From the U.S. producer Supermicro we received a recent server that furnishes the necessary PCI-X slots. A X5DL8-type mainboard for Intel's Pentium 4 Xeon provides the basis. Other system specs are as follows:

• ServerWorks Grand Champion LE chipset;
• One or two Pentium 4 Xeon mobile processors with 400- or 533 MHz FSBs;
• 16 GB of ECC RAM maximum;
• Dual-Channel DDR;
• Six PCI-X slots: 100 MHz speed when fully equipped, with only three plug-in cards, up to 133 MHz;
• Integrated Adaptec 7902W Ultra320 controller with zero-channel RAID option (Adaptec 2010S);
• Two-gigabit Ethernet controller (Broadcom 5703 and Intel 84540EM).

We equipped the system with two 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 Xeon mobile processors and 2x 512 MB ECC memory modules from Samsung (DDR266, ECC, registered).

Our test system offers seven slots for SCSI hard drives with SCA interface. This combines power and data connection in one connector.

Because of its size (standard ATX power supply with greater depth), this sort of redundant power supply can be used in almost any ATX case. It consists of three modules - one can go down at any time without interrupting operation. A second may also go down, if not too much capacity is being used.

Supermicro X5DL8 with ServerWorks Grand Champion LE chipset.

Socket 604 holds the Pentium 4 Xeon mobile processors with FSB speed of 533 MHz.

We used two Xeon CPUs, each with 2.8 GHz. The top model currently offers 3.06 GHz.

Our test system was only equipped with 2x 512 MB PC266 DDR-SDRAM. As with all high-quality boards, the X5DL8 demands registered memory and also requires ECC. Also pictured are the two CPU coolers (right).