Supermicro X7SPA-H-O Intel Atom D510 Mini ITX 1PCIE 6XSATA3.0G 2GLAN VGA Motherboard Retail
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 Rating: Review Date: 09/22/10 |
Supermicro X7SPA-H-O Intel Atom D510 Mini ITX 1PCIE 6XSATA3.0G 2GLAN VGA Motherboard Retail
Cons:
1. Current BIOS (1.0c) does not allow to go into BIOS with USB keyboard, have to use PS/2 keyboard which sucks2. No audio on this particular SKU - which is not a big deal for a headless server anyway3. No overclocking of the Atom - which is not surprising for SuperMicro, but I wouldn't mind having an option to bump the CPU clock to 2GHz (just like I did on my Asrock ION nettop) given the very low power consumption and thermals should not be a problem. Anyone knows any software utility like the one Gigabyte or Asrock have to OC?4. Some of BIOS defaults are archaic. SATA are set by default to IDE instead of AHCI, ACPI set to 2.0 instead of 3.0 - that's why you should check the BIOS setting BEFORE you install the OS :)
Pros: 1. Excellent on-board Intel network cards - full support for teaming/load balance/etc., terrific network throughput on a true gigabit network2. 6 SATA-II with AHCI in such small form factor3. very low power consumption |
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Rating: Review Date: 06/07/10 |
Supermicro X7SPA-H-O Intel Atom D510 Mini ITX 1PCIE 6XSATA3.0G 2GLAN VGA Motherboard Retail
Cons:
None
Pros: Quiet, cool, fast file transfer Comment:
Quiet, cool, fast file transfer (70-80 Meg./Sec. on NFS)Dead simple setup and fully supported (less on board software RAID). Use Linux MDADM for RAID if needed. Very low power consumption. Solid construction. If you need a NAS box with more stuff, look no further than this one. |
I added 2x2GB OCZ DDR2-800 SODIMMs, 6 SATA hard drives (no RAID) and 4GB OCZ Rally2 flash drive dedicated to Win7 ReadyBoost, running tweaked version of Win7 Ultimate (disable aero, remove Media Center, etc.). The PSU is Corsair 400W 80+ certified. The primary us is file serverPerformance is surprisingly good. After I teamed both NICs into Load Balancing mode, I observed sustained transfers rates of 100mb/s!!! (single 12GB file, if you try to copy 1000 small file the throughput will be limited to a known Win7 issue). Turning off the Aero and tweaking the OS resulted in quite responsive system with pretty fast boot.Power consumption numbers are unbelievable. How about 36-38W while running ut? It can do both ut and mkvmerge at about 40W, but once you wake up other drives, you consumption will jump to ~ 70w, which is still very good.Overall I am very happy; for you compare the versions of this motherboard to make sure you buy the one which fits your needs.