[CentOS] Best Motherboard

Thu May 15 14:24:52 UTC 2008
Sam Drinkard <sam at wa4phy.net>


Ryan Nichols wrote:
> To all..
>  
> I was using a Gigabyte motherboard, and the board seems like a bad 
> choice.  What do you guys recommend for a decent server board that 
> would use a Dual Core processor and DDR2 ram.  I dont want to replace 
> the CPU and Mem i already have, just find a decent board that 
> supportsthe existing..
>  
> Thanks,
> Ryan Nichols
>
Ryan,

    About 2 years ago, I build a server using a SuperMicro X6DA8-2 
motherboard and it is a dual xeon processor machine with capabilities of 
16G of DDR2 memory.  It has dual gigabit ethernet ports, 6 usb 2.0 ports 
and a dual SATA controller as well as regular IDE bussmaster 
capabilities.  I've been very happy with it, and at the time, it was not 
that expensive a board with the 2 cpu's on it.  A couple months ago, I 
recased the thing back into a SuperMicro case that was optimized for 
that board and I wish now I'd done it when I first built it.  One 
problem I had with it was the cpu cooler fans.  The original ones were 
made by Intel, and they were noisy, terribly out of balance and 
downright bad.  I replaced them with 4-pin PWM fans from SuperMicro and 
that machine is so quiet now, I have to feel of it to make sure it's 
running.  The thing runs about 90 degrees operating and with the fans 
set up on the super quiet mode, it never even breaks a sweat.  There is 
another version of the board that has a SCSI controller on board, but 
only one gigabit ethernet port.  Everything else is pretty much the 
same.  I highly recommend SuperMIcro boards and cases.  Probably a bit 
more expensive than some of the others, but in a server, I want quality, 
so I pay for what I get.

HTH

Sam