Price of older Supermicro motherboards

[zis8snbt4p]

The biggest trick to buying on the MP market is that you often have to buy a *system*.

My experience is that at least in the UK ebay there are not many supermicro systems that are cheap.

You can still find some sweet UP E5 like the SYS-1018R-WC0R which are based on the WIO-format X10SRW-F (do NOT buy this unless you understand what you're doing, WIO is a proprietary format).

I plan to transplant the innards into a tower case as it is going to live in my living room and I would like it to be as quiet as possible.
What do I need to know about the proprietary format? Is the problem mainly physical, as in how to mount it onto the tower and how to fit the components? Airflow issues?
I have already noticed that there very few cases that can handle anything bigger than E-ATX and a lot of the dual supermicro boards are either proprietary or EE-ATX.

Thanks.

 

[Woodward]

Here's what I put together in Fall of 2015:
MB: Supermicro X9SCM-F ($120)
CPU: Pentium G2020 SR10H ($35)
8 Drives: WD Green WD30EZRX 3TB IntelliPower 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal ($690)
RAM: Crucial 8GBx2 DDR3 PC3-14900 Unbuffered ECC 1.5V 1024Meg x 72
Case: Fractal Designs R4 ($80)
Power: Seasonic SSR-360GP ($40)
IO Crest 2-port SATA III PCI-Express x1 card (SY-PEX40039)

I don't have a lot of experience or advice. Just thought I'd put this out in case it's useful. Total cost was about $1100. Saved serious bucks by getting MB, CPU, case, and PS on eBay. Drives were on sale at the time at Newegg, RAM direct from Crucial. Everything still working fine. List price for a similar selection today would be up around $1800.