Need suggestions for a server board

[NightFalcon]

I'm building a server for myself and could use some feedback on the choice of motherboard. First of all this has to be Dual-Xeon board and must support PCI-X preferably with at least one 133 MHz. I've been really wanting to get an 800FSB system because for the price of 2.4 GHz 533 Xeon I can get a 2.8 GHz 800 Xeon, well for about $20 more. The problem is that I can't find any boards with that FSB and still have them match my other specs.

Can anyone recommend a board for around $200-$350 that is 800FSB, has PCI-X slot 64-bit/133MHz, has built-in video, and built-in gigabit network? Don't need anything fancy like SCSI or RAID, I need that PCI-X slot to put in a raid controller, so don't need another one on the board. Oh, and I won't ever have more then 2GB of ram, so don't need one of those boards with support for 32GB, 4GB limit will do just fine.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Good luck with that The only boards I've seen that meet all your requirements also have the 8 ram slots and RAID and are $400+. Bump for your search ^

 

[Peter]

Get an Opteron instead of the Xeon, and use the money you saved to upspec the board. Either way, www.tyan.com is where to look

 

[NightFalcon]

All right so let me ask you this then. How big of a difference is there between 533FSB and 800FSB? Also between 512 L2 and 1MB L2 on the CPU itself? I can find the boards that meet my requirements without problems, but they are all 533FSB.

 

[jose]

Some boards will let you overclock the Xeons. ie you can get a 2.4(533) and oc'd to 3.2(800)..

The Asus PC-DL & the Asus NCCD-DL will let you do that, but only have a 64/66mhz pci-x slot..

Regards,
Jose

 

[Peter]

... which hangs off the south bridge. TOTAL throughput on the southbridge uplink is 250 MB/s. Seeing how it has PCI-X, PCI, SATA, IDE, USB 2.0 and sound to manage, go figure how much "server" performance you'll get from this half-arsed solution.

Make your mind up - do you want a solid performer with real good I/O performance, or a looks-as-if toy?

 

[NightFalcon]

Originally posted by: Peter
... which hangs off the south bridge. TOTAL throughput on the southbridge uplink is 250 MB/s. Seeing how it has PCI-X, PCI, SATA, IDE, USB 2.0 and sound to manage, go figure how much "server" performance you'll get from this half-arsed solution.

Make your mind up - do you want a solid performer with real good I/O performance, or a looks-as-if toy?

Are you referring to the two boards above or to something else?

How about this board: NCLV-D?
Can't find any info on it at all and it's not even found on pricewatch, but using dealtime I managed to locate it here: http://www.digitallyunique.com/nclv-dide.html

$258 seems like a very good price and it has both 800FSB and 64bit/133MHz PCI-X. Can you tell from reading that if there's a downside to it?

 

[jose]

Here's a review for the E7525 chipset based mobo:
http://www.linuxhardware.org/a...204232&mode=thread

Here's some more on diff Intel chipsets:

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040927/index.html

Which raid controller are you planning on using ?? what hard drives ?? 15k ??

Regards,
Jose

 

[NightFalcon]

I'm planning on using this Broadcom raid controller: http://www.newegg.com/app/View...=16-125-005&depa=0
Drives will be Seagate SATA 200GB 7200 8MB.

That board that I posted above is not advertised correctly, same 66 MHz PCI-X from the manual. Think that's what I'll have to settle with. Most likely looking at this Supermicro board: http://www.supermicro.com/prod...n800/E7320/X6DVL-G.cfm