David Fletcher wrote:
> I've only put CentOS onto a fanless mini ATX board with an Eden chip on it,
> which works fine. But I have installed Fedora onto three home built units
> with genuine Intel motherboards, model D865PERL, with Seagate SATA drives,
> which have given me no trouble at all.
I was unlucky to have several of those (D865PERL). The motherboard is
real horror. Sure, it works in simple setups, and that's about it. As
soon as I attempted to put three dual-port ethernet cards (also Intel
brand) into it, it just froze. Intel support refused to solve the
problem although both the ethernet PCI cards and the motherboard were
manufactured by Intel (they were claiming that I was mixing server and
desktop components, blah). There is ton of BIOS updates for it. Some
of them issued to solve similar problems (BIOS freezing with various VGA
and ethernet cards). However, the problems were never solved
completely. I guess after some time Intel just gave up of fixing it.
Oh, and also, when connected to some types of KVM switches, for whatever
strange reason BIOS would freeze on powerup if machine is not selected
on KVM swtich...
Long story short, if you intend to keep all those PCI slots (5 or 6,
don't remember how many it has) empty, and you don't intend to connect
it to KVM swtich, you'll be fine. If you plan on actually using those
PCI slots, you better skip it.
Advices... If you don't have all the other components (processor,
memory, etc), look at something into what you can plug 64bit processor
(preferably AMD64, Intel EM64T only if you really want/need/must have
Intel processor. If the price isn't too big issue, you might want to
look into bying motherboard with support for dual core CPU.
If you need/want server grade motherboard, and decide to go with Intel
processor (although, IMO, AMD would be smarter choice), look at
www.supermicro.com. Note that those are *server* class motherboards,
and hence the price. They also have some desktop/workstation stuff,
which I guess should be a bit cheaper. The only thing to be carefull is
to avoid SuperMicro motherboards with Marvell SATA chipset. Marvell
isn't supporte by Linux out-of-the-box (yet). However, there's only one
or two SuperMicro motherboards with that chip (and they all seem to also
have an Intel SATA controller onboard, which is supported by Linux).
I've used many of them (from P3 to Xeons and dual-core Pentium D with
EM64T), and they all worked (and still work) rock solid stable. Oh, and
also, with SuperMicro make sure you check the form factor (size) of the
motherboard. There's couple of them (designed for 1U cases) that are
non-standard size and would fit only in SuperMicro 1U case.
Unfortunately, they don't have any AMD based motherboards.
