February 9, 201016 yr ok I know there are a trillion posts on motherboards but this one is slightly different so please read on... My mobo went to heck this weekend and I need to replace it. it was an ASUS (the third one I had that went bad... no more ASUS for me). It held a AMD Athlon 64 single core CPU (Athlon 6400 or so). My question is this... Do I just buy another Mobo that will house my Athlon 64 or do I upgrade... Basically I am asking if upgrading has any benefit? I house uncompressed Blue Ray on my unraid server and have had some issues with streaming, but always chalked that up to my client and not to my Unraid server...Should I spend the extra $70 or $100 to get a dual or quad core cpu, does dual or quad core have any benefit with Unraid and through put. I have 9 sata 3.0 drives so far and will be adding more as time goes bye. 4 run on a promise stat controller (PCI) and the rest run on my on-board sata controller. I could probably replace the MB for like $70 but a MB and CPU might be around $170... since this was an unexpected failure money is an issue.
February 9, 201016 yr Should I spend the extra $70 or $100 to get a dual or quad core cpu, does dual or quad core have any benefit with Unraid and through put. Unless you are running additional add-on processes on the unRAID server (torrent client, vmware, etc) you will see little to no improvement from the additional cores. unRAID is not CPU bound in any way.
February 9, 201016 yr Quad core is a waste of money unless you are doing vmware or transcoding. Dual core can help by providing extra paths for network, hard drives and unraid calculations. As Joe mentions, for stock unraid, you will see very little improvement. Given your circumstances as defined, I would stick with what you have unless you can get a sweet deal on used mobo/cpu combo from eBay.
February 9, 201016 yr Author thanks guys for the fast response. i am currently running basic unraid, no addons except an additional interface that I never use. i wouldn't mind using it for an FTP server but that is later. i will get a replacement mobo then, what brand do you guys like.. .I won't do ASUS again, just not reliable enough. I wanted to do Gigabit but I see ther are some BIOS issues with it trying to save a copy to a hard drive partition.
February 9, 201016 yr As long as you disable that feature in the BIOS (which it seems you can do with the newest BIOS versions) you will be fine.
February 9, 201016 yr Biostar is my new favorite motherboard company, especially for unRAID. Biostar boards cost about the same as an Asus (hence, cheap), but they are much better quality. You should be able to find a Biostar board with 6 onboard SATA ports, onboard video, and a Gigabit NIC for about $60 (USD). Here's the board I'm using: BIOSTAR A760G M2+ AM2+/AM2 AMD 760G Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - $55.99 currently out of stock Here's a good deal on an open box mobo (meaning it may not come with SATA cables): BIOSTAR TA785GE 128M AM3/AM2+/AM2 AMD 785G Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - $61.99 + shipping And here's another open box: BIOSTAR TA790GXB A2+ AM2+/AM2 AMD 790GX ATX AMD Motherboard - $59.99 + shipping
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