I'm building a somewhat high end nas at a homebuilt price. need a cpu suggestion.

Here are the specs:
Gigabyte P35-DSL3 (currently waiting for RMA from Gigabyte)
-onboard gigabit nic
2x1gb Crucial Ballistics DDR2-800 (dual channel)
Adaptec 5405 Hardware Raid Card (1.2ghz dual core)
3x Western Digital WD5000ABPS varaible rpm sata drives. 5 year warranty
radeon 7000 pci graphics card (woot!)
350watt psu

Windows Server 03, home server, or something similar havent decided. I doubt ill use it for anything else except simple file shares on my local network for now.

So my options for CPU on newegg are the following:
39.99 Celeron 430 conroe 1.8ghz
49.99 E1200 1.8ghz
54.99 Celeron 440 Conroe 2.0ghz
64.99 E1400 2.0ghz
69.99 E2180 2.0ghz

I know the E2180 OC's well i had one, till it overheated in the summer. I'm curious mostly about the celeron cpu's. Do you think they will have enough performance to drive the hardware? If they don't at stock speeds, do they OC well? I wont be overvolting, i just want the hardware to last and be low maintenance. Dont want to worry about heat issues.

e2180 best value for money

e1200 low cache not good

e2180 that thing is the best out of the choices

Combine the e2180 with an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro, and think about a higher quality PSU. Something in the 450 to 500 Watt rangeI would prolly use a PSU from PCPower like the, http://www.pcpower.com/products/de [...] index.html, look around you can find a better price than Neweggs.
To further enhance system cooling an Antec 300 case would be a good addition.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/5r2m9h

It's a NAS. I think a K6-2 would do the job.

That's what I was thinking.

OP you might be better off just getting a old $50 system off E-bay or CL and adding to it. It will save you some money and you don't need much power for a NAS.

E2180 runs nice at 3ghz and its fast

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813121342

and some case to go with it or somthing.

and speaking of a K6-2, i have one in my hand at the moment

2.2 core/3.3 i/o

yea i was thinking a low end cpu would do the job, not planning on using this as a web server or anything too robust. I was thinking the single core CPU's would be good. Plus they have a 35watt power envelope. Its gonna be on 24/7 I don't want it drawing hundreds of watts. Thats why i got the variable speed HDD's too.

I'd like to just use one of my old systems lying around, however my raid card is pretty beefy. it needs a pci-e 8x slot. thats why I'm gonna put my P35-DSL3 in there and upgrade my current pc's mobo.

As for the PC case im just using some old mid-tower i got laying around and putting a 4x3.5" hot swap drive bay into the 5.25" bays. for $100 bucks, going in my basement which is cool in summer and freezing in winter.

Lets say Celeron 430 vs E1200, forget the e2180. they all have 512 L2 cache per core anyways.

Either of these a better overclocker?

I run a little nas from an old athlon xp with 256 mb ram using xp home for simple file and print sharing. Works great

You talk about low power consumption and you talk about overclocking, you can't have it both ways. Your best bet would be the 430, single core 35w it's not going to cost you much at all to run 24/7. You said you want low maintenance so don't think about overclocking. Overclocking creates heat and with heat comes the need for more cooling, more cooling means more dust, more dust means more cleaning.

You don't need raid card or even raid for home nas. Any old pc will do if it can see full size of hdd. Older motherboards could not see mre than 132GB or so. As for OS You don't need server OS. XP or even 2000, or 98 or NT will do just fine.. Only thing to consider is that You want all network to run on Gbps not 100Mbps if You want it fast. So in old pc You will probably want to add Gbps ethernet card.
I myself have Nas, Web and FTP server running on the old dual P3 1Ghz dell workstation with 4x256MB 800Mhz rambus memory. And it is more than i need, it only uses like 10% CPU. and I got it for less than $100 on e-bay locally.Only thing it needs is Gbps ethernet card for faster local transfers, but then I would need to change router as well to Gbps so I am really not bothered.
Other thing is that it is big so I have been thinking of getting some old small form factor Pc of e-bay and using one large hdd instead of all the old small Hdd's that I have now.
I can also mention that there is no monitor or keyboard/mouse for it. I am using remote desktop from my main pc if I need to do something.
Also I have been thinkintg of addindg CCTV function to it with video capture card for 4 cameras and software with motion sensing and sendig pictures to e-mail and/or mobile when motion detected so that even if pc with video recordings is stolen I will still have picture of robbers on e-mail/phone. And that pc will handle all these tasks with ease. So think before You shed out money for new components when building nas. Old system probably will not be very energy efficient but mine has original 350W dell PSU and works just fine.

I know its a little over the top for average home user, but I worked in IT for a few years. I cant help it. Its like crack. Either way I'm taking your advice on the 430. It should be enough. I'm not planning on raising the vcor if I overclock, so energy concerns should only be a few watts. I would also keep the speed step enabled so when not in use it downclocks. Nothing big just a modest 200mhz or something.

As for dust: I'm planning on modding my case in the future with either h2o or air filter if it gets too dusty. My basement seems pretty dust free compared to the upstairs.

I got my house wired with cat 5e. All that remains is to replace my 24 port 10/100 with a nice gigabit switch (managed) with some sfp ports for future expansion. I'm planning on setting up a vlan to one of my jobs so i can offer them some data security. Their files are too big to pay a company to backup remotely. >30gb. That would cost over a hundred a month and would pay for my system in less than a year. Same with my files too expensive to backup online. Stuff like PSD files, 30 gigs of music, program installs, some video editing projects and home video.