Most stable motherboard/CPU for server?

[jasonjm]

Hi all....

I am building a server, and was wondering if any of you had any opinions of which motherboard/CPU combo above 1ghz is likely
to be the most stable and reliable?

thanks for any opinions....

 

[mechBgon]

Are you sure you need above 1GHz? People have different needs, but where I work our primary domain controller supports about 50 users at a time, runs Exchange 5.5 with GroupShield and Netshield antivirus software, hosts several databases, and runs Veritas BackupExec tape backup for itself and our backup domain controller. With a single P3 933, it seldom exceeds 10% CPU utilization and is usually poking along at about 3-5%.

It has not crashed since I started working there and it runs an Intel STL2 motherboard, which is based on ServerWorks ServerSetIII LE. I guess you'd have to call it "mature" technology since Intel has discontinued all the processors it was designed for (up to dual 1GHz with 133MHz FSB), but it does run stable. Intel has a 3-year warranty on it.

If you want more power, how about a SuperMicro board that supports dual Pentium3-S with 512kb L2 cache? They have ones with and without SCSI. Those CPUs are darned expensive though.

 

[blstriker]

I'm currently using a serverworks board with a p3 512k cpu. It's pretty stable. It's hard to predict stability since there are so many variables. For the past two years, I was using a amd k6-3 350 on a fic 503+ with the via mvp chipset. It was rock stable for me but others swear that the same combo for them sucks. It's hard to say. But the serverworks boards all seem to be geared towards reliability since they're desgined for servers.