This is probably the wrong forum for this, but I know there are some system admins/service techs on this forum so what the hey. After not being so interested in hardware for a couple of years, I have now found that there are great deals of a couple year old high end computer gear. While looking at some overclocking threads, some guy had gotten his Xenon 5650 up to 4.3 or 4.6 gig, which is pretty impressive as it is a hyperthreaded hexcore chip (12 practical cores!). This got me looking at this cpu which led me down a rabbit hole into an area with cheap possibilities but a lot of unknown as well.
It seems to me (and I could be very wrong) that one could build a pretty crazy 12 core, 24 processes computer on the cheap with some "like new" server parts. The mother board being a Dell R510 (which is a 2U server board). This is a dual processor board suited for the Xenon 5650 (12MB L3 cache!), and it is pretty cheap on flea bay. Looking around, it seems the following parts would be the bare necessity (all parts new or "like new, unused":
2x Xenon 5650 (chip only), 2x ~$65 = $130
2x Dell Heat 5650 heat sinks, 2x ~$50 = $100
Dell R510 Mobo: ~$40
Dell R510 DVDR Drive: ~$20
Guaranteed compatible memory, 2x4G, 2x $33= $66, you could go real crazy with ram
HD: what you got
GPU: PCIe of some sort, this one I am not sure about
Case: What you got. Will this work in an ATX case?
Power supply: 500W? Must it be a proprietary Dell PSU?
Fans? Need a case fan with 2 big heat sinks from the Xenons
Cables?
Is this reasonably possible? It seems a very cheap way to get some crazy computing power. If the Mobo could be overclocked it would be even crazier, unfortunately the OC-able dual xenon board are in the $300-400 zone.
Cheers!