Have you ever tried being helpful? If you can't answer someone else's question politely I'd have little hope of you ever being able to make a useful contribution to HUKD.

Why can't you get Windows 10 working? Are you on the latest bios?

Gen7 (AMD) Microserver and NUC have soldered-in CPU - no options to change.

For the Gen8 Microserver, this might be useful info:
http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/10839-just-picked-up-a-gen8-g1610t-cpu-upgrade-options-in-2016/

Found this Nas, seems like a good price: http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/6tb-buffalo-nas-2620299

Thinking about grabbing one of these and slapping in a cheap xeon from aliexpress

can i run a web server on this ?

Won't a 290w PSU be quite expensive to run? Please excuse my ignorance, it's been a long time since I last built a PC.

How is this different from a NAS?

"Cheap" and "socket 1150 Xeon" don't seem to go together :disappointed: . I wondered about that but bought the Xeon version for £220 after cashback instead.

Nice thing about these is they don't need ECC RAM.

picked one of these up for £90 early last year after cashback and its been running almost the whole time (minus maintenance). i currently use mine for plex and torrenting, it'll only transcode one good quality 1080 at a time but ive had it running up to 3 streams at once. pairs nicely with bubleupnp and a chromecast

This is the G3220 version and seems to be the best price at the moment (no cashback available).

The £300 version has a Xeon

This is more powerful than a NAS (of same price) its larger, can run windows can fit a gfx card or other expansion. It will probably use more power and be louder than a NAS.
At 8.49kg its vastly heavier than an equiv NAS (so no bookshelf)
Its a good price , decent CPU, but doesnt come with windows installed, which can be make or break for some people.

*linux will run equally well and is free , very easy to install.

Surprised this isn't getting more heat...I thought these were around the £300 mark?

I've got a 3 year old intel nuc running kodi. This will be fine

I haven't been able to get Windows 10 working on my N40L and it's horrifically slow so I might replace it with one of these?

All I do is have it hooked up to my TV as a HTPC and share files around my home network with it. Any obvious flaws? I think I've read that sound through HDMI doesn't work, but I've got a spare basic graphics card I can use.

Not just in terms of build quality but also in terms of features.
This (and the similar HP Proliant ML10 Gen9) both only come with one NIC, minimal management features* and so on. Think the HP doesn't even officially support ESXi.
*Intel AMT but AFAIK only if the CPU it was shipped with was a Xeon from the factory (no user upgrades) according to this
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/servers/f/177/t/19632929
"AMT is disabled at the factory if a Pentium or Celeron processor is installed. A system board replacement is required to enable it."

EDIT Of the three cheaply available servers, the HP Microserver Gen8 has the best features with dual NIC plus the dedicated iLO NIC. Power consumption and noise of this and the HP ML10 are meant to be a better though.

I have one of these (still in its box) ready to replace a failing desktop. I've used it, its as quiet as a normal desktop when in use. In my opinion its built more like a desktop PC rather than a server.

It's super cheap, stupidly cheap really. Have some heat.

Intel G3220 could probably playback 4K youtube videos in Windows 10 using just the Intel iGPU.

Posted a week ago

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/dell-poweredge-t20-tower-server-pentium-g3220-119-94-delivered-serversplus-2616065

Yea I think it's more than capable for 1080p playback and streaming, people do that on the lower spec celeron mini servers other by HP, to get around sound would probably cope with being in cabinet or cupboard as the chip won't make much heat, but servers are more than often loud.