Great! I think at this point I'm willing to take a shot on the $75 Intel board w/Realtek: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813121442.

Thanks for all the great info so far!

$75 seems overpriced, especially since the next generation has been available for a few weeks. But a few bucks may not be worth much to you...

Are you talking about Cedarview? I am considering $75 vs $200+ for the D525 based Supermicro. Cedarview graphics don't seem to be supported (yet) to the level I need, under ubuntu at least. Eh.. ?

I do see that the Cedarview D2550 CPU was released a little over a month ago, but I don't see motherboards with it for sale anywhere. And the only D2700 board I can find is a Jetway for $130- to save 3 watts TDP at an approximate savings of $2/watt/yr. So a total $6/yr savings on power would take 5-6 years to recover the money spent on the Cedarview.

Just thinking out loud here- trying to figure the most cost effective way (over time) to up my current file server to gigabit speeds, and still have a decent desktop experience for general use..

I'm just saying that I paid less for Pineview boards more than a year ago in my locale where as a rule everything is more expensive than in the USA. So $75 seems steep for a legacy board. D510MOs are being auctioned on eBay by the way.

There are D2500 and D2700 Intel boards on sale everywhere. They're cheap. But you want supported graphics so they're not for you. It means the older boards have lost some of their value though.

Yeah, I hear you... I noticed most of the stuff I'm looking at now was actually selling for ~%20 less 6+ months ago.. weird..

My existing case/PS is older, but seems to basically be mini-ATX compliant. The power supply has a 20-pin power connector, however it does not seem to have the 4-pin 12V CPU core voltage plug that seems needed by the Intel D525MW motherboard (see attached pic from motherboard manual). Can I just get an adapter to connect one of the large molex drive power connectors in my case to this socket? If I recall the 4-pin drive molex connectors have a 12V, 5V, and two ground pins. I'm not sure what all 4 pins on the motherboard connector are expecting. And why do other D525 board makers (like Supermicro) not seem to have this extra 4-pin CPU core voltage connector?

I don't think you'll need an adapter. If I recall correctly, the D510MO ran on 20 pins.
There are other boards with 24 pins by the way. Maybe you're not seeing them because the 4 extra pins are aligned with the main connector.

The four extra pins on the 24 pin connector versus the 20 pin connector are not the same as the four pins on the CPU connector.

The 24 pin connector has an extra 12V, 5V, 3.3V and ground wire. The CPU connector has two 12V pins and 2 grounds.

Awesome page.. Thanks for that!

Got the Intel D525MW motherboard & 4GB RAM today. Turns out my existing power supply does have a P4 power plug, so I basically just swapped motherboards and re-installed linux. I'm now getting ~50MB/sec transferring a 700MB file to/from the file server. It also happens to draw *exactly* the same power (35W) as the old setup.

So I don't save any more power, but file transfers are now more than ten times faster, and general OS responsiveness when using the desktop is amazingly faster than the old Via C7. All in all a very worthy $100 upgrade for me... Thanks for all the help!