What to look for in Home Serve Motherboard

[IVB]

If E8400 is overkill, why not go from Intel to AMD? AMD Athlon 4850e has a lower power consumption than Intel C2D E8400.

You'll want to go with an AMD motherboard, though.

I've paired up 4050e with 780G motherboard and the performance with playing Blu-Ray movies is great! My motherboard used is an ECS A780GM-A, which is an ATX motherboard. But you'll want to have a motherboard with built-in RS232 serial port, though.

My angst is one of compatability. I'm finding a variety of boards are touchy with non-intel parts, and given that there's no real price difference in a server motherboard, it doesn't really hurt to go Intel.

 

[damage]

Anybody lookedinto realiable offsite backup solutions? I've used a few cheap ones for work and haven't been overly impressed. For a solid provided with long term commitment i could be interested.

how about mozy? ( http://www.mozy.com ) they're part of emc now.

 

[felixrosbergen]

The looked at the Abit P35, which has the Intel P35 chipset.....i figured the P45 must be better than the P35...

I compared the Abit P45 based mobo with the gigabyte and believe the gigabyte was cheaper and had some more power saving features...

Noting the power consumption issue on the video card...the 512MB may indeed be overkill...but if i don't even have a monitor connected to it (planning on doiing most work via Remote Desktop from the couch) and i have the Windows screendaver turn the 'screen' off within minutes...does the 'card' contnue to use power?

Any suggestions for less consuming video cards would be appreciated. My last 3 video cards all ended up with fan issues and i'm pretty well sick and tired of buying a new video card because a crappy proprietary fan/heatsink combo on the video card gave up...

Since i may at some point connect my big screen (HD) to this i though it may be usefull to have a HDCP capable card...and it's cheap...

Running CQC i may be able to create some nice remote control pages with the high resolution that the conneciton of HD TV to the PC would offer.

 

[IVB]

yes, the vidcard will still use power.

this particular mobo is currently OOS, but you'll notice that it has 3 PCI, 3PCIe 1x, 1 PCIe 16x, onboard video, onboard RAID, 6 SATA, etc. With the PCIe 16x, you could put in an HDCP compliant vidcard later and bypass the onboard video.

Dunno how it'd be with a server OS and whether that introduces any other complexities.

 

[keepersg]

I wanted to build a quiet, low power, low cost, high capacity machine to run WHS on for my home network. After some investigation, I settled on the parts list below and built it yesterday. The case while large, is beautifully put together and runs quietly and very cool. Took me about 2 hours to build the machine. WHS installed without a hitch and was up and running in another 2 hours (during most of which I did yard work).

All from Newegg. I recycled an old DVD and CD drive for it. Will put in a Blue Ray drive when the come down a bit.

Antec New Solution NSK2480 Black/Silver 0.8mm cold-rolled steel MicroATX Desktop Computer Case 380W Power Supply

ASUS M3A78-EMH HDMI AM2+/AM2 AMD 780G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ 2.9GHz Socket AM2 65W Dual-Core Processor

Patriot Viper 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model PVS24G6400LLK

2 Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM (

Microsoft Windows Home Server 32 Bit 1 Pack - OEM (N82E16832116395)

 

[CalypsoCowboy]

I'm having problems with my WHS and I'm thinking it's related to the mobo. So I'm getting an actual server mobo to see if that helps. Something to think about.