Test Platform: Asus K8N-DL
We used an Asus K8N-DL workstation motherboard. The board comes with dedicated memory sockets for each processor. The first processor can access four DIMMs while there are only two DIMMs for the second CPU.
Article continues belowA Broadcom chip does the networking job; the chipset comes with four SATA II ports and two UltraATA/133 channels. Asus decided to place an additional Silicon Image controller on this board, so a total of eight SATA ports are available.
Since this board was designed to fit into standard ATX cases, it does not come with a large number of expansion slots. There is the x16 PCI Express slot for graphics plus a PCIe x1 connector and two 32 Bit PCI slots. We found it nice to see that the board was equipped with a Firewire chip as well as with a decent AC97 2.1 sound system with 7.1 channel support and optical audio outputs.
