[Asterisk-Users] Need a recommendation on a good motherboard/processor combination

[Mathew Frank]

I seem to remember you sent this the other day?  If so I`m guessing you
didn`t get much replies, so...

>I need a recommendation on a good motherboard/processor combination.
>I would like a motherboard that has lots of PCI slots and works well with
>Asterisk without problems getting drivers working, etc.  Onboard LAN
>would be nice to keep from using a slot.  Plan to use RedHat 8 for the OS.

I, and a reseller/consultant friend of mine, used to use ASUS a lot due to
reliability. (note:  I still have a working Asus P100 board running as a
firewall here - probably run for a few years more fault free - they really
used to be fantastic)  In the last few years I personally have had way too
much hassle with faulty boards (DOAs, firmware problems that never got fixed
and intermittant faults specifically for me), and so did this friend of mine
with his custumers, so we both will never touch them with a barge pole.
Maybe they do score well on TH for speed, but I`m in business - I need
reliability as a priority.

I personally have and still do use Gigabyte and have never had a problem -
though the way they have implemented "dual bios" defeats itself. (meaning a
virus could concievably blow both bios chips away because they are both
writable, and nvram is shared between the two)  The last ASUS board I ever
bought was extremely unreliable (strange intermittant boot problems among
other things) so I replaced it with a Gigiabyte board with the same (VIA
333) chipset and it was solid as a rock (still using it now in fact)
Gigabyte have a lot of boards with 5+ PCI slots, too.

My aforementioned reseller friend is a fan of Intel boards due to
reliability, just good design, and a _very_ good returns policy (very
important when you are reselling to businesses)

Well that`s how I see it - I`m sure others will dispute my claims, but they
are purely experience-based.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Mathew