Turning a server into a pc

[willybill]

A friend of mine just replaced a dell 2950 server and no longer needs it. It has dual quad core processors (he didn't say what kind but I'm guessing xeon) and 32 gb of RAM

He offered it to really cheap, I don't need a server but was considering converting it to a pc.

Has anyone ever tried this, or have any advice on where to start researching, I'm not really worried about cost, I just think it would be a cool project.

 

[teknobug]

Dual Xeon E5340, not bad. You can plug a USB keyboard and mouse to be able to use it, it has no more connectors other than ethernet and VGA, it has 2 riser slots but I don't think it has PCI-E for a video card.

 

[kanewolf]

It will be REALLY LOUD. 2U servers have lots of small noisy fans. You have to run PRO or server versions of Windows to support dual socket. 2U servers don't make good deskside units.

 

[James Mason]

99% of games and applications won't make use of 2 CPUs though.
You also can't put a graphics card in a rackmount server.

The ram may not even be usable on other systems because it's likely ECC ram which requires special motherboards as well, and it's probably slow no matter how much you have.

More =/= better.