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;
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.
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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).
Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.
