Quote Originally Posted by userfriendly View Post
Whats the difference between the 2? I know servers use a different case and processor and they cost a heck of a lot more. And thats all I know.
Hardware-wise, servers would/might have a more robust powersupply and even redundant power supplies (one or more extra power supplies to take over the job of the primary PS if it fails). It would be using SCSI type connectors to it's hard disks to achieve certain requirements like multiple hard-drives (up to 7 per scsi), hot swap, RAID configuration, etc. A server might also have more than one processor CPU. In the time when the first Intel Pentium chip was king, I have been setting up dual Pentium servers. Since a server continuously runs a serious amount of hardware that gets hot, it must have serious amount of cooling as well.

BTW, with more modern techniques, sometimes a server isn't anymore a single powerful computer. It might be a group of simpler computers linked in a network system called a "cluster". We were doing early experiments in clustering when I left my employment to seek other opportunities.