 1150 motherboards brand new so that suits perfectly now onto the CPU, as i said this machine is going to be used 100% as a file server to begin with so it needs to be power efficient but have enough horse power should i need it to add some more work onto it. a quick look into 4th gen CPU's i was originally looking at a mid range i5 so i had 4 cores at my disposal, they were still holding quite a lot of money then i came across the S variant chips, These chips are traditionally used in ultra small form factor machines, they sacrafice a little performance for low power draw/ heat output. I found the sweetspot between performance v cost to be the i5-4460s, Clocked at 2.9GHz and can TURBO upto 3.4GHz the chip has a TDP of 65w compaired to the "desktop" variants 84w.

So here was the final spec:

• DEEP COOL M-ATX Case
• ASUS H81M-C M-ATX Motherboard
• Intel i5-4460s 2.9GHz, 6MB Cache, 3.4GHz Turbo
• Crucial Ballistix 8GB DDR3 1600 (2x4GB) from old server
• Corsair VS350 PSU from old server
• Transcend 60GB SSD from old server
• Seagate 2TB 7200RPM 8MB for Data From old server
• Windows 10 PRO

I also bought a new ASUS DVD-RW drive to share over the network if required and a Startech floppy bay sized card reader which plugs into one of the motherboards internal USB headers (would have been a shame not to make use of that floppy bay!)

The finished article...

quite a nice little build and i just love the case for some reason! Will get some benchmarks up soon now that i have it all up and running.