The Reference: Intel OR840
Intel's workstation motherboard is available for some time now. As many of you may know, it uses the 840 chipset, thus it needs to be equipped with either two or four RDRAM RIMMs. Intel includes a Slot terminator card which makes it possible to use the board with just a single processor as well.
The two Slot1-sockets are rather close to one another, which restricts the size of the heatsink you can use for the two processors. You should always make sure that the system is sufficiently cooled. Most "hot" components - CPUs, RIMMs, AGP card - are situated in the upper part of the board and will generate a lot of heat in that area. Intel knows about this and placed a total of six (!) fan headers on this motherboard. Two will be used by the CPU fans, four are left too cool down your hardware.
The OR840 comes with integrated 10/100 Mbit LAN (Intel chip) and huge voltage regulators, since both the CPUs and the RIMMs require a lot of power. An AGP Pro slot makes sure that even touch workstation graphics cards can be used with the OR840, and an on-board speaker is present to replace the system speaker.
Five PCI slots should be enough for additional hardware. The workstation board can also be ordered with on-board AC97 sound system (with two internal line-ins).
There wasn't anything to complain about performance and stability. The board ran rock-stable during my tests. Even the BIOS-Setup is very easy to use, although it is rather different to the standard AMI and Award BIOSes.
The board lacks both CPU setup and overclocking options. Basically you don't need to set up your processor, as Intel CPUs always come with a fixed multiplier.
