Choosing between building

[Roy360]

I'm looking to build a pfsense router and a ZFS fileserver

These are the two builds I came up with:

LGA1150:

LGA1151:

I'm building a 2x8TB RAID1 fileserver and a 1 gigabit ethernet + multi-client openvpn pfsense router.

I've given up on my idea to use virtualization, so I'll be building two machines.

Thoughts?

 

[Ericloewe]

I assume these are two options for the FreeNAS server?

If so:
The LGA1150 build is okayish. The T CPU is wasteful, since it won't actually use less power but will limit performance. I was going to complain about the 4GB DIMMs, but if you can get them at that price, go for it.

The LGA1151 is much more dubious. That motherboard screams "not a server board" - and trust me, it does matter. You might get away with it, but there's a significant risk of having to buy a replacement board because something did not play nicely, whereas the Supermicro X10 board is very popular and well-understood around here.
That said, you can try to find an X11SSL-F or X11SSM-F at a reasonable price and end up with the best of both worlds at a slightly higher cost. An X11 board would also allow you to upgrade to 64GB of RAM in the future. The main sticking point would be the insane prices for DDR4 RAM, at the moment.

 

[Roy360]

I assume these are two options for the FreeNAS server?

If so:
The LGA1150 build is okayish. The T CPU is wasteful, since it won't actually use less power but will limit performance. I was going to complain about the 4GB DIMMs, but if you can get them at that price, go for it.

The LGA1151 is much more dubious. That motherboard screams "not a server board" - and trust me, it does matter. You might get away with it, but there's a significant risk of having to buy a replacement board because something did not play nicely, whereas the Supermicro X10 board is very popular and well-understood around here.
That said, you can try to find an X11SSL-F or X11SSM-F at a reasonable price and end up with the best of both worlds at a slightly higher cost. An X11 board would also allow you to upgrade to 64GB of RAM in the future. The main sticking point would be the insane prices for DDR4 RAM, at the moment.

I originally wanted to use the g3220 that I have lying around my house.

However when I choose the g3220 and the x10 motherboard, there's no ram that passes the compatibility filter (on pc part picker)

I'm assuming I need unbuffered ram, but pc part picker doesn't give me any options.

I was iffy about the Asus board, but it was 60$ cheaper than the cheapest supermicro.

I did however find a used x10slm for 90$ and a used x11ssl for 120$, so the Asus is no longer the cheapest option.

With both motherboards being supermicro and the CPU power consumption being similar (30W idle for the g3220 and 17W for the celeron), I think I'll go with the ddr3 build for freenas.

I'll be able to afford 16gb ddr3 instead of 8gb of ddr4, plus the cost differential of getting 8GB sticks instead of 4, is only 20$

 

[Ericloewe]

I originally wanted to use the g3220 that I have lying around my house.

Forget about PC Part Picker, they're a bunch of amateurs, clearly. It supports the same RAM as any Xeon E3 v3.

I'm assuming I need unbuffered ram

Yes.

 

[tvsjr]

I suspect that the memory you've selected isn't ECC... which it should be.

 

[Roy360]

I suspect that the memory you've selected isn't ECC... which it should be.

Why do you say that?

The price I originally quoted were for rdimms. They won't work in my motherboard so I ended up getting:

1x Kingston Technology 4GB 1600MHz ECC Single Rank DIMM for Select IBM Servers KTM-SX316ES/4g - 17$

And

1x Transcend 4 GB DDR3 1333 ECC Unbuffered Mac Compatible DIMM 1Rx8 TS4GJMA343H - 15$

Amazon said "more are on the way", but when i ordered they only had one of each.

Amazon has some crazy deals on registered memory (ie. 3*8GB for 76$), but I think a Xeon processor and a LGA2011 motherboard would be overkill.

 

[tvsjr]

I was referring to the PCPartPicker stuff you listed before. You can get good prices on used/refurbed stuff from time to time, which I suspect is what you purchased.