Great $995 Intel MB/CPU/RAM Bundle on US eBay if Looking to Upgrade


Hoopster

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This seller has offered this or similar bundles three times now in the last couple of months and they have all sold out.  He usually lists lots of three.  Of the nine bundles purchased in February and March, at least six were purchased by unRAID users.

 

The bundle includes the following:

  • ASRock Rack E3C246D4U mATX MB with IPMI
  • Xeon E-2288G CPU (8-core/16-thread) with iGPU
  • 32GB (2x16GB) Hynix ECC RAM - can be upgraded to 64GB for $170
  • 128GB NVMe SSD

All components are new except the NVME SSD.

 

I bought one of the $1099 64GB bundles when he had the 32GB Samsung RAM chips.  It saved me over $300 based on individual component prices.  

 

It is running great as my new unRAID Main server.

 

Just to be clear, I have no affiliation whatsoever with this seller but this is a good deal.

 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/193471319780?ViewItem=&item=193471319780

 

His main business is server hosting/data centers so he buys in bulk and then sells the extra inventory.  The business is WebNX

Edited by Hoopster
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On 3/11/2020 at 10:17 AM, Hoopster said:

This is really tempting. I just do not know how much I would gain by upgrading my one large server. I basically use just as for media storage but do run a plex server with no more than 2 ppl on it at any one time. No VM's but have had the idea to tinker with them.  Will continue to monitor that ebay site.

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3 hours ago, Harro said:
This is really tempting. I just do not know how much I would gain by upgrading my one large server. I basically use just as for media storage but do run a plex server with no more than 2 ppl on it at any one time. No VM's but have had the idea to tinker with them.  Will continue to monitor that ebay site.

I didn’t really need to upgrade either but I thought it would give me some more overhead for VMs to actually run them concurrently with the NAS and Plex server.

 

I thought, well, if I am going to upgrade in the next couple of years this is a killer deal. I will admit it was driven more by “what ifs” and possibilities than a pressing current need.

 

Still glad I did it. Lots of overhead, Handbrake and other transcodes are twice as fast as before, and the HTML5 IPMI is really good.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Edited by Hoopster
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4 minutes ago, neruve said:

Bummer! I was waiting for the IRS to give me my tax return back and I was gonna jump on this. Guess I have to wait a bit.

The seller (imc) has listed several of these bundles recently.  He may do it again; especially if has the stock and they keep selling out.

 

Message him on eBay and ask if he will list more.  He is good about responding.

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8 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

The seller (imc) has listed several of these bundles recently.  He may do it again; especially if has the stock and they keep selling out.

 

Message him on eBay and ask if he will list more.  He is good about responding.

I know workloads are probably different, but what do you idle at with your setup or power consumption. My current setup idles at 160-ish watts I wanna bring that down by about 100 watts or so.

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  • 3 weeks later...
9 hours ago, bucky2076 said:

This looks like a really good deal to me. Sadly they don't ship to australia, so now I'm annoyed.

Does it help that I'm a us citizen, with some money coming in from the IRS thanks to the financial meltdown...

Annoyed to be sure....

 

Maybe a freight forwarding service?

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On 4/15/2020 at 5:22 AM, bucky2076 said:

This looks like a really good deal to me. Sadly they don't ship to australia, so now I'm annoyed.

Does it help that I'm a us citizen, with some money coming in from the IRS thanks to the financial meltdown...

Annoyed to be sure....

 

As jonathanm suggested, you could try a freight forwarder or perhaps you have a friend in the US who could purchase and send it to you.  I have no idea what customs/import issues that may entail.  Even better if one of those friends is traveling to Australia soon on "essential business"; however, these days there is not much traveling happening.

Edited by Hoopster
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thanks guys for the creative ideas... I think I'm beyond such games, though I admit playing them years ago... sigh. I can always purchase similar items locally albeit at a premium. Typical really when living in oz certainly attracts the premium. I think I will message the ebay seller and see if they want to play. should be fun.

 

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On 4/16/2020 at 10:08 PM, bucky2076 said:

I heard back from imc on ebay, he is going to see what can be done with respect to shipping overseas... looked open to the concept, which is good.

Curious, how did this work out for you?  I picked up the motherboard/RAM as a combo.  Very eager to switch out my current setup for this.

Edited by DoItMyselfToo
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On 4/23/2020 at 1:52 PM, DoItMyselfToo said:

Curious, how did this work out for you?  I picked up the motherboard/RAM as a combo.  Very eager to switch out my current setup for this.

hi sorry for the delayed post. Did not proceed with this, as i'm taking a more incremental approach until i've learned the basics. Don't think they are shipping internationally at this time, thugh I could purchase parts individually but at a considerable premium.

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Servers are no small chunk of change; $$ add up quick.  Glad to hear you've got a starting point.  I just ordered this motherboard/RAM as a combo, minus the cpu, which was also a good deal.  A friend is lending me an i3-9100 to try out for a week.  If that works out for my needs, then I'll grab one.  They're very affordable.  If not, then I'll look at talking with this seller or Provantage, depending on the cpu I'm after.

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Hello Doit... nice to talk with you.

I converted my desktop to an unraid server, all I had to do was purchase some memory, a 6TB drive and 1TB SSD for cache. I have a few dockers taking shape and trying to get VM's to take shape. . I took the disks from qnap nas, and tossed them into the server.

 

I am now using a Lenovo C940 laptop as my daily driver, and it is more than capable. Originally I was looking for the unraid server to double as the desktop, but I don't think that model is workable now that I'm further into it.  Server is working great for the time being... probably last 12 months depending on how quickly the vm's grow.  The dockers are super efficient from what I can tell.

I spent weeks agonising over hardware, cpu, disks, architectures, servers, cases, etc... I was like a deer (kangaroo) frozen in the headlights. Could not make a decision for the life of me. Converting my desktop was a fun project to learn, without making big mistakes.

I am not ordering from the US at the moment, because I don't think the merchandise will ever arrive to oz under the current circumstances. The hardware I did buy online, was from a supplier in my local area.

Gook luck with the build...

 

 

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Well, swapped in the E3C246D4U/2x16gb combo into my SC846 chassis yesterday.  Went with an E2278G cpu and an Arctic Freezer 33 cooler.  The cooler is huge.  My chassis has just enough headroom to allow the cover to close.  Also, I ordered a 9-pin USB 2.0 adapter to use for unRAID.  That will arrive this week.

 

My initial toying around has me very pleased.  I need to update the BIOS and get fan settings sorted.  Then I can get quick sync transcoding setup.

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My E3C246D4U arrived with the latest BMC (1.80)/BIOS (P2.30).  I just updated the BIOS to L2.21A to enable igpu for Plex transcoding, per @Hoopster and others.  Success!  I love ASRock's Instant Flash.  It makes flashing super easy.

 

Now, I'm going through all the BIOS settings and having to look up a bunch to figure out the "correct" values.  I sure wish motherboard manufacturers would provide more detail for each setting in the BIOS, though suppose these are largely for IT Pros, which I'm not.

 

Anyway, when all setup, I'm going to watch some Plex for "testing" purposes, 😜.  I sure need to be sure the new server is setup correctly.

 

 

Edited by DoItMyselfToo
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Plex hardward transcoding (QuickSync) enabled and persisted in the go file, thanks to @techsperion for a wonderful guide located here.  I have four things to finish my new setup:

 

1.  Get clear about the "Auxiliary Panel Header" shown on page 31 in the manual.  It doesn't match my board.  On my board, the 4-pin "Speaker" pins are located where page 31 shows "System Fault" pins and 1/2 of "Locater LED" pins.  I might have to reach out to ASRock support, unless someone here knows more.

 

2.  Figure out fan speeds in my SC846 chassis.  While the stock 80 mm chassis fans are PWM fans, they run at full speed.  So, I might have to swap them out for different fans.  I usually use ARCTIC PWM/PST.

 

3.  Make a few custom power cables for my SSD cache drives when my Molex connectors/pins arrive.  I currently have something jerry-rigged.

 

4.  Install a USB 2.0 port to the onboard USB 2.0 header, when it arrives.

 

Thank you again @Hoopster for recommending this board/ram combo.  The smaller footprint (mATX) gives me more room in the chassis for cabling, etc.

Edited by DoItMyselfToo
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  • 3 weeks later...
47 minutes ago, Harro said:

Finally broke down and ordered. Which coolers has the best performance for cpu cooling? I have a coolermaster 590 tower.

I have this motherboard and cpu combo, but was severely limited by case clearance. So I purchased a lower-profile Noctua that does an adequate job but still gets pretty darn hot at full load. If I could have chosen any cooler, I would have gone with the Noctua NH-D15.

  • Like 1
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