Re: Choice of a new core i7 motherboard

[Thomas Goirand <thomas@goirand.fr>]

Andrew Miehs wrote:
> On 04/04/2009, at 4:54 PM, Thomas Goirand wrote:
>> We want to upgrade some of our motherboards, and I was wondering if some
>> of you had tried the X8ST series of motherboards from Supermicro. My
>> concern is, above all, hardware support.
> 
> I used to be a big supporter of SuperMicro, but after their 6014P range....
> 
> I found there support in Europe friendly, but in the end, they seem to
> have their hands tied.
> 
> I found that these boxes ate memory. I would need to swap out dimms
> once every 12 months. (We had about 30 of these boxes).

Yes, Supermicro boards are picky on the RAM.

> The IPMI cards also only worked half the time in these boxes.

They ALL worked for me.

> This having been said, I have no idea how these new boards are.

Shame, that was my question! :)

>> Also, how about the KVM & virtual media over LAN? It seems to me that
>> it's now integrated in the motherboard and that it doesn't need any
>> daughter board. Am I right? Does it still have virtual media (eg:
>> emulated CDROM over a samba shared folder)? Do we have BIOS access level?
> 
> If it is anything like the old version, you have access to the bios,
> and and the basic bootup stuff - but after that, it is your job
> to make sure that linux sends the rest of the data back to the ipmi
> card via the serial port.

You are talking about the OLD TYPE of boards. The new ones are full KVM
over IP as it was an external one, plugged to the VGA. They have nothing
to do with serial ports.

Thomas