Thanks Chris! I've lived too many horror stories of builds gone wrong, so I've decided to keep it simple. I know my way around a Linux system, but at the end of the day I use Windows. Given my job, the mandatory overtime, 9mo baby, exhausted wife, and the endlessly dirty house - I simply don't have time to play sysadmin anymore! I did some testing with Plex. With the Realtek GbE in Direct Steam 480p, I was hitting about 30%-45% CPU while having a few desktop apps open and running. Intel NIC will help with that a little bit. While that was happening, I tried a stream to my iPhone and peaked at 100% CPU as it was actually transcoding the 480p - honestly, no issues with playback as long as I didn't do anything on the computer. By this, I'm thinking 2 streams is my limit, which works for now. I'm planning on making iPhone-capable M4Vs to mitigate this, as well as for travel purposes. Do note that my library is more DVDs than Blu-Ray right now.
I'm planning on a fair bit of reading for DrivePool to make sure I know the ins and outs before committing to building this thing. I've also got to wait for my laptop to be returned from Mythlogic (hopefully they can fix the chassis or I'll have to build a new tower, which puts this plan on hold.)
The only thing I cannot seem to find is a guide to configure Win10 Pro to run headless, which either tells me that it "just works" or I'm not putting the right stuff in when I'm searching the web.