I have my ESX 4.0 system running for about a month now with the following specs below and connected to an Openfiler system for storage. I'm mostly happy with the results except for iSCSI is a bit slower then expected when moving large amounts of data, but for normal usage, it is perfectly fine and reading is great. Everything is connected via a Linksys 1GBe switch.

ESXi 4.0
GIGABYTE GA-890FXA-UD5 ATX AMD
AMD Athlon II X4 635 2.9GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor
2 x Mushkin Enhanced Silverline 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Desktop Memory (16GB Total)
1 x 250GB SATA WD2500AAKS (OS)
On-Board NICs 10/100/1000 (Realtek 8111D) (Custom OEM.TGZ)
ZOTAC GeForce 7200GS ZT-72SEG7N-HSL Video Card
Crucial TX650w
APEVIA X-DREAMER3-AL Silver Computer Case With Side Panel Window

OpenFiler
Abit AV8
AMD Opteron 165
2 x 1GB Crucial DDR Memory
2 x 20GB IDE (OS - RAID 0)
4 x 2TB SATA WD20EARS (ESXi Storage via iSCSI - RAID 5)
2 x 500GB SATA WD5000AAKS (Backup via NFS - RAID 0)
1 x Promise SATA Controller
On-Board NIC 10/100/1000
Crucial TX650w
Random Case

What revision of this board are you using for this build.

Also, what BIOS ?

Iv just got one of these boards, and it works fantastic when its got 4GB of memory installed, but as soon as i populate the other two DIMMs with another 4GB (all identical), it boots up and seems to be fine.

BUT, the managment VM keeps crashing by the looks of it, getting errors in the vmkernel log saying things like



and then i get things like


if go onto the machine console and restart the managment interface, it comes back for around 30 seconds, then crashes again !

Not good !