fred smith wrote: > I'm considering upgrading, and am trying to choose a modern motherboard > that nevertheless fully works with Centos5/RHEL5. > > Though I'm partial to AMD processors, and would like to use one in my > new configuration, that's not a requirement, if the most appropriate > board happens to be intel-compatible. > Personally, for consumer grade motherboard, I prefer to use Gigabyte or MSI. Between those two, MSI is more USB boot friendly. I boot many implementations with USB SysLinux without problem with MSI, but problematic with Gigabyte. For AMD, I recommend to get any with AMD 780G chipset, the reasons are : a. already has built in low entry 3D capable graphic unit, and has DVI output in case you want to use them with large LCD screen b. the SATA chipset brought by the AMD SB700 or SB750 is compatible with VMWare ESX 4.0i, thus can be made as local VMFS storage. My CentOs is always above VMware ESX now. > However, given the way ASUS is dumping LInux and crawling more firmly > into bed with the Beast, I'd prefer to avoid ASUS boards. > Long time never used the Asus board anymore, thus cannot comment. > I see that NewEgg has some combo deals at reasonable prices, but I > can't tell which chipsets/boards are known to work with centos5 and > which aren't. > > Just at random, here's one of their offerings, a Biostar board: > http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138143 > I've always understood Biostar boards to be cheap, not only in price, > but perhaps they're serviceable? I have some cheap BioStar motherboards. Works well, and suitable for lower price desktop built for my friends. All of the running Ubuntu Linux. However none of them running 24x7 thus cannot recommend whether it is suitable for your email server requirements. The oldest possibly about 2 years old. If I recall, I never had any motherboard problem since 2001 and I only used Gigabyte-MSI-Biostar-Palit. Yes, there are some old motherboards who were dead after never been used, but usually they are > 4 years old and becoming rusty after I put them in the store room (very humid here in Singapore).