Best cheap motherboard

[Jabster]

I'm setting up a cheap server and need some advice on motherboards. The following motherboards are available in my area and fall into my price range sorted be price.

ECS Elite K7VZA, Onboard Sound, 5xPCI
ECS Elite K7VMA, Onboard Sound & VGA, 4xPCI, 1xAGP
8VTAE + Sound, 5xPCI (I don't know what make this is)
Gigabyte GA-7IXE4, 5xPCI, 2xISA, Norton AV+..
FIC AZ11 + Sound + Norton AV, 5xPCI

Which motherboard is the most stable or would be the best for my situation?

 

[Peter]

K7VZA is a good board, cheap, reliable and fast, no funny bits, no nonsense (and no overclocking features either). Get the latest revision with KT133A and 686B chips for 133 MHz CPU bus and UDMA100 IDE.

K7VMA is very similar to that one, using the KM133 north bridge to have VGA right out of the box.

GA-7IXE4 uses the outdated AMD750 chipset, no AGP 4x, no UDMA100, and 100 MHz CPU and SDRAM busses only.

I don't have a comment on the remaining two. In general, if this is to become a stressed FILE server, then use SCSI equipment for better parallelism of disk accesses, and don't use chipset integrated graphics - you'll need the bandwidth for other things. For low end servers however, integrated graphics and IDE drives are sort of OK.

Regards, Peter