Please recommend a motherboard

[Andrey Nozhkin]

I'm going to create a small home cluster for some heavy calculations (not bitcoins or similar, it's more about scientific things). It uses CPU and RAM mostly; built-in graphic card is enough.

I will use i5 or i7 CPU family.

I need to get cheap but reliable motherboard. The main requirement is that it should allow up to 32 gigabytes RAM to be installed - so it should have enough RAM slots. Also it should be reliable, and I'd prefer brands\models with (at least) a few years of factory warranty.

It should have an honest 100mb ethernet port (1GB would be great), and at least a few USB ports - better USB3.

The dimension does not matter, anyway it will be put in a custom case. Any desktop model is acceptable.

Your advices, please? Thanks!

 

[LRogers1]

it depends on what card you are going to want to put in it such as gpu sound card and wifi card etc. please reply with your requirements

 

[Andrey Nozhkin]

it depends on what card you are going to want to put in it such as gpu sound card and wifi card etc. please reply with your requirements

Absolutely no requirements. If you have read my post then it's quite obvious - nobody cares about soundcards if he's doing scientific calculations. I stated about GPU by the way - low-end or built-in.

The same thing for wifi - I will use wired ethernet so no wifi is required.

 

[LRogers1]

wouldn't it be better to build a latest gen xeon server and have that running with 32-64gb ram? as they have a lot of power especially with 15k scsi drives?

 

[Karsten75]

Do you plan to overclock the CPU for higher performance? Is your application able to use multiple cores or will it essentially be a single-threaded application?

As an aside, if you do plan to have a multi-threaded (parallel) capable scientific application, then GPUs far outperform CPUs in their performance - just saying.