Of course one can get a new 2 socket Xeon server* for less than the price of a MPB, so the mainstream distinction has shifted considerably over the last decade.
That does sound low, but isn't out of the question. From Newegg:
E5-2620V3 quantity 2: 428.49
SUPERMICRO MBD-X10DRL-I 319.99
Kingston KVR21R15S4/8 x 3 90.99 (although 3 sticks doesn't make any sense)
$1450 total.
Or 6 sticks of KVR21R15S8/4 direct from Kingston at $62 each is $372, for 1549, which still leaves some room for a SSD and chassis.
ADDED: cheapest Supermicro 1U for this would seem to be the SC514-505, which for SSDs would seem to be quite fine if you can find it, found one price that looks correct based on the next higher grade with fancy hot swap disk trays of $233. So for the 6x4GB memory config, $1782, leaving $218 for the SSD. And you'd have to buy a couple of fanless heat sinks.
Hmmm, Intel has an enterprise Intel DC S3510 at 599.99. So we're close if you buy in any quantity, then again 24 GB is unbalanced for a 2 socket server. But this looks in the ballpark, these systems are getting to rather nice prices.
Yeah, indeed it doesn't make much sense when you have 4 memory channels. Memory performance is going to be very bad. Four sticks would be just fine.
> Or 6 sticks
Neither does 6. Go for 4 or 8 sticks. Not sure if it applies here, but on some motherboards having 2x more than <number of memory channels> sticks means there's a bit more latency.
I configured the Colfax CX1205a-X6 to confirm -- the spec is suboptimal but compares favorably to the most expensive MPB (which I see as just over $3K).
