biggnsexxy

I lied, the Atheros NIC is not working great. You can copy to the server all you want at decent speeds (30-50mb/s), but can not read from server later. Installed add-on NIC, prob solved. But all-in-all, the onboard NIC is not viable.

Long time listener, first time caller....new un-raid server builder here. Microcenter has a combo special with different boards/procs and I could not find anyone who had used the MSI 785GM-P45 AM3 785G board, so I became the guinea pig for the rest of the world (yes, a huge responsibility, but when you're called upon, you answer...ha). So anyway, used the following hardware with un-Raid 4.6 and running smooth. mb: MSI 785GM-P45 AM3 785G proc: amd phenom ii x2 560 (combo'd with the board was $99) mem: crucial 2 x 1GB DDR3 - 1333 CL9 psu: Corsair Builders Series CMPSU-430CX hd: 2x Seagate Barracude LP 2TB (ST320005N4A1AS-RK) case: Antec 300 (I just love the case, and don't have any current plans to use drive cages) boot: 2GB Tuff-N-Tiny Ran into issues initially, but ended up being a bad DIMM1 slot in the mb, so only used DIMM2 to see if everything else was good. Originally bought 2x Samsung Spinpoint F4 drives, but they ended up having same issue as WD EARS drives, but without a jumper fix. They were parity checking at roughly 3mb/s. Exchanged the mb for a new one, and returned the Samsungs for the Seagates. It's up and running now, passed several memtest passes with no errors. Initial parity check on seagates ran at about 60mb/s. Robocopying data now. Anyway, just wanted to pass along that this is an acceptable MB to use for anyone considering it. Edit: Wanted to add that the on-board Atheros gigabit nic works great.