ASUS Z8NA-D6C Server Motherboard Review :: Layout

Board

Memory bank 2

SMBus connector

8-pin power

Starting with the upper left hand corner of the board we find two polymer capacitors. ASUS uses solid capacitors with a 50000 hour lifespan on their board. This is followed by the SMBus Power connector. The 8-pin power connector is next followed by the 24-pin power connector found on most ATX boards. This configuration is fairly standard stuff for power on a motherboard.

24-pin power

CPU1

CPU2

Memory bank 1

Moving inward from the left side of the board we find that ASUS has the first of two banks of three DIMM slots. The board has two distinct sets of memory DIMMs one for each CPU installed on the board. The Xeon LGA-1366 CPUs support triple channel memory up to 8GB of Registered ECC/non-ECC DDR3 memory per slot. The board also supports Unbuffered DDR3 memory but at 4GB per slot, for a maximum of 48GB/24GB of memory. The memory supported is up to 1333MHz.

Front fan

USB connector

ICS chips

FP I/O

Next to the first memory bank are the two CPU Sockets. ASUS has them in opposite directions with one labeled CPU1, the other CPU2. To install a Xeon CPU the procedure is exactly like that of the Core i7 LGA-1366 CPUs. Lift the lever pull the cover off the CPU Socket, take off the protective cover, lower the CPU into the Socket in the proper facing lower the cover and lever and install the cooling. The Xeon 5504 CPU uses a large heatsink and we added a fan to cover the two. The second memory bank is to the left of the CPU Sockets.

5500 IOH

Aspeed 2050

Back of PCB

ICH10R

The Z8NA-D6C uses the Intel 5500 IOH. This is designed to connect Intel CPUs with Intel QuickPathInterface like the Xeon 5500 series to peripheral devices. The 5500 IOH is similar in many respects to the X58 chipset, but has 1 PCI Express x16 , 2 x4 PCI Express Gen 1 to talk to the Southbridge for a total of 32 PCI Express lanes instead of the 36 PCI-E 2.0 lanes found on the X58 and supports 2 QPI connections for each CPU.

Intel PHYs

SATA

Expansion slots

Winbond chip

The board has an ICH10R Southbridge to support RAID for the six SATA ports present. These are located on the bottom left area of the board. The ICH10R supports up to six PCI Express 1.1 ports, the PCI bus, Intel High Definition Audio, Integrated gigabit LAN and six USB 2.0 controllers. ICH10R supports software RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. If you want more storage options, the Z8NA-D6 is available with 14 SATA ports, but the Z8NA-D6C has enough for most users.

Hynix chip

Fan

Circuitry

I/O

The Z8NA-D6C has a single PCI Express Gen 2 x 16 slots for an add-in card. As the board is meant for both servers that mount several of these boards on a rack and workstations that might require an external graphics card, this is an elegant solution, offering the board an option to add a FireGL or Quadro workstation-class graphics card to the board. Other expansion options include 2 PCI Express Gen 1 x4 links, the MIO slot for a discrete sound card and a 32-bit PCI slot. The rear I/O on the board consists of a PS/2 mouse, a PS/2 keyboard, two USB 2.0 ports, a Serial port and a VGA port for the onboard video.