This board is a community favorite.

This motherboard has a single Intel 1156 socket with 4 DDR3 ECC REG DIMM slots. 4 or 6 SATA ports are standard. Dual Gigabit NIC is also standard with an extra port for optional onboard IPMI. 3 PCI-E X8, X4, or X1 cards can be added, and 1 PCI card can be added. It also supports full length X16 GPUs because the first X8 slot has a cutout to fit the full size connector. It’s likely that we’ll be adding a LSI HBA and USB 3.0 card, which will take up 2 of the 3 available PCI-E slots.



This motherboard hovers around the $25 range, sometimes more if you go for the (-F) version that has IPMI.

Unfortunately, your CPU selection will be limited to quad-core Xeons (think: i5 and i7 equivalent), as well as up to only 32GB of RAM. But that’s OK - it’s a cheap, functional NAS that will stick kick the crap out of an off the shelf unit.