The Supermicro X8SIL-F mATX motherboard is becoming a favorite for home servers, especially those built upon Core i3′s and Core i5′s because it provides lots of expandability in a small form factor, and has IPMI 2.0. The Supermicro X8SIL-F’s supported processors can easily handle a network attached storage (NAS) virtual machine as well as additional virtual machines for other purposes. As I eluded to in my previous post, the major difference between the revision v1.01 and v1.02 boards, at least as far as I have seen, is the support for the Intel Core i3 and i5 CPU’s as well as the Intel Pentium G6950 in the v1.02 X8SIL-F versus support only for Intel CPU’s in v1.01. With the virtualization support and hyperthreading in the Intel Core i3 and i5′s as well as the low power consumption of Intel’s 32nm process, it is a great, low cost and low power combination.



