On Nov 5, 2017, at 7:08 PM, Jonathan Morton <chromatix99@gmail.com> wrote:
I see you've specced them to have PicoPSUs and so on. That isn't exactly the cheapest option, though it is very compact - which I know from experience since my E-450 uses the same. Considering less compact options may improve the price comparison.

It's true, but also if I wanted to compare my builds to the ProLiant fairly, they’d have to include 8GB of RAM. So I put up four more builds, two with the cheapest case and PSU I could find on the same site, and two with the same cheap case/PSU but also 8GB of RAM.

The prices are all close enough for me to where I’d just want to choose what’s best. The single-threaded performance of the quad-core CPUs are naturally lower, which may affect something, somehow. It would be nice to be able to try Flent tests on both without buying both, but that’s how it is.

Also, with any build it takes a little more time and there’s the possibility of a compatibility problem vs buying something pre-tested (lessons learned), but these builds do look pretty safe.