Hey Folks, I wanted to share with you all my new rig, and see if there are many others who have gone down the same route as me. Like so many of us who are wanting to play SC, ive had to get a completely new rig together. Not wanting to fork out thousands for a dream build or something off the shelf, I followed this guide by bored gamer, and others like it. my complete specs are: HP Proliant ML350 G6 - this is a dual CPU server motherboard 2 x Xeon 5570 Cpu's the stock clock speed on these is 2.9 ghz but turbo's up to 3.3ghz, they are 4 cores with hyper threading, so 8 logical cores per CPU 24gb DDR3 ECC server ram running at 1333mhz in triple channel Nvidia Geforce 980 4gb (EVGA) sandisk 240gb SSD no onboard sound, so i'm using a usb surround headset that is working fine. currently using a USB wifi stick, that only leaves me with 2 more USB ports, so a pci expansion card has been orderd as has a pci wifi card. because i was a dickhead and didnt buy the server in its own tower with all its fans and power supplys etc ive also had to buy a ton of shit that i didnt know was required. This includes; 4 x HP server fans, these things arent your typical case fans, for a start, they cost me 20 pounds each and have 4 pin plugs, you have to have all of them or the system wont post, and when the system is calibrating and the fans spin up to full speed, it is mental and deafening. seriously, these things blew a full can of coke off my desk. fortunately theyre pretty quiet most of the time. infact i dont seem to have gotten the system hot enough that they do anything but idle. 2x cpu coolers, i bought cheap ones, but have had to cable tie them to the board because once again servers have their own stupid mounting system and because server cpu's are usually passively cooled there arent any onboard fan plugs, so theyre just molexed up and dont react to cpu temp. the cpus have never gone above 60 degrees C though even at full load. 2x proprietary 460watt HP power supplys server backplane - this is basically a control board that you plug the PSU's into BUT, because there arent any PCI express cables on the server you will also need a normal PSU solely to run the graphics card. AND in order that the extra psu fires up when the system switches on you need something called a slave atx psu thingy, which was cheap and works well. apparently you can do it with a bit of hacking and arseing around, but i didnt want to blow anything up. and of course, i havent got a case, so im building one out of MDF, its going to completely shit as i am terrible with my hands. im aiming to make a massive cube with wheels on the bottom, at the very worst itll just be a really poorly made coffee table. also, finally, i had to buy the front panel switch box, i had assumed that it'd just be like a pc and you could just short the jumpers to start the thing but nooooooo, you need a whole front panel thing which has a load of LEDS for system health monitoring and two USB Ports, it was cheap though. so heres how it runs. so that's over 11000 on firesstrike which for the money is pretty good i reckon. SC runs badly, no news there, but in free flight at very high graphics im probably averaging 45 -80 fps, in the PU its around 15-30. i know its all netcode optimisation and all that stuff. I'm pretty hopeful the system will run it fairly nicely when its all sorted. however, i have just spotted a bagain on some much faster CPU's they are again quad core, but the tubo clock speed goes up to 3.7ghz and has a 12mb cache. im hoping that might speed things up even more. also ive ordered another 24gig ram kit. there is a bit of a stability issue at the moment, im running win 10 pro, and was getting a BSOD with the error code DPC Watchdog Violation, I thought i had cured this by using a different ACPI driver, it was fine for a bit, but then it crashed again. I'd be very interested in hearing from anyone who has sorted this out. apparently a bios update might sort it, but HP wont hand out their updated BIOS ROMs unless you have some kind of business support package in place, which is ridiculous. aside from that the thing is running really well, i can definitely recommend going down this route even if i cant get this BSOD problem fixed, it doesnt crash often. in total, my spend breaks down like this; mobo 33 vid card 200 backplane 25 psu 33 fans 80 memory 55 cpus 25 ssd 100 psu 50 front panel 15 atx slave 10 cpu coolers 26 usb card 7 wifi card 15 which totals 664 but ive just spent another 50 on more ram, and im bidding on some fast cpu's that should cost me 40 for the pair. I welcome any feedback, let me know if you've built something similar. Cheers