Server board socket 370 PIII

[Wizard]

Poweredge 500sc part number 06M131 mainboard. This uses PIII socket 370 and 4 memory slots, two PCI-X slots and 4 PCI slots.

What attacts me is the price is very cheap now for this board, Tualatin CPU so cheap now, and saw 8 IDE port PCI-X cards on ebay, etc. Also sweet thing is 2GB of registered ECC SDRAM.

Will this work with XP Pro? I know I need to use a PCI video card but I know where to get good one.

Just curious.

Cheers, Wizard

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Server board socket 370 PIII

Unless it's a dual i wouldn't bother with it. But yes it will work with XP just fine, it'll run Vista and 7 too, but unless you get something like a 8400GS PCI... no aero.

[Wizard]

Re: Server board socket 370 PIII

True... What about the "server" aspect side? If I do find PCI-X gigabit NIC and another card that plugs into PCI-X for hard drives will that help with transfer speed/data transmission?

Cheers, Wizard

[Scenic]

Re: Server board socket 370 PIII

but unless you get something like a 8400GS PCI... no aero.

lowest nvidia card supporting directX 9 (and thus aero) is the FX5200 / Quadro NVS280 (PCI only for the Quadro, the AGP NVS280 is based on a GF4)

[ratdude747]

Re: Server board socket 370 PIII

even duals will work if you have xp pro... home, not so much.

sounds nice...

[bigbeark]

Re: Server board socket 370 PIII

Yes, it takes Tualatin, but no AGP Port.

Be aware that PCI video is not a sure thing on these serverworks chipset motherboards.

In my experience, PCI card can cause lockups and is surprisingly not that much faster than the onboard AGP. Sounds crazy, I know, but I suspect you may have to fiddle with IRQ assignment to get good performance.

Others here may have had a better experience than I did. Love to hear about it and if you had to do any fine tuning to get PCI video working OK.

That said, these boards are quite responsive. I use Ubuntu and the boards seem faster than their Hardinfo (benchmarking tool) scores would indicate. Of course, it's possible that the boards may work better under XP.

Keep us posted!

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Server board socket 370 PIII

lowest nvidia card supporting directX 9 (and thus aero) is the FX5200

Supporting does not = working. We all know how blazing fast the FX5200 was in DX9...

[Wizard]

Re: Server board socket 370 PIII

Single CPU vs dual CPUs

I do not mind getting the dual CPU board if that does help with XP Pro or linux because I can get cpus rather cheap now.

Cheers, Wizard

[Wizard]

Re: Server board socket 370 PIII

Added:

1500SC is dual CPU board with 4GB support (dual channel because manual says pair at a time), can run 1 CPU at first. Have 2 SCSI ports on board. But will this require rest of SCSI hardware that is specific to 1500SC to use SCSI stuff? I have some 68 pin SCSI HDs in storage.

500SC single CPU and no SCSI on board. 2GB and simpler board.

Cheers, Wizard

[Scenic]

Re: Server board socket 370 PIII

Supporting does not = working. We all know how blazing fast the FX5200 was in DX9...

it's fast enough for aero though. i've got a test box somewhere with a 2.6GHz P4, 1GB DDR and a FX5200 64MB. Aero works just fine. hell... aero even works on intel GMA 950's (all those first gen atom netbooks).. and these are even slower than a FX5200

enough OT for now... :p

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Server board socket 370 PIII

Get the dual. You'll love it. But no AGP is teh suckz.

[Scenic]

Re: Server board socket 370 PIII

i've got a dual PIII 1GHz with AGP (unfortunately coppermine-only) and topcats intel SAI2 which supports Tualatins (has 2x PIII-S 1.4 on it) but has no AGP (onboard ATI Rage 3D or something instead)

the latter is my homeserver-NAS-Gameserver-VPN-Torrent-all-that-crap-you-could-think-of box..