Need motherboard for home fileserver

[Stefan Esser]

Dmitry Marakasov schrieb:
> * Dmitry Marakasov (amdmi3 at amdmi3.ru) wrote:
> 
> Thanks for you replies so far. Now after some digging I understand a bit
> what I actually need.
> 
> Well, I hoped to get a SocketAM2 board for AthlonX2, as it is 30-40%
> cheaper than Core2Duo with similar performance, but most of AM2
> motherboards use nForce chipset, which is unsupported by CURRENT.

What made you come to that conclusion???

I use an Abit AN-M2HD (and I know I'm not alone with that main-board)
which is based on the nForce 7050/630a and works very well. I had one
issue with an LCD connected to the HDMI port (a HDMI-to-DVI cable is
bundled) and since it happened outside X11 (i.e., with a text console),
it might have been a bogus enabling of HDCP. (Hard to describe, the
screen showed a picture like an unsynchronized TV, but steady; only
a power cycle allowed recovery ...)

> The  only solution I've found is M2N32-SLI (thanks Craig), but I'll
> need to buy video card and Intel Gbit NIC.

The video integrated into the 7050/630a works surprisingly well with
the Vesa driver, but is also supported by the current (binary) nvidia
driver. (Also, since the upgrade of xorg to 7.3, there is an issue in
the port, which reports an API mismatch, but there is a work-around and
the port is being fixed to support xorg 7.3, too.)

> Though Core 2 Duo CPUs are more expensive, choice of motherboards is
> much wider, and they are generally cheaper than M2N32-SLI, so price
> of AMD/Intel platforms is nearly equal. I've found some MB's with

I prefered the AMD X2 for several reasons, one of the most important
ones was idle CPU power consumption. The Core 2 (and typical chip-sets)
consume 10W to 15W more idle power, which translates to about $30 a
year where I live ...

> integrated video and Intel ethernet: ASUS P5B-VM DO, Intel DG33BUC,
> Intel DG33FBC. I think I'll buy one of those, but just to be sure,
> are those statements right:
> - Marvell/NVidia NICs suck, and I am right that I definitely need Intel.
>   (what about RealTec, btw?)
> - ICH8DO should work as well as ICH8 and G33 should work as well as G965
>   (didn't find menton of ICH8DO in src/sys/dev/ata/ata-chipset.c)
> - ADI*/Realtec(ALC*)/Sigmatel(STAC*) HDA CODECs provide more or less
>   equal sound quality. And it can be considered `good' to
>   non-audiophiles.

Well, you may want to take a look at the Abit AN-M2 (or -M2HD, if you
are interested in firewire support, or possibly in HDMI/HDCP). All
functions appear to be well supported (disk, video, sound, integrated
PCIe Gigabit Ethernet). Combined with an "Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro
PWM" it gives a cheap, compact, and quiet (and power-efficient!) small
server with quite good performance (though with only a limited number
of PCIe and PCI slots, since it has a uATX form factor).

BTW: The AMD/ATI 690G chip set also allows to build a compact home
server (and with the recently announced support for an open source
graphics driver, the on-chip video may become well supported; but I
guess it will work as well with the Vesa driver as the 7050 did when
I tried it ...) The 690G should have another 5W less idle power
consumption ... (But beware: 690G main-board often have only 100baseTX
Ethernet or a Realtek Gigabit Ethernet chip on PCI, which may limit
network throughput ...)

Regards, STefan

So, no reason