[sclug] Motherboard suggestions

[Alex Butcher]

On Tue, 23 Apr 2013, Derek M Jones wrote:

> It looks like its time to update my Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard
> (system built in 2005, 3 DDR memory stick failures, 2 power supplies
> given up the ghost).  I am getting intermittent hangs and swapping
> out the memory does not seem to make these go away.
>
> I originally built the system to house lots of hard discs (total
> of 3T) and so I chose a motherboard with lots of SATA ports (8).

If the system is that old, your discs might well be coming up for
replacement too. If so, why not rationalise around a RAID1 or RAID10 of 3TB
discs? That way you'd probably get better performance, lower power
consumption and need fewer SATA ports too.

> The nearest Asus equivalent I can find today is the P8Z77-V.
>
> Does anybody have suggestions for reliable motherboards supporting
> lots of SATA ports?  Support for a PS/2 port would be a plus; I
> love the old IBM keyboards and the PS/2 -> USB connectors seem
> to result in support for some characters disappearing.

Gigabyte boards used to have a couple of PS/2 ports last time I bought one
around the end of 2008. They seem to have the edge over Asus for quality
too, these days.

Best Regards,
Alex