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Between its consumer/ gaming lines and its server lines, ASUS has a compelling set of workstation motherboards for a variety of platforms as denoted by WS line designation, like the ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution recently reviewed. ASUS has released an update to the popular P6T6 WS line in the ASUS P6X58-E WS. The P6X58-E WS is a mix between enthusiast components and server components that provides a compelling case for something that can be used as a workstation today then transition to a server duty later.

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Oftentimes those building their own small business and home storage servers are looking to save considerable amounts of money. In the process, users oftentimes look to the lowest cost motherboard they can find, with the wisdom that add-in cards can get the features that they want. On the other end of the spectrum are server motherboards like the Supermicro X8SI6-F that have everything or almost everything users need onboard. The Supermicro X8SI6-F costs in the $300 range, which would be a turn-off for many users, but when one looks at the features, $300 looks like a relative bargain. Read the full story

My main server, the Big WHS now houses over 60TB of storage, runs multiple VM’s, and has over 10 Gigabit NICs. At the heart of this server, is a Supermicro X8ST3-F. It was not the first motherboard I tried in the server, as I originally tried using an ASUS P6T7 WS Supercomputer in the Big WHS, but it has been running solidly since its first installation. Aside from its stability, it also comes with many PCIe slots, an onboard LSI 1068e based 8 port SATA/ SAS controller, dual Intel Gigabit NICs, onboard video, and IPMI 2.0 with KVM over IP.

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To update to my review of the Supermicro X8SIL-F, I took some Kill-A-Watt power consumption numbers with the Supermicro X8SIL-F to answer a few questions regarding power consumption with real server hardware compared to consumer-level hardware. Below I am focusing on idle power consumption as with the Intel Core i3-530, Xeon X3440, and other LGA 1156 CPUs the CPU utilization while running a NAS application will be very low. After a bit of testing I found the i3-530 again leading the pack in idle power consumption and the Xeon X3440 turning in very respectable idle power consumption numbers.

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