This is the board I bought to be my server board. It's got a couple of nice features that make it great for that, a media centre, and also for a workstation.
A. onboard Nvidia GeForce 8200 with hybrid SLI
This is good for a few reasons:
1. If you do want to use it as a server, you can use the onboard video and not tie up a slot with a vid card. This allows you a PCIX slot and a PCIE X16 slot for serious RAID cards, NIC's, capture, fibre, or whatever cards. Combine that with the 6 SATA ports (one being external) and I figured you could hook up around 26 hard drives easily on the cheap.
2. If you want to use it as a workstation, you can take advantage of Hybrid SLI. It's what Nvidia uses on their laptops to save energy. So when you surf the 'net, you're using the onboard. When you're gaming, you're using the add-in video card. Since it's also got a PCIX port you can grab the significantly cheaper server cards to put in there.
3. Since it's got a Geforce 8200, you can use it as a media centre. Use the PCIE and PCIX slots for tuners, capture cards, video surveillance.........whatever. Nvidia means it will work great in Windows, Linux, *BSD........you name it.
B. Lots of slots.
1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 slot at full x16 speed
2 x PCIe x1
2 x PCI 2.2
1 x PCI-X
It'll take pretty much everything.
C. ECC unbuffered.
Always a nice feature as it gives you that server-style error checking while being cheaper as it's unregistered.
D. ATX
It'll fit in any standard case.
E. Heatpipe cooling on the VRM and chipsets.
Super easy to keep everything nice and cool. Since the stock fan keeps them cool, you don't have to deal with small, whiny fans or worry about fans dying and your mobo smokin' on account of that.
F. Dual gigabit ethernet.
Bond them to really serve things up or assign each a unique IP. Set up your tables and away you go.
I've tested it with Windows XP, Ubuntu, Knoppix, and FreeBSD. All of them worked great with their latest version. FreeBSD 7.2 didn't work with the onboard video card. I highly doubt anybody here cares in the slightest
$50 or trades. Let me know whatcha got.
