Don't have any suggestions but I have a half height rack with 3x HP DL380's and some switches etc in, with only 1/3 running it still costs £50 a month if left on 24/7!!!

Thanks both!

Good to know about the electric, looking at the npower website, that's about right to run the average PC 24/7. Who would have thought it was so much!

I don't think I'll be running it 24/7 anyway, it'll more be a test box anyway, my microserver does my 24/7 work

I've gone for the below at £159, seems to be reasonably good spec for the price, also comes with a COA to may have a legitimate server OS to play with also, although not too bothered either way as can download Eval versions:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/390867056128

DELL POWEREDGE 2950 II 2U SERVER

*2 x  2.66GHZ QUAD CORE XEON X5355 CPU's

* 64BIT CPU's

* 8 GB RAM FBDIMM'S

* 4 X 73GB 15k 3.5" SAS HDD's FITTED

* WINDOWS 2003 R2 SVR ENT EDITION COA ON CASE (NOT INSTALLED OR SOFTWARE PROVIDED)

* SPACE FOR ANOTHER 2 HDD'S

* NO EXTRA CADDIES OR BLANKS PROVIDED

* PERC 5/i RAID CONTROLLER

* DELL REMOTE ACCESS CONTROLLER (DRAC)

* ONBOARD GRAPHICS

*  2 x 10/100/1000 GIGABIT PORTS

* 1 x SERIAL PORT

* 4 x USB PORTS

* 2x PSU's

* DVDROM

*  BLUE FRONT BEZEL

Turned up today..

RAM wise looks to be 8 x 1GB sticks in there, which should be fine for a couple of VMs to play with, but if I upgrade will mean swapping out some sticks.

just powered up today to make sure it was booting fine, sounds like an aircraft on boot and is about as long as a coffee table, unfortunately about 4 inches longer than it's current home which is a bit of a PITA.

Cheers for the offer, but don't think I'll both upgrading for the moment, like I said it's not going in to full operation, just something to play with really.

And you would probably make better money on eBay as I'd probably order the below and wait for it to arrive from the states for £36 to double and could sell my old RAM and make some of that back.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/8GB-4X2GB-KIT-DELL-FBDIMM-PowerEdge-2950-1950-2950-1900-1955-R900-RAM-MEMORY-/360794617198?pt=US_Memory_RAM_&hash=item540108f56e

You'd make more than that putting it up on ebay and selling to someone in the UK I expect?

Bargaintastic. If you're using Hyper-V make sure you enable data deduplication on your vhd partition. I've got around 15 2012 r2 vms on a 120gb partition and still got 70 or 80 GB free.

you got a dns server on your home network?