When you look around for a server motherboard with multiple onboard LAN connections and support for Intel’s E3-Xeon V3 CPUs, you won’t find anything that could be considered cheap. That is up until now, as Gigabyte’s GA-6LASL is just that; a lot of server board for a tiny price tag.
The mATX form-factor motherboard comes with an LGA1150 socket and Intel C222 chipset, supporting the Xeon E3-1200 V3 and the 4th generation Intel Core i3 processor families. The four DIMM slots support up to 32GB ECC memory with a speed of up to 1600MHz and the board comes with two SATA3 ports and four SATA2 ports for storage. DOM storage is of course also supported.
As previously mentioned, the GA-6LASL has dual onboard LAN controlled by an Intel I210-AT chip and an integrated Aspeed AST1300 2D graphics card for up a resolution of up to 1920×1200 at 60Hz. Being an intel board, the SATA ports support Intel RST with RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10. It comes with one PCIe x16 Gen3, one PCIe x8 Gen2 x4, and one PCIe x4 Gen2 x1 slot.
There are no direct USB 3.0 ports, but it does have a header for two front-panel ports. There are plenty of USB 2.0 options with four onboard ports and two headers for four more ports. Being a server board, it comes with support for Windows Server 2008 and 2012 as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.3.
The Gigabyte GA-6LASL is a lot of server board for just £99, well worth considering.
