I am using this Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H board.  The on board Realtek 8111C Gigabit NIC works great and is very fast (I usually see 20 to 45 MB/sec transfer speeds).

 

It uses the following chipsets -

1. North Bridge: AMD 780G

2. South Bridge: AMD SB700

 

It runs several drives in AHCI mode with no problems (I don't use the onboard mobo Raid).

 

I had driver compatibility problems with FreeNas and this board, but I'm glad I found the unRaid product instead!

Thanks for another confirmation of this board. I plan on switching over to it (or the HP version) and a 35w cpu for some power savings next year. I love seeing those sub 50w idle energy reports with one hard drive on this chipset.

 

I'm curious how many pci-e sata controllers I can get working at once with the 5 slots. I have 2 pci-e 4x Adaptecs, 2 pci-e 1x Syba's, and 1 pci-e 1x Highpoint.

What kind of CPU are you using? Is it still rebooting on writes with a dual proc?

I'm using a 45W AMD Sempron LE-1150 Sparta 2.0GHz 256KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 45W Single-Core Processor - Retail.

Is your board still working ok?  Any problems so far?

 

I am considering buying this board for an unRAID machine.

 

 

I added this board to the Hardware Compatibility page, with links to the related forum threads, especially noting the single core CPU recommendation.

 

In tracking back through those posts, I could not help but notice a rather unusual aspect of the original build, the simultaneous use of five (5!) SiI3132 SATA controller cards.  This is a record for me, at least in my experience, of multiple identical PCI-type cards installed.  Multiple Promise cards have always been known for compatibility issues (although they have improved), so it's hard not to suspect issues with this many identical cards.  PCI-type cards, especially the older ones, sometimes have a limited set of IRQ, I/O port, and RAM configurations.  I only mention this because it seems very unusual to me, and so far, we have no other compatibility issues reported with dual core CPU's.

I am about to carry out a build using this board as I want one that is known to at least partially work - and with room for 2x Adaptec 1430SA PCI-E cards.

 

However, I am not sure what CPU to go with? Either a dual core (something like an X2 4850e) or a single core LE-1640.  Would a dual core make much of a difference and is there a possibility of it working with unRAID 4.4?

Price wise, and in my opinion, there's no point with going for a single core AMD CPU right now. You can get a BE-2x00 CPU (45W - dual core... more than enough speed) for $25 if you're patient or $35-40 if you want it right now. That's what I would do and that's my recommendation.

I spent $20 for the single-core AMD low watt chip from NewEgg, not to shabby.  I would expect only a negligible performance gain using dual-core vs single-core if only used to serve up storage (I'm not even sure if any version of Unraid is multi-core aware).