Originally posted by: MU_Engineer
Why can't you just put a PCI Express USB 3.0 and SATA/SAS 6 Gbps card in a server board? I'd go that route since the 890FX and AM3 stuff is strictly client products and you won't see server features like IPMI and such on those boards. You'd be lucky to even find ECC support on a desktop board- as far as I know, the only one that offers it is ASUS, although all AMD desktop processors support unbuffered ECC memory.
The difference is that the components will be much more expensive.
If I go the consumer route, I can start small and grow along the way.
The board has enough SATA 2/3 ports to get me going and I already have an old PCI 3ware 12-port SATA-1 card that I can re-use until I get myself a nice new PCIe card.
But, OK, lets say I follow your advice, keeping in mind that I only need _one_ 6-core CPU, which board and CPU would you recommend?
The box will be like 95% of the time idle, just having a few smallish DBs and one or the other virtual machine running, doing internal mail, DNS, managing a few VPN endpoints and beeing an NFS store.
Occasionally however the box will need to do heavy number crunching over several hundered GB of data. :-)
Cheers
Mike