Rackmount Server: Aberdeen Stirling S15 Dual Xeon :: The Motherboard: Supermicro P4DPR-6GM+

Supermicro is a shining star in the server arena. They have been working closely with Intel for a long time now and they are the early adopters of the Intel E7500 chipset. Intel seems to be taking over the high-end chipset market from Serverworks. The Supermicro P4DPR-6GM+ is a dual Xeon CPU motherboard for 1U Server cases. They did a really good job of designing a robust motherboard. The Intel E7500 chipset utilizes DDR memory by dual channel pumping up to 3.2 GB/s of bandwidth.

Northbridge

Southbridge

It is possible to install 8GB of DDR 2100 ECC registered memory on this motherboard. 2GB memory modules are not on the market yet. Until that day 4 GB memory will have to be enough. When you look at the memory slots, you will see that, they are angled to fit in a very thin case.

This board supports two muscle CPU's(Xeon). If you have ever installed CPU's, you know about the crappy handle mechanism which locks the CPU. Sometime the locking handle is even plastic. There is nothing crappy about this board. Every detail is quality including the locking handle. When you run a server 24/7, and if it is a database server, that CPU will get hot. We nornally install heatsinks on the top of the CPU. What about the bottom? Long hours may cause a defect on the motherboard due to excessive heat. When you check the bottom of this motherboard, you will see two heat spreaders installed.

An additional slot for an add-on video card or a powerful graphics chip would be waste of investment for a server. A reliable, old ATI Rage XL on-board video chip is more than enough for this board.

If you are not planning to use an add-on SCSI or a SCSI RAID adapter, the on-board SCSI chip is a necessary feature for a server motherboard. This board has the good old Adaptec AIC-7899W chip which supports Ultra 160 SCSI. There is a port in the backplane for external devices such as backup devices, NAS, or other storage devices. There is also the standard onboard SCSI connector for hard drives and internal SCSI devices.

You will see another port on the board which resembles notebook memory sockets. This port is for additional Adaptec RAID 2005S card. This is also called Zero Channel Raid. Extensive tests have shown, when you configure drives as RAID 5; this add-on card maintains its performance for up to 30 users. for over 30 users access, other RAID 5 solutions will be more effective. The Stirling S15 Server features another solution for this, which we will discuss later.

A double ethernet solution is handy for servers. You might like to connect one for external web access and one for internal network access. Or you may like to separate the connection for another OS server group. This board has one GBit connection by way of the Intel 82544GC chip and one 100/10 connection via the Intel 82550PM chip. You can team them up for 1.1 GHz and/or connection redundancy purposes.

Intel 82550

Intel 82544