Server Boards

I'm planning to build a server box, mostly for experimentation.

I'm looking at two boards:


http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?in...EON24-R&cat=MBB

and

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?in...21BA1-E&cat=MBB

I'm leaning towards the Intel board with a Socket 775 Duel Core Pentium because I want to use SATA drives, and set up a software RAID (CentOS v4).

The duel Xeon board looks quite interesting, though.

Thoughts?

I typically dont like to purchase refurbished hardware, so I'd go with the intel one, however the gigabyte board does (or the description says) that it comes with 2 processors pre installed? (not sure how they are selling that for 80 bux, must have to do with the fact it is refurbished)

Although the Gigabyte board has 6 (six!) DIMM slots and two processors, it's got only one PCI slot. My experience with onboard NIC cards is that... they are soon replaced with real PCI NIC cards. So that would be a problem.

Note that the Intel board seems to support only 1GB RAM sticks, as it has four slots and supposedly supports up to 4 GB of RAM. I don't really like either board for a server, but it depends upon what type of experimentation you are planning. If it's only a home server, then I'd go with the more durable (lots of PCI) Intel.