Comment by TacticalCoder

> Typing this from an Asus X99 WS 3.1 with a E5-2696v4.

Yeah the Xeon E5 v4 to me are really an amazing spot. These things, today, are basically free. If you look a bit you can buy stuff like four 20 cores E5 v4 for $60, making them effectively $15 each. Basically free.

And here's the trick: I don't need my Xeon to be up 24/7. 8/7 is sufficient, so I save 2/3rd of the electricity cost. I set up my network so that when I sleep, my main server doesn't need to be on. The services that really need be on 24/7 (say my DNS for when I'm sleeping and my wife/kid need Internet) are running on a Raspberry Pi (which consumes nothing).

And when I need the shitloads of cores / ZFS etc.: I turn the Xeon on.

Now it's still a server in my case: my main machine is a recent AMD.

> if anybody got a tip, i'd be more than glad to listen, please.

Slap 128 GB of the 256 in a $50 used Xeon server and use that has a backup / to run VMs / ZFS / etc.