PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

i was looking for mobo for new gen xeon and found this
http://www.supermicro.com/products/moth ... /X7QC3.cfm

not enough PCI slots

Neutron wrote:not enough PCI slots

think magma

Funny.

If you're interested in discussing Xeon motherboards drop another line in this thread. I've run Supermicro motherboards since 1998 and have been researching a new build for about 6 months (only delay on the build is due to lack of funds to do it properly, that should shortly be rectified).

I'm currently debating either a Seaburg based board (5400 chipset) with dual core Xeons or a single slot board with a higher clocked quad core. I can't find really solid info comparing the Xeon systems to modern multicore boxes. At least not solid enough to confirm or deny if the consumer class boards have caught up with the Xeons in terms of the overall bus design (this Xeon box has 2 independant PCI busses for instance).

stardust wrote:this one for c2d is the way IMHO
http://www.supermicro.com/products/moth ... /C2SBX.cfm

if it didn't have DDR3 I would have been just jealous

Although it will only use 2 Scope cards due to the 5v requirements, the x38 based C2SBX will actually support 4 pci cards as long as the other 2 cards support 3.3v operation. Should be obvious to some, but the point here for those that care is that 64bit/66mhz (or even 133mhz) PCI-X slots will downclock to the lowest speed/bit-width that is inserted into them (and the slots are almost always sharing the higher speed bus in such a way that both slots here will clock down to 32bit/33mhz if only one has such a card inserted).

The real question though is how the 133mhz slots are attached to the system bus, via the 'north' chip or on the ICH9 'south' chip... The latter could sorely affect the other 'normal' 32bit bus's operation. Not worth worrying about for some, but my current motherboard is an older Xeon board that has 2 PCI busses that are cascaded in such a way that the 'normal' 32bit bus uses the bandwidth of the 64bit/66mhz bus. Since I'm running SCSI on the 64bit bus (native/onboard adaptec u160) and am NOT using any exotic scsi raid features there's bandwidth aplenty for the 32bit bus still, meaning my board is capable of using the coprocessing features of scsi (which I prefer for OS/Apps/Swap even in these SATA days) and has enough bandwidth left for all 133mb/s required by the 32bit bus.

Btw for those who aren't interested in Xeon chipsets, the above Supermicro x38 based board (and the older p35 board also posted above) are some of the few boards on teh market that will go up to 8Gb of ram without suffering stability issues. On many cheaper motherboards you have to severely turn DOWN the ram timings to get even close to 8Gb of ram installed. Also supermicro boards almost ALWAYS support any future intel (or amd) chips that they claim to support. The capacitors and VRMs are always well specified and the only time something winds up unsupported is when a final cpu deviates from the spec that was published 2 years earlier (ie, a penryn core works on an older Supermicro board if it was claimed to UNLESS intel had to change a certain requirement during the final implementation of its newer cpu architecture).

Here's the seaburg board I've been eying (5400 based):
http://www.supermicro.com/products/moth ... 7DWA-N.cfm

stardust wrote:and for plenty of PCI:
http://www.supermicro.com/products/moth ... /C2SBE.cfm

no ddr3 though Markus

DAMMIT! now I am jealous!

hm, how much, and where to get it?

-greetings, markus-

[ X7DWA-N ] looks really nice.
2 pci 3.3v for existing cards and 2 pcie for future cards
64gb ram! must be best solution for gigastudio users. but is it possible to use such a ram in xp?

thanks

Nope, it is not (not 32-bit XP, anyway).

XP x64 has a higher limit, I forget what it is though.

Cheers,

Chris

i found only 1 place in canada and they special ordered it, it could take a while.
"frontier pc" in BC

it doesnt help that i cancelled my order when i saw the 5 PCI slot gigabyte but then reinstated it when i found that one is even more impossible to find.

C2SBE looks better than the C2SBX if you have 3 scope cards, because the 2 64 bit PCI slots are attached buy a bridge chip to a PCI-e x4 bus on the ICH9

so you have 2 pci33 slots and 2 pci64 slots on completely different busses.

Bangladesh is kind’a hot country. Is it good idea if I bought motherboard from Canada? is there anything to do with climate?
thanks

I have received 2x C2SBE in canada. 2nd one was a mistake of the supplier, since i canceled the order and then reinstated it, they forgot to cancel the first one !.

anyways i did have to pay for it. but i think i now have most or all the C2SBE outside USA Ill probably re-sell the second one.

Glad you got your board(s)! Wonder if anyone on here will snatch up that 2nd one...

And I've got my X7DWA-N here now as well. I'm holding off for a bit on the build though, Intel only released a small quantity of the .45 based Penryn 1600Mhz parts (1600mhz fsb) to the open market. Until there's enough manufacturing to keep their vendors happy (dell, apple, hp etc) there's too much of a price premium. Should only be another month or so, and the 1333mhz parts will drop enough then that it'll be either a pair of 2.83Ghz 1600mhz parts or 3Ghz 1333mhz parts. Still need to decide on a case & psu anyway and I have too much work to focus on this much atm.