Hi first time to post on here, what an awesome thread! Spent hours and hours trawling through the pages.
I have recently acquired a S2600CP board from ebay US (Bethany) which I believe is Natex by a different name, I tried to order on Natex website but they wouldn't offer UK shipping (I'm in UK). The board came with 2x E5-2670 and some copper 1U heatsinks which probably aren't much good to me because I want to use the board for a workstation for rendering Blender projects. I checked the CPUs and thankfully they are the later stepping. I haven't powered it up yet, waiting for new PSU to arrive, but visually board looks OK
I struggled to find an I/O shield for this board (I know
kalleyomalley has them for sale on Ebay US but $12 + $48.50 for shipping to UK is crazy). So I had a hunt around and finally found this listing from a Chinese seller. (note for EU buyers initially this did not show up in my search from ebay.co.uk, I had to search from ebay.com to find it). Postage is much more reasonable but It hasn't arrived yet, will let you know if it's ok when it arrives. It appears to have no paint which doesn't concern me. They have shield listings for other S2600 board variants too
Intel I/O io Shield BLENDE BRACKET S2600CP2,S2400SC2,and S2400GP2 New #G281 XH
For Memory I wanted to buy from Natex or Memoryamerica, these were cheapest I could find for the memory itself, but again no international shipping, or crazy high shipping costs to EU. So I bought Samsung 64GB 1600MHz Reg ECC from here:
New Samsung 32GB 4X8GB DDR3 1600MHz PC3-12800R ECC REG Registered Server Ram
The memory took a couple of weeks to arrive from China, the DIMMs appear to be new, they were packed in plastic trays and wrapped in bubble wrap, haven't tested on the S2600 board yet but I dropped them into my old HP Z600 workstation and everything OK at least running at slower 1333Mhz.
Now searching for a case, I'm tempted by the Intel pedestal server case from kalleyomalley but some of you say it runs quite noisy, and I only need 1x|SSD and 1xHDD, I want this for a workstation that sits on desk next to me. Any case recommendations that will take this board?
Also CPU coolers, any recommendations?
Thanks for a great thread!
Roy