I just bought a new board and CPU for my server system TODAY, actually... Here's what I got:
1.
GIGABYTE GA-P55-UD4P LGA 1156 Intel P55 ATX Intel Motherboard2.
Intel Core i5 750 Lynnfield 2.66GHz 8MB L3 Cache LGA 11563.
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 RAM (F3-12800CL7D-4GBRH)I'm quite excited.... I've been waiting for some time for the Lynnfield LGA 1156 boards and CPUs to come out. I'm replacing my old and trustworthy ASUS A8R32-MVP Motherboard (with it's AMD Opteron 170 CPU), which has been running great for me since I bought it literally the day the board came out back in March of 2006. The main reason I ended up upgrading the system was because I was maxed out on SATA ports on the old board, and I've been having some trouble with one of my two PCI TV tuners on it (I think it conflicts with the on-board RAID or something).
I just couldn't justify the cost of the LGA1366 Core i7's, knowing that the Lynnfield chips wouldn't be too far behind. I might eventually "trickle down" this new LGA 1156 chip or board to my HTPC, and grab a LGA 1366 CPU for the server, but only if Intel doesn't decide to kill off the desktop variant of their Xeon chips (which is what the LGA1366 Core i7's really are), and only when Gulftown (6-core Nehalem) ships. Or maybe I'll put the Gulftown in the HTPC instead, or just keep my Q9550 there for a long while. I'm certainly not having any real trouble with it being slow for me, even with fairly demanding games thrown at it (it is only pushing 1920x1080, after all, which even your average mainstream GPU can handle easily). Either way, that's at least 9 months to a year off, and this should serve VERY well in the interim.
This new Gigabyte board will fit the bill almost perfectly. Sure, the P55 PCH uses dumb-old DMI to interface with the CPU (rather than shiny, new QPI like on the LGA 1366 boards), which limits the number of PCI-Express lanes you can hang off of the chipset (and ended up eliminating SATA 6Gbps from the boards in the end), but I'm not going to ever run 2 or 3 graphics cards in a server system, so QPI's insane bandwidth doesn't buy me much (and show me a hard drive that can actually fill a 6Gbps pipe, thanks). But, aside from that, it's got great features for a media capture/server system:
* 8 SATA 3Gbps Ports, plus another 2 eSATA ports on the back port cluster
* 10 USB ports on the back cluster, plus another 4 headers onboard
* Dual Gigabit LAN ports, which support LACP teaming.
* RAID 0/1/5 support via the Intel Matrix Storage system for 6 of those 8 onboard SATA ports (which is as good as it gets for non-hardware RAID)
* Realtek ALC-889a Audio, which is the nice one that fully supports on-the-fly Dolby Digital re-encoding (so you can actually use an external DAC and route ALL the system audio out through the digital output on the board)
Should be a fun weekend!
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Topic: Choosing a good motherboard/CPU etc for a MC14 media server (Read 3602 times)