For those considering a non-intel chassis build, I'm posting the following comments and pictures of my S2600CP2J build.
Motherboard: S2600CP2J from Natex.us, with 64gb hynix PC3-12800R, dual e5-2670's (obviously in this thread) 425us (612 cad plus 80 import/tax bs)
Case: Phanktek Enthoo pro w/ windows Titanium green. 129 cad shipped from amazon
Fans: Cooler Master EVO 212 - 89 CAD for the two, free shipping (NCIX)
Power Supply: EVGA 750 G2 - can't remember price bought it awhile ago - probably had for around 140 cad.
HD: Samsung SSD 850 evo - 119 cad.
Still missing: video card - likely will be a used 760 gtx or something of the like.
Notes about the build, not too bad! fit in the case well. Phantek touts that it is SSI EEB compliant - and in general it was had to move some motherboard posts/stand-off's as they were setup for an atx build, but that was easy enough - however it is missing the one post that would go under the memory (mid right hand side of the motherboard) so that area is just floating a bit. If one was going to be swapping memory in and out of there all the time, it would probably be nice to have the support - but in general it's not a huge concern of mine. The phantek case is huge, it is wide, and tall, dwarfs the z820, it's pretty spartan but has a clean look, and I do quite like it even compared to another corsair vengeance (military green) case that I have.
The power supply, installed easily, and all cables reached without extending any - however the one power cable for cpu 2 is a long stretch - so I can't exactly follow the velcro pathways as seen in the back-shot.
I'm undecided on how I currently have my fans setup - they all currently run through the Phantek supplied fan header (also seen in the back shot) and are only plugged into CPU-1's fan pwr on the motherboard. this works well with FRUSDR updated - I just told it - that CPU-1 was the only fan connected, and since it signals the header - all the fans get direction from that .... but at the same time I'm perhaps curious about what happens if that one motherboard cpu-1 pwr outlet fails, ...FRUSDR wouldn't be able to tell all the other fans to ramp up at the failure, so I might forgo the header, so if one fails at least the others can stay running...
Don't know how I feel about the whole ssd concealed in the back of the case either... I guess it works, and I won't be accessing it much. I will only be adding one more drive to this machine another western digital 1tb black, as I have in the z820 (page 96 of this thread) - as well as a video card, just need the finances to cool a bit after the two builds.
with the S2600cp2j usb 3.0 case outputs won't work (obviously), but i'll probably add a little pcie card with header output for that as they can be had for fairly cheap - the usb 2.0 ports work though when plugged in on the motherboard.
The Bios, BMC, FRUSDR updates all went well, only other thing I'd recommend is making sure you turn on one or both NIC'S in the bios, as they were off (from natex) when the board arrived, caused a bit of a head scratcher when no network device was showing up in windows. I did the bios first, but then I read in the BMC instructions/readme that there is an order in which you should flash the roms - I was already out of sync with that order - but all seemed to go well!
The S2600cp2j onboard Matrox g200 gfx really suck, max resolution is 1024x768... I did get a lenovo server driver (g200e?) for them for windows hoping the resolution might get a bump but nope. This computer will eventually get render duties like the z820, but for now it has to wait!
I hope that helps some people, and if you have any questions feel free to ask, this route was much cheaper than the z820. I haven't run cinebench in comparison to the z820 yet.