HTPC system

[dkemme]

I came across this while looking for a used rack for the AV equipment room on Craigs List. This guy has racks and components from an MCI call center. Am planning on getting a few IBM Netfinity dual 650 MHz Pentium III 1u servers to run the touch screens close to the equipment room and act as CQC server, $75 each. He mentioned he had a few of these below machines and wondered if would work as an HTPC system available for $250 each. My goal is to have a machine to store my very large DVD and CD collection and serve through CQC (Slimplayer for CD, likely Zoom for DVD) Here is the description:

Compaq Proliant 6400R Server
Features Include
Dual redundant hot-swapable power supplies
Four Pentium III Xeon 550MHz processors with 2megs of cache each
Four Gigabytes of RAM
Four 18.4 Gigabyte hot-swapable SCSI fixed disk drives \
One CD ROM drive One Floppy Diskette drive
Compaq Remote Insight Compaq Integrated SCSI controller
Compaq Smart Array 431 controller
Compaq Dual 10/100 Network Interface Card with gigabit upgrade installed
Formatted and tested.

These systems range in speeds from 500 MHz to 700 MHz. I started out with 14 of them and I have 9 left. They came from MCI's network operations center in Colorado Springs and were pulled in operational condition from racks. I have the racks, routers, and piles of fiber interconnects, including several Brocade Silkworms.

I would replace the drives with 500gb and put in a video card for HDI output.

Any thoughts?
THANKS
DJK

[dkemme]

Learned more about this system, although might be a good fileserver, not fast enough for apps to run and quite noisy.

[zaccari]

I have had a Compaq 6500R and that sucker is a SERIOUS beast. I'd suggest something more like an 1850R that you can pick up on eBay with less noise, power utilization, etc.

Russ...