This is an archive of past FreeBSD releases; it's part of the FreeBSD Documentation Archive.
I have had fairly good luck building workstation and server configurations with the following components. I can't guarantee that you will too, nor that any of the companies here will remain "best buys" forever. I will try, when I can, to keep this list up-to-date but cannot obviously guarantee that it will be at any given time.
The ASUS P55TP4XE motherboard appears to be a good choice for mid-to-high range Pentium server and workstation systems. If you're really looking for performance, be also sure to get the pipelined burst cache module . I feel that it's worth the extra cost. If you're looking for a 486 class motherboard, you might also investigate ASUS's 486SP3G offering (Note: These have become increasingly hard to get as ASUS apparently no longer manufactures them).
NOTE: The Intel Triton chip-set based motherboards do not offer memory parity logic, making it almost impossible to detect when a memory error has occurred. Those wishing to build more fault-tolerant systems should therefore buy one of the newer Triton II based motherboards, which offer both better performance and parity checking.
This one is a bit trickier, and while I used to recommend the Buslogic controllers unilaterally for everything from ISA to PCI, now I tend to lean towards the Adaptec 1542CF for ISA, Buslogic Bt747c for EISA and Adaptec 2940 for PCI.
In this particular game of Russian roulette, I'll make few specific recommendations except to say "SCSI over IDE whenever you can afford it." Even in small desktop configurations, SCSI often makes more sense since it allows you to easily migrate drives from server to desktop as falling drive prices make it economical to do so. If you have more than one machine to administer then think of it not simply as storage, think of it as a food chain!
I do not currently see SCSI WIDE drives as a necessary expense unless you're putting together an NFS or NEWS server that will be doing a lot of multiuser disk I/O.
My SCSI preferences extend to SCSI CDROM drives as well, and the Toshiba XM-3501B (now released in a caddy-less model called the XM-5401B) drive has always performed well for me. Generally speaking, most SCSI CDROM drives I've seen have been of pretty solid construction (probably because they don't occupy the lower end of the market, due to their higher price) and you probably won't go wrong with an HP or NEC SCSI CDROM drive either.
I've had pretty good luck with both 8mm drives from Exabyte and 4mm (DAT) drives from HP .
For backup purposes, I'd have to give the higher recommendation to the Exabyte due to the more robust nature (and higher storage capacity) of 8mm tape.
If you can also afford to buy a commercial X server for US$99 from X Inside then I can heartily recommend the Matrox Millenium card. If free X servers are more to your liking, you certainly can't go wrong with one of Number 9's cards - their S3 Vision 868 and 968 based cards (the 9FX series) are pretty fast cards as well, and are supported by XFree86 's S3 server.
I have had very good luck with the Sony Multiscan 17SE monitors , as have I with the Viewsonic offering in the same (trinitron) tube. For larger than 17", all I can recommend at the time of this writing is to not spend any less than U.S. $2,500 for a 21" monitor if that's what you really need. There are good monitors available in the >=20" range and there are also cheap monitors in the >=20" range. Unfortunately, none are both cheap and good!
I can recommend the SMC Ultra 16 controller for any ISA application and the SMC EtherPower or Compex ENET32 cards for any serious PCI based networking. Both of the PCI cards are based around DEC's DC21041 Ethernet controller chip and other cards using it, such as the Zynx ZX342 or DEC DE435, will generally work as well. For 100Mbit networking, either the SMC SMC9332DST 10/100MB or Intel EtherExpress Pro/100B cards will do a fine job.
If you're looking for high-speed serial networking solutions, then Digi International makes the SYNC/570 series, with drivers now in FreeBSD-current. Emerging Technologies also manufactures a board with T1/E1 capabilities, using software they provide.
Multiport card options are somewhat more numerous, though it has to be said that FreeBSD's support for Cyclades 's products is probably the tightest, primarily as a result of that company's committment to making sure that we are adequately supplied with evaluation boards and technical specs. I've heard that the Cyclom-16Ye offers the best price/performance, though I've not checked the prices lately. Other multiport cards I've heard good things about are the BOCA and AST cards, and Stallion Technologies apparently offers an unofficial driver for their cards at this location.
I currently use the Gravis Ultrasound MAX due to its high sound quality and full-duplex audio capabilities (dual DMA channels). Support for Windows NT and OS/2 is fairly anemic, however, so I'm not sure that I can recommend it as an all-around card for a machine that will be running both FreeBSD and NT or OS/2. In such a scenario, I might recommend the Creative Labs AWE32 instead.
For video capture, there's really only once choice - the Matrox Meteor card. FreeBSD also supports the older video spigot card from Creative Labs, but those are getting somewhat difficult to find and the Meteor is a more current generation frame-grabber with a higher-speed PCI interface. I use one for broadcasting video on the MBONE and it works quite well!