Help me decide on motherboard and processor

[Jailer]

Well I was entertaining the idea of either a Supermicro or Asrock C2750 Avaton board but have decided against it. I don't need a mini ITX board as my build will be housed in an Antec 1200 and regular hardware can be had cheaper than either of the Avaton boards.

I've read plenty of posts and got my selection down to two of the recomended boards from cyberjocks hardware post. Problem is I don't know enough about server hardware to know which one I should go with. On top of that there are an enormous amount of processors to choose from and I'm having trouble deciding which one I should get.

I've narrowed my choices down to these two boards:

Supermicro X9SCM-F
Spermicro X10SLL+-F

I'm leaning towards an i3 processor but don't know what flavor to get regardless of what board I choose. I'll be setting it up with 6-2TB WD green drives in RAID Z2 with an external usb drive for occasional backups. It will also be maxed out with 32GB of memory to future proof it as much as possible.

My usage will be mostly single user cifs file server running plex and transmission jails. There's only three of us in the house and the warden and jr hardly ever use the streaming and never use transmission. So basically I only need to worry about one instance of trans coding to my phone since the server itself will mostly see light use.

Which board should I get and what processor should i get to go with it?

 

[Ericloewe]

I'd go with the X10SLL+-F. X10s are mature by now and pricing is broadly similar. There's also the vague hope that Broadwell will take 16GB UDIMMs (unlikely - and that's if there are any socketed Broadwells), as well as improved idle power consumption and an upgraded (don't ask me in what way) IPMI.

 

[Jailer]

Ok that's good to know. My experience is entirely with desktop hardware so I'm quite out of the loop on the server stuff. Still it would take a processor upgrade as well for >32GB of memory.

Leaning towards a i3-4150. That should be sufficient for what I want to do and provide a little overhead in case I want some minimal expansion in the future. Would you agree?

 

[Ericloewe]

Ok that's good to know. My experience is entirely with desktop hardware so I'm quite out of the loop on the server stuff. Still it would take a processor upgrade as well for >32GB of memory.

Leaning towards a i3-4150. That should be sufficient for what I want to do and provide a little overhead in case I want some minimal expansion in the future. Would you agree?

I went with a 43xx for no real reason (I liked the idea of a bit more L3 cache, but I have no concrete data). Do note that the 4150 will require the 2.0 BIOS, which may not be the factory version.