Building a custom server

[LuckyTaxi]

Recommendation on a motherboard. Looking to spend less than $130 for a motherboard capable
of running an AMD 2500+ CPU.

Looking to purchase two to replace our ancient mail & web servers running FreeBSD.

I've purchased Biostar, Shuttle, Soyo and Asus for our workstations. We wont be needing any SCSI cards or anything like that since IDE is sufficient for our school.

I'm looking at Chaintech (price is fairly ok), but I dont know anything about the company.

 

[Cheetah8799]

Well, there are a LOT of AMD based motherboards to pick from. Go with a good brand that has built in raid support for IDE, since you won't be using SCSI. That way you have at least some hardware raid mirroring. I'd suggest maybe ASUS for a good, higher quality brand. As for a specific model, I'm not sure. Maybe find one that allows up to 2gb or more ram, more than 2 ram slots, and obviously the ide raid. Maybe even SATA raid if you choose to use that for storage.

I've never been really impressed by Chaintech mobos.

If you want to run Linux/Unix servers off of this, you may want to go for a VIA chipset board, since I think the nForce2 Linux drivers are pretty much beta quality.

 

[LuckyTaxi]

found a gigabyte MB for $80. I wont be needing RAID even though it should be used.
What we do now is backup data to another server using rsync.

 

[Cheetah8799]

If I were building a low end server, I'd still have hardware raid, but I can totally understand if money is an issue. I work at a private college, and am often told I can't get servers we need due to budget issues.

 

[LuckyTaxi]

Originally posted by: Cheetah8799
but I can totally understand if money is an issue. I work at a private college, and am often told I can't get servers we need due to budget issues.

Working at a private K-12 school sucks. Pay is low and when we need things, we have to sacrifice on features such as RAID. IDE has served us well so I'm not complaining.

 

[Vette73]

I would get a KT600 board. VIA has been known to work with all brands of ram and also has True SATA ports. That and VIA has a strong Linux follwing so drivers are pretty solid for the most part.


Here is one on-sale for $47 (with a $10 rebate its only $37, so get 2)

KT600 board SY-KT600 DRAGON PLUS V1.0