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.
A 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.
