I've been pretty set on going with the dual E5-2670 route, and checking my options to see if I could find anything that made more sense than the Natex deal.  My uses will be the following:

 

Media storage

1-2 simultaneous Plex transcodes

15+ dockers, mostly media related like couch potato, sonarr, nzbget, MythTV, etc.

2-3 VMs.  Mostly used as workstations.  No heavy gaming or video editing.  Mostly word processing, web browsing, media viewing.

 

I've recently found on Natex.us, for about $200 less than the E5-2670, 1U Rack, 128GB RAM system, there is a Supermicro, 2 node, 4x Xeon E5645 CPU which is in a 2U rack and has 96GB RAM.  Here are the two links:

 

4x Xeon E5645

http://natex.us/supermicro-cse-827hd-r1400b-2-x-x8dtt-hf-nodes/

 

2x Xeon E4-2670

http://natex.us/1u-chenbro-rm13704-server-intel-s2600cp2j-dual-xeon-e5-2670-sr0kx-128gb-16x8gb-ecc-pc3-12800r-ram-intel-x520-da1/

 

Outside of the 32GB RAM drop. what other major differences/issues will I encounter going the dual node route of the supermicro system over the dual 2670 system?  I see that the nodes only have the single 2.0 16x PCI slot, so I get less PCI slots.  I'm also getting a bonus 10 gigabit network adapater with the E5-2670 system.  However, besides this, under my specific uses, if these are my two choices should I go with the quad Xeon E5645 system because of the cheaper price and greater # of cores?

 

Maybe I'm missing some other obvious pitfalls of that potential setup.  I'd be interested in hearing what you guys thought.

The 4x E5645 is actually just two computers in one case. The E5645 cpus are are dual socket capable, and that case has two motherboards in it. So it isn't a quad cpu system, but instead two seperate dual cpu systems. With that being said the E5-2670 cpus are far more powerful than the E5645. I just moved up from dual X5670s to dual E5-2670s and it has been a great improvement. The X5670 is the same generation as the E5645 but a little more powerful. Hope that helps.