Supermicro motherboard

I need to buy a motherboard for my storage server build. I have a 24 bay Supermicro case and 24GBs of 1066 ECC RAM (6 x 4GB) already. I was looking at this board:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X9SRL-F.cfm

I need at least 4 PCIe slots, 3 HBAs currently and possibly an additional NIC card and a fifth slot would be nice for future expansion.

I'm not married to Intel over AMD. Is this a good board? Is there something better?

If this is a good board can you recommend a CPU?

I'm thinking an E5-2603 should be plenty for Linux/ZFS. Any thoughts?

The 2603 is certainly enough for general home/media file serving, but it really depends what you're doing with the machine. FWIW I have dual E5-2620s for running VMs on the same machine, and hardly ever touch full utilization.

The X9SRL is a nice board. Intel is generally a little more expensive for the chip but about the same cost for the board, performance for a low-usage file server is a tossup.

I have separate hardware to run virtualization on. This box's only job will be data storage. Are you saying the E5-2603 might be overburdened just handling the file sharing?

"File sharing" is a little unclear: it could apply to anything from a thousand-user data share down to one user streaming x264 over network at 10mbps. I have an E5-2620---which is just a little faster per core and has six cores instead of four---but like I said CPU usage is never a problem, even with VMs running on that machine.

I would recommend a Xeon CPU.