How to select a motherboard

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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.

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