April 28, 20233 yr I've built my fair share of computers - a ton of Hackintoshes and the like. My current storage needs have now out grown the DAS hooked to my 2013 MacPro. I'm just going down the path of sourcing parts. I'm looking at the Intel X99 platform as I can get a 14 core Xeon processor pretty cheap. When it comes to finding a decent board though I'm hitting a bit of a wall. I can find a lot of inexpensive boards from Dell, HP, Lenovo workstations and what look to be cheap Chinese import boards. They're small - 4 RAM slots, 1 PCI-E slot, and only 4 SATA ports. I could definitely keep the cost down by using a workstation board but they are a PITA to set up due to power supply and board layouts. Trying to find a known brand that is X99 like a SuperMicro, AsRock, ASUS, etc. ends up being stupid expensive. This machine would be used for running a PLEX Server and VMs so it'll need the hefty multicore processor and a PILE of RAM 32GB+ I have a TON of DDR3 RAM so a board that can take either DDR3 or DDR4 would be beneficial and the X99 boards I've seen fit that. Has anyone used one of the import boards? Any glaring issues other than them being a bit on the "weak" side of features? If you have used one, what did you go with? I would look at getting a workstation that is fully assembled and ready to go but they lack 3.5" HDD slots. Of these the Workstation I have been seeing which has at least 4 dedicated slots is the Lenovo ThinkStation P500 as well as an open 5.25" bay that could be purposed for a HDD slot as well.
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