Upgrading my server, need some help picking MB and Memory

[chooch]

Well, my MB is starting to act up and it's time to get a new one.  I am currently using a MB with AMD 939 CPU, so don't think any of the parts will be worth salvaging for my next build (except for my Sata card) since the CPU and memory are old.

 

For my CPU I am going to use the 2.7 GHz AMD Sempron 140 since I already purchased one a while back.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103698&Tpk=sempron%20140

 

As for the Motherboad, the recommended BIOSTAR TA785G3HD is no longer available.  So I was going to get the ASUS M4A785-M

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131595

 

Is this still one of the preferred motherboards to use?  Right now it is on sale for $65 shipped so seems like a good price.  I have 6 drives in my server so this should work out nice with the 6 onboard sata ports.  I really don't plan on adding more drives and will just upgrade with larger ones when I run out of space.  I also have a 2 sata port PCI card, so will use that when I need to run preclear on new drives without messing with my current array.

 

As for memory, should I just get DDR2 800 or is it worth upgrading to 1066 or 1200?  I was going to get 2 x 1GB sticks and this PQI PQI26400-2GDB seemed like a good deal for $30 shipped.  Plus there is a 15% off code for desktop memory running right now.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820141064

 

Any other recommends for memory/motherboards would be appreciated since there are so many to choose from.  I was hoping to get some input and advise from you guys since I was not planning on upgrading my MB until it started acting up recently.  So now I am trying to do all the research I can in a short period of time and there is a lot of information out there.

 

Thanks in advance.

[Rajahal]

The Sempron 140 is a fine processor, still one of my favorites.

 

The ASUS M4A785-M is kind of a finicky board.  As you can see from this thread, I had a hell of a time troubleshooting two of those boards against Supermicro SASLP cards.  I never got them to work.  However, I never had problems with the 6 onboard SATA ports or with a 2 port card on the PCIe x1 slot, so if you don't plan on expanding past 6 drives then it should work just fine.  You could also add one of these 2 port SIL3132 cards to add an extra two ports (which will be faster than your PCI card).

 

The other issue with the ASUS M4A785-M is that it is very picky about which USB Flash drives it will and won't boot from.  I would recommend searching through this thread and finding a flash drive that others have confirmed will work.  I can confirm that it WON'T work with a Verbatim Tuff n' Tiny.

 

DDR2 800 is plenty fast enough.  You won't see any benefit from the faster RAM.  I would recommend getting 2 GBs on a single stick, as it allows you to upgrade to 4 GBs in the future if you want to (more RAM can help when you are transferring a lot of little files, and it helps out with cache_dirs too).  This is the RAM I've been using lately.