I've just come home to find a fairly nasty BSOD on my WHS and when rebooting I am no longer getting any HDDs detected. I've not had a chance to crack it open yet but I'm fearing that the Motherboard is on its way out. SO, looking at replacing the mobo and in all likeliness the CPU. Since its been a while since I've really looked into hardware I was hoping for some advice on a suitable replacement. Speed is not really an issue so here is the wish list: CHEAP!!! Many SATA ports. Current setup has 4 on board + 4 more over 2 PCI Sata controllers. 7 Are in use. I'm happy to carry on using the Gigabit LAN... just to match the rest of the network. Other than that, I'm easy, Intel or AMD. Red or Blue, MATX or EATX or ATX. Any suggestion?
ATX generally gives you more SATA than uATX but you'll probably want onboard GPU in which case the ATX options are more limited - although you can now get ATX with onboard GPU. I personally would look into power usage as this could save you lots of money (I assume the server will be permanently ON, or at least most of the time). Something like one of the energy efficient Athlon IIs such as the 235e might be a good place to start, obviously then you'll need an AM2+/AM3 motherboard although for cheap it'll be AM2+ for sure!
