Prefered motherboard for diskless client ?
 

Hi,

after setting up a small (openmosix)-cluster with clusterknoppix and booting clients with etherboot (yep, classic floppy) as a feasability study the next thing will be a real diskless (computing) cluster.

The diskless clients are considered to have the following parts:
- case (obviously no real problem)
- 512 MW to 1 GB RAM (numeric models require it)
- micro-atx motherboard with following components onboard
* vga (also used in terminal mode)
* LAN
* PXE enabled BIOS (boot via network (fire&forget))
* INTEL or AMD-CPU (mini-itx is nice, but the MIPS/$-ratio ...)
* no X-Server trouble with the associated chipset
- of course no spinning disks

Could anyone give a recomondatation for the motherboard ?
(Of course it should be a cheap one, we need more than one)

Thanks a lot,
Snooze

I've played with a few Intel PCI NICs that have the PXE boot on them, so you could always use one of those and the board of your choice. It's going to cost more than an all-in one board as well.

The other option is to look at Via's product line (except for the Micro-ITX line as the CPU is pretty weak). I've successfully booted a micro-itx board using PXE and tftpd, so you should be able to find an AMD/Intel-based board that can do the trick. Stay away from fancy new chipsets (i850 has worked well for me) and RAID controllers (pointless in your case). You're probably going to have to buy 512MB sticks as most of these boards only have two DIMM slots.

If it was me I'd leverage that buying power and talk to your vendor about getting a few boards to use as a demo, (or at least find one with a flexible return policy).