[CentOS] Best Motherboard

[Luke S Crawford]

"Ryan Nichols" <rnichols430 at gmail.com> writes:
> Really? We bought that EXACT motherboard.. 10 to be exact and we've had 9
> fail and the 10th is on its way to major failure.. the odd thing is that
> 10th one was the first one purchased and that was 6 months ago.

Unless you have many hundreds of servers I would not expect that failure
rate from the cheapest 'free with purchase of CPU' motherboards.  (assuming 
they were not returns.  Never buy a returned motherboard.)  

Are you using ESD protection?

Seriously.  I worked at one place where we bought SuperMicro SuperServers
and assembled them ourselves.    About 1 in 3 were bad before being
put in production, and the ones that we did get to production had weird
problems like failed NIC cards months later.

I put in a strict anti-static regime (grounded conductive mats on the floor, 
the  table and grounded foot and wrist straps)   after that, we built 
another 70 servers.  Only one failed, and they were rock-solid once in 
production.

granted, the static problem at this office was noticeable-  you would 
walk across the room and touch something grounded and get zapped.  But
you can kill a motherboard with a much smaller ESD than you can feel

But being overly paranoid during assembly provably results in fewer pages
in the middle of the night later on.