March 25, 201115 yr Awesome deal at Microcenter. The motherboard only has 4 SATA connectors, but it does have a x16 and two x1 slots for expansion. http://www.microcenter.com/specials/email/CPlanding0325.html Intel® Core™ i3 2100 LGA 1155 3.1GHz Boxed Processor If purchased separately. Price BEFORE $40 In-store instant savings / REG. $139.99 / 369124 $139.99 INSTANT IN-STORE ONLY SAVINGS -$40.00 MSI H61M-E33 LGA 1155 H61 mATX Intel Motherboard Price after instant savings / REG. $69.99 / 368480 $59.99 BUNDLE SAVINGS -$59.99 BUNDLE TOTALS $99.99
March 25, 201115 yr From what I can tell about the board it DOES NOT have an x4 slot. It has an x16 and 2 x1 slots. It would be a pretty good board for a 15 drive server with a couple addon PCIe x1 SATA cards from monoprice and a SASLP. The price is right for the combo also!
March 25, 201115 yr Author You're right. I modified the OP. I think Im going to pick one up for a new HTPC.
March 25, 201115 yr Drat. The motherboard shows up as being sold out at the Santa Clara, CA, Micro Center. :'(
March 25, 201115 yr Drat. The motherboard shows up as being sold out at the Santa Clara, CA, Micro Center. :'( In the past Microcenter's been known to refuse to price adjust for online purchasers. A ton of people who got this email or read about it on Slickdeals reserved their boards online hoping to get a price adjustment when they show up in the store. If it's like past in-store only deals like this, you'll soon see that thread fill up with people complaining MC wouldn't adjust the price. My store just went from 8 to 6 in stock in about 3 minutes. If we ignore the 4 SATA ports, how good would this be for an UnRaid box that also handles Sabnzbd, Sick Beard, and Crash Plan duties? I'm currently using a 4 year old 65W Athlon X2 that's only just barely up to the challenge. I was hoping to save a bit of power when I upgrade as well, but I see this is also rated at 65W.
March 25, 201115 yr It would be fine and you could go all the way up to 15 drives without to much issue with the correct addon cards.
March 25, 201115 yr Well I'm headed to Micro Center in any event to return some memory. For grins, I'll take a look at the shelves to see if they happen to have the motherboard in stock. If I was able to get this deal, I was going use it as a test server. I'd play with one of the unRAID beta builds using old 500 GB drives I got lying around. I figured the extra horse power might be nice for computing parity --- and for any other excuse I could come up with to justify the purchase. In the past Microcenter's been known to refuse to price adjust for online purchasers. A ton of people who got this email or read about it on Slickdeals reserved their boards online hoping to get a price adjustment when they show up in the store. If it's like past in-store only deals like this, you'll soon see that thread fill up with people complaining MC wouldn't adjust the price. My store just went from 8 to 6 in stock in about 3 minutes. If we ignore the 4 SATA ports, how good would this be for an UnRaid box that also handles Sabnzbd, Sick Beard, and Crash Plan duties? I'm currently using a 4 year old 65W Athlon X2 that's only just barely up to the challenge. I was hoping to save a bit of power when I upgrade as well, but I see this is also rated at 65W.
March 25, 201115 yr I reserved one when the website started listing the actual price. I'll probably grab it and replace my old Athlon X2 5200+. I'm hoping to realizing some power savings, but we'll see. I only have a 4 drive setup now, and I suspect that I should be able to do OK with add-on cards for my needs. I have the $9 2 port 1x card on the way already as a backup, so I think I should be OK drive-capacity-wise.
March 26, 201115 yr Did anyone else buy this? I'm having trouble getting it to recognize my SATA drives...
March 27, 201115 yr In the past Microcenter's been known to refuse to price adjust for online purchasers. A ton of people who got this email or read about it on Slickdeals reserved their boards online hoping to get a price adjustment when they show up in the store. If it's like past in-store only deals like this, you'll soon see that thread fill up with people complaining MC wouldn't adjust the price. My store just went from 8 to 6 in stock in about 3 minutes. When I was buying components for my new PC recently, my local MC was sold out of the processor I was looking for for ~3 weeks. When I asked one of the salespeople about it, they told me to keep checking the online inventory, and when it showed as instock, order it online and they would adjust instore (buying the processor + MB instore gave an extra $40 discount). I didn't have to do it like this, but I guess its a YMMV.
March 28, 201115 yr Wow, that i3 Sandy Bridge processor is $135 from Newegg itself! Yeah, it's a pretty insane deal. I grabbed the processor, the board, and 4GB (2x2GB) of DDR3 RAM for $140+tax. This thing is incredibly fast. However, I can't get it to work with UnRaid 4.7. If you want to run the betas, it appears to work with 5.0b6a, but I didn't start my array to find out. You can follow my thread with the details here if you like: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=11984.0 Although, it looks like MC pulled the motherboard from their site, so I'm not sure if anyone else will be able to get in on this. The guys in the store said they expected another shipment of them to come in tomorrow (Tuesday).
March 28, 201115 yr No MC by me, but I've been wanting to upgrade my main PC for over a year now. We'll have one when we move to Denver this summer, but I don't know if I'll be able to wait that long.
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