Gigabyte GA-970A-D3 ???

[lars]

i am going to build my first unraid server this days. at the moment i am in the planning stage.

 

so far, i came up with the Gigabyte GA-970A-D3 mb + Athlon II X2 260 as base, since mb + cpu come in at a budget $130 and the mb leaves several options to upgrade the cpu later on, if needed + it has plenty possibilities to extend.

 

now to my actual question, does anybody uses this mb? does it work at all/ with work-arounds? any pro and con would be highly appreciated!!! (btw. its based on a AMD 970 + SB950 Chipset, if that is any help)

 

thx in advance, L 

[Inssomniak]

Ive used this board and its variants in a few places.  Its VERY nice for the money.(50-70 dollars CDN) I actually seek out this board in Virtualization environments.

 

I just used this board with a new piledriver X6 AMD CPU and now have a fully virtualized unRAID!

Works great with ESXi if you want to go the virtualized route down the road.

 

 

 

 

 

[bburns]

I need to replace my Unraid MB, I have been trying to decide between an AM3+ board vs. FM2 Board. I was wondering if  anyone had any experience with these in a Unraid server. The current Motherboard Compatibility list seems quite stale.

 

Here is what I currently have:

 

* ASUS M4A78 PRO with six SATA ports

* AM2+ 3.2GHz Athlon II Quad core processor

* SUPERMICRO AOC-SASLP-MV8 PCI-Express x4 Low Profile SAS RAID Controller

* 4 Port SATA PCI E x1

* 4 Port SATA PCI

* 8 GB RAM

* 8 2TB Hard Drives (+parity + cache)

 

 

 

Here are the ones I am looking at:

 

GIGABYTE GA-970A-D3 AM3+ AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128521 - 6 Onboard SATA but has NO video:(

 

GIGABYTE GA-F2A85XM-D3H FM2 AMD A85X (Hudson D4) SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128572 - This has 8 onboard SATA Ports plus video

 

Cost is almost identical. How does the Athlon II processors compare to A4-5300 Trinity processors?