I'm done!
I went on craigslist and bought an Intel Pedestal Server with dual Xenon e5-2620 with 500G HD, CD-ROM, 16G (8 x 2G) RAM, 550 Watt PS, and 8 hot swappable bays for $350. No OS installed. It's a P4000 chasis with a S2600co motherboard (P4308 to be exact on the chasis).
I could not get the 500G in the hot swap rack recognized so I plugged into one of the white sata ports and was able to install win 7 pro (needed to copy the files to the HD first for some reason for it to install).
How do I get the blue sata ports to work?
I ran the passmark cpu test and got 13,500 marks for the dual e5-2620s. Not bad for 6-cores/12 threads. Slightly faster than my i7-4790k at 13,000 marks.
I swapped the CPUs. I have one xenon that is from malay and the other from costa rica. Not exactly matching e5-2670.. Booted right up. Ran the benchmark and was rewarded with 19,500 marks (world avg is about 18,400).
I spent a total of $516 on this very fast system and am stoked!
I just added a cheap video card so I can run my 3d benchmark to completion and added a Samsung 250G SSD (parts I already have).
Can anyone point me to cheap memory? I can't find 64G for $85 ($170 for 128G) anymore. You guys are luck to get the RAM at that price. I'm looking to go 128G.