Hello there,

While I might not be an AMD fan/expert, someone I know in real life offered me to get 2 Opterons 246 really cheap, basically the chips are listed at over 500$ each on the retail/streets market, he's selling them for only 180$ a shot... so I figured out I'd get the deal and build a decent server...

Now comes the picky choice of the motherboard...

I spent quite a while looking for a motherboard which does suits my needs, so here they are:

- The server will be running under Linux 2.6.8.1 recompiled for SMP support, the system should be stable, running 24/7.

- There will be no Windows operating system running on it at all, so the 64bits OS thing shouldn't be an issue.

- The machine will be accessed remotely through ssh (Secure Shell) and will only serve as a stable game server for +1000 connected clients in the future.

Thus being said, I do not need;

* A soundcard on the motherboard we won't do multimedia...
* I do not have a need for ATA133 or SATA, we planning on hooking up a Western Digital 120GB drive to it these drives are ATA100, so no SATA needed...
* Thus being said; no need for SCSI onboard either...
* We don't need USB 2.0 or even USB 1.1, and no support will be compiled in the kernel...
* We don't frankly need an integrated 1000 or 100 NIC since we have a couple of Etherexpress Pro PCI 100 NICs laying around the lab...
* And further more we have no need for AGP 8X or PCI-X since there will be no monitor hooked up to it and either a crappy AGP or PCI video card will do the job if we ever need to acces the system in terminal mode locally...

Now, what we'd like to see is:

* At least 8 RAM banks which we'll eventually fill up with 8 sticks of 1GB/DDR 400 at some point.
* Native DDR400 support for better performances...
* AMD chipset for better compatibility/stability...

And the point of this thread is: a decent price!

So far, the only affordable board seems to be the MSI K8T Master2-FAR, as it's listed at 300$ here but however it is limited to 4 RAM banks and supports a max amount of 4GB of RAM... which is a bit short, besides the board uses a Via chipset which I'm not very fan of...

On the counterpart, the Tyan K8W seems to totally suit our needs since it has 8 RAM banks and does support PC3200 (400DDR), however the board is listed at 699$ which is quite too much for our budget...

So, if anyone thinks about a board that actually would have decent performances, with possibly an AMD chipset or better compatibility and 8 RAM banks... but is reasonably cheaper than a K8W, please let me know!

Thankfully yours,

--
Boo!

since i'm a tyan fan i'll dump other ideas on ya...
heres the tyan product matrix linkage:
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/matrix.html' ">http://www.tyan.com/products/html/matrix.html

you said you looked at the K8W... was that the Thunder board [s2885] or Tiger board [s2875]?

since you dont need/want inegrated scsi i would recommend from the Thunder family, boards s2881G2NR, s2882G3NR and if you need firewire s2885ANRF [K8W]

those are all dual boards, 16gb ram [8x DDR400], onboard lan, and 2 of those have onboard ati video.

prices:
s2881 - $445 - http://www.buy.com/retail/prod...sku=...72&loc=101&sp=1' ">http://www.buy.com/retail/prod...=10361772&loc=101&sp=1
s2882 -$396 - http://www.buy.com/retail/prod...sku=...36&loc=101&sp=1' ">http://www.buy.com/retail/prod...=10356536&loc=101&sp=1
s2885 - $445 - http://www.buy.com/retail/prod...sku=...53&loc=101&sp=1' ">http://www.buy.com/retail/prod...=10355453&loc=101&sp=1

these prices are from http://www.buy.com' ">http://www.buy.com with free shipping [at least when i just looked] but you can always hunt for other options at http://www.pricewatch.com' ">http://www.pricewatch.com

-------------------------
SYSTEM-1: 2x Viewsonic VX900-2 19"| Tyan S2885ANRF (Rev.A, bios v2.07) | 1x ATI Radeon X800 Pro 256MB | 2x AMD Opteron 248-HE Single-Core CPU | 8x 512mb PC3200 Corsair XMS Series ECC Reg. (CMX512RE-3200LL) | 2x Seagate LVD 36.7Gb U320 SCSI 10,000rpm RAID0 (ST336607LW) | 1x Seagate LVD 36.7Gb U320 SCSI 1