Hi everyone, my first post here.

I have to choose a linux-friendly motherboard supporting an intel Q9650 (quad-core 3GHz, 1333MHZ FSB) and 2/4Gb of DDR3 1333Mhz RAM in dual channel mode.

The mobo should have:
- one Gbit LAN port
- the possibility to boot linux from a USB2.0 key
- a very-cheap on-board VGA
- a very basic disk controller (no raid).

I think we might use a very light linux distribution or maybe Debian.

The system will be diskless (or maybe with a very small SSD) because its only purpose will be to perform very heavy code-compilation tasks, and to send the results via FTP.

By the way, I have to build four of these systems in order to create a 16-cores cluster, so any help in finding a cheap but reliable mobo would be very appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

If you are building a serious build machine I would get an i7 processor. The large cache and faster memory access should be much faster then a quad core of the same MHz speed. I'm am building a machine now with a ASUS P6T SE motherboard. The Asus board plus a 2.66 processor is under $500.

By "2/4" you mean "2 or 4"?

Probably your compile tasks are much less demanding than ours. We (where I work) do a lot of compiles on several Linux systems and those with less than 2GB of ram per core are frequently limited by that, sometimes to the point that it isn't even effective to try to use all the cores.

Every day the code we build gets even bigger as multiple programmers add features.

Why? Are you really trimming the cost that aggressively? Disk drives are very low cost.

A few GB of swap space is very helpful in a compile server in case the most demanding compiles all happen it once. That's a lot better than exhausting ram and failing.

Odd choice. We store the results by SMB or NFS. So how do you get the source code (which we also get by SMB or NFS)? If that also by FTP? FTP seems even less convenient for getting the source code that for pstoring the binaries. Where do you store the source code during the compile?

BTW, how will you distribute the work between those systems? I haven't yet dealt with that. We have the super crude approach of manually selecting one when starting a build job.