Selecting MB for storage server

[Dodger_MSN]

Selecting MB for storage server

Min requirements:
-SATA RAID
-PATA RAID
-NCQ chipset support

I'm choosing between:
-Abit AN8 Ultra
-DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 Ultra-D (ok, it's SLI, but no matter)
-EPoX EP-9NPA+ULTRA

My choice of selected MB is based on their price and price of CPU. What do u think about that?

 

[zAAm]

I've never liked epox. About all my friends have had an Epox mobo and all of them were dissatisfied. And three mobos went bad between them so... Any of the other would do and I guess the Abit would probably be a bit cheaper. You could always look at add-on SATA and PATA RAID cards as well?

 

[Deleted member 3]

My server runs on an EPOX board, never had any problems. WEll besides the fact that it won't underclock my CPU's.

 

[Dodger_MSN]

zAAm
External (pci-32) controllers have a bottle neck in PCI-system BUS chain. Buying a cool 64 bit pci controller requires MB with 64bit PCI slots, for the most part they are not cheep.
In a case of n4 and integrated periphery I hope on Hyper Transport technology.

Mentioned models of Abit, DFI and Epox are almost equal in their price. Thus Abit and Epox are about 126$ and DFI about 136$. It makes no difference.

 

[zAAm]

It depends on the amount of drives you want to use on the controller? 32bit controllers have mostly enough bandwidth for up to 4 harddrives and also 64bit controllers are usually backwards compatible with 32bit slots... And all things being equal I'd choose the DFI. The other 2 mobos doesn't have PATA RAID as far as I can tell btw.