# Best motherboard for core i7 nehalem processors?



## caa (Jul 15, 2009)

I tried looking in the mailing lists, in the handbook for 7.2 supported hardware, and on the forums for core i7 motherboards, and found very little.

I'm wondering who's using core i7 processors, and which motherboards work well.  I'm hoping to find something with at least 2 nics, 6 memory slots, and at least 1 pata port to go with the usual plethora of sata ports that these things seem to have.

I found some info on early problems with the core i7 processors, but it looks like they've mostly been fixed.

Thanks,
-Charlie


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## desnudopenguino (Jul 21, 2009)

Did you check the drivers/controllers on the motherboard?  You're probably not going to find out which motherboards work, but you should be able to find out which network adapters, SATA/RAID drivers, video & audio, etc... components on your board that FreeBSD supports.  I recently bought an AM3 board and FreeBSD 7.2 didn't *technically* support everything on it, but it all works out of the box without any problems.  

Here's a link to the current hardware supported for 7.2
FreeBSD 7.2 RELEASE Hardware Notes

I hope this helps.

Bucky


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## dh (Jul 22, 2009)

I'm using Gigabyte EX58-UD4 motherboard with Core i7 920 w/ 6GB RAM on amd64 8-CURRENT. I've had it for 4 months now and so far it has been working well. I'm using onboard Intel MatrixRAID (mirror) and sound (with snd_hda). I haven't tried any NIC-s on that MB though.


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## torqueturns (Aug 21, 2009)

We are using Asus P6T WS motherboard 3G of DDR3, 3 sata 500Gig drives, Nvidia 7400 GS (passive heat sink) and Intel 10Gig Ethernet card (pci-x) slot (ixgb driver).
Processor is the Intel core i7 940 chip.   The machine is running FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE-p3 and currently has over 600 ftp clients round the clock for the last week, data rates are great, stability has not been an issue.  We are hoping to scale to around 10,000 concurrent connections in our testing lab.


```
> netstat -w 1 -I ixgb0
            input        (ixgb0)           output
   packets  errs      bytes    packets  errs      bytes colls
         0     0    6572564          0     0  120691056     0
    213774     0    6778884     421173     0  111017370     0
         0     0    6272630          0     0  115880965     0
    202151     0    6820968     397583     0  112101654     0
         0     0    6204229          0     0  114153311     0
```


```
last pid: 63308;  load averages:  0.45,  0.48,  0.45    up 6+19:45:34  11:14:43
603 processes: 1 running, 602 sleeping
CPU:  0.9% user,  0.0% nice,  3.1% system,  6.1% interrupt, 89.9% idle
Mem: 118M Active, 2401M Inact, 300M Wired, 20M Cache, 199M Buf, 94M Free
Swap: 8192M Total, 8192M Free

  PID USERNAME    THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE  C   TIME   WCPU COMMAND
  890 root          1  96    0  4896K  2112K select 4  30.7H  0.00% pure-ftpd
  869 root          1  44    0  3184K  1016K select 4 188:04  0.00% syslogd
 1025 root          1  44    0  9324K  4600K select 2   0:04  0.00% httpd
 1038 root          1  44    0  5876K  2460K select 0   0:04  0.00% sendmail
 1048 root          1   8    0  3212K  1060K nanslp 0   0:01  0.00% cron
 1140 www           1   4    0  9324K  4692K accept 1   0:00  0.00% httpd
23991 www           1   4    0  9324K  4696K accept 0   0:00  0.00% httpd
 1139 www           1   4    0  9324K  4704K accept 0   0:00  0.00% httpd
 1137 www           1   4    0  9324K  4696K accept 5   0:00  0.00% httpd
 1141 www           1   4    0  9324K  4676K accept 4   0:00  0.00% httpd
 1138 www           1   4    0  9324K  4680K accept 1   0:00  0.00% httpd
56842 www           1   4    0  9324K  4668K accept 3   0:00  0.00% httpd
83537 root          1   4    0  4900K  2184K sbwait 2   0:00  0.00% pure-ftpd
84995 root          1   4    0  4900K  2184K sbwait 0   0:00  0.00% pure-ftpd
92333 root          1   4    0  4900K  2184K sbwait 3   0:00  0.00% pure-ftpd
88397 root          1   4    0  4900K  2184K sbwait 2   0:00  0.00% pure-ftpd
```


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