> >if motherboards were sparse why not look on ebay or something? > I've never tried that. I thought that newegg had pretty good coverage for motherboards, and

> >if motherboards were sparse why not look on ebay or something? > I've never tried that. I thought that newegg had pretty good coverage for motherboards, and they make it easy to filter by CPU type, whereas I don't think eBay does. I just tried searching eBay for "intel 2011-v3 dual" and I did get it's worth checking out supermicro site itself https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboards/server-boards https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboards/server-b... just select the platform processor series, check which board seems the best fit and then try if searching that on ebay yields any results > >this motherboard seems like a really bad choice, because it's for a workstation not a server - doesn't have vga out, does have audio output and doesn't have IPMI > I don't need audio output, so that doesn't make a difference to me. VGA output would be convenient, but it's also pretty easy to fix with a cheap GPU. IPMI would have been nice, and some readers have pointed out to me that SuperMicro has IPMI on a very similar board, so I should have gotten that one. I agree - you don't need audio output, but you've paid for it. That was my point. You could've saved on all three things by choosing the right motherboard. (edit: 3 things - integrated audio, dedicated gpu, kvm) > >i'd also go for a better powersupply than bronze - at least gold, if that thing runs 24/7. The return of investment is like ~2.5yrs depending on the PSU (at least in my country) > Does that assume the server runs under load 24/7? My CPUs are at very low load most of the time. basic PSU calculators can help you - https://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator https://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator -- just fiddle with cpu utilization and computer utilization time and you'll see also you might wanna check bios what mode you're running - if performance or eco or whatever (honestly not sure if workstation MBs are different in this regard, i am dealing with server MBs only) but you might be running on higher TDP than you think anyway