Super Micro X5DAE

[Alchemist]

Hey all. I'm looking into building a new PC. I found a board that looks to be pretty good (Super Micro X5DAE it's an extended ATX board w/ dual P4 Xeon processors). I was wondering if any one has tried / heard anything Pro or Con about this particular brand of boards or if there is something out there better?

I’m also curious if anyone's installed a liquid cooling system in any of their PC’s, with this dual board, that’s the direction I’m probably going to go in and I’m looking for reliable parts and suggestions as to the best way to set that up.

[PresterJohn]

super micro makes some of the best boards around...the question is why would you want a fancy super-cooling getup on it???

the supermicro bios has very little in the way of OC'ing options...you'd be running the cpus at standard timings. as such, anything outside of air-cooling is an unnecessary expense.

[Xaotic]

I have several friends who love their Supermicros. Very stable and trouble free. The model you are getting is great and the 7505 chipset is simply superb. I have the MSI board with the same chipset and other than a SCSI controller channel, it has been perfectly stable. Another manufacturer of stable boards is Tyan, no overclocking here.

On cooling, as PJ says, stick with air, unless you are overclocking radically. I use Dynatron skivved copper HS and 70mm TMD fans and the noise level is bearable(probably has more to do with active cooling for the SCSI drives).

[Alchemist]

Ok Kool.

Well I am looking into overclocking it (more or less just an interest at the moment and don't know if I'm really going to need to with dual P4's). But I'm not sure what options are available with different BIOS. Are there any sites that have information on this, that You know of?

Also if I do overclock it do you think I could get away with just good heatsink and just forget the liquid cooling idea.

[Xaotic]

Generally, the boards that offer the better overclocking features, normally don't have PCI-X. That was my primary reason for changing to the 7505 platform. Most, if not all(I haven't checked), of the boards also do not lock the PCI bus and that can cause stability problems with some disk controllers. I have a SCSI RAID card that runs stabily at 150FSB on a Iwill DVD266u-RN running PIII-S 1.26G processors at 1.42G, but will not go higher. Just something to think about.

On the cooling, the best place to check, or other information, is www.2cpu.com. Their forums are dedicated to SMP and there's lots of good information there.

[NDC]

What will you be using this system for? I'm assuming you will be using this system for a hi-end workstation?

If that's the case, I wouldn't lean so much towards motherboards with features to overclock. What you should be looking for is stability since people that spend money on dual processor systems, especially Intel Xeons, tend to use their workstations for mission critical taks....

If tweaking is what you have in mind, I would recommend an ASUS PC-DL or the IWILL DPI533.

Supemicro as well as Tyan are more towards stability vs. tweakability..

If you're looking for something inexpensive without on-board devices such as Intergrated SCSI, 64bit PCI, etc, this can cut the cost of the motherboard significantly.

Unless you're running a server with multiple hard disks, 64bit PCI will offer no visible gain in perfomance for most users since this PCI slot is used mainly for SCSI controllers. Even if you do use a 64bit SCSI controller, you will not see any visible difference since you won't have enough SCSI HDDs to make the difference. On the other hand, if you decide to use this system as a server with multiple SCSI HDDs, you will see a difference since the 64bit PCI slot along with multiple HDDs will actually make good usage of the wider bandwidth.

As far as cooling goes, I have found the Swiftech MCX603 heatsinks to do a great job with very little noise since you can use low speed 80mm fans vs. using 60mm high-speed fans which are screamers. Even the Sanyo Denki fans that come pakaged with the windtunnel in the Intel Xeon retail processors are screamers and tend to make the whole case vibrate.

After doing some investigating, I went with a Tyan S2668AN which is the same as a S2668ANR. The only difference is that I don't have the on-board SATA controller. I prefer SCSI over SATA and don't like to have onboard devices so I went with the S2668AN.

This system has proved to be an extremely stable system so far as it has been with numerous Tyan SMP motherboards in the past...

Here is my Xeon rig (http://www.xtremepccentral.com/gallery//showphoto.php/photo/602/size/big/password//sort/1/cat/2)

[Alchemist]

Well once I get it done it's going to be a toy for while, but eventually it's going to be used as my home server, or so is the current plan. I am interested in building a similar system for a gaming machine though, so I'm definatley interested in all the information I can find for both set-ups.

As for the pic of you PC it won't let me view picks. It says I have to register first. Which I though I already did. And there isn't a register button on the button bar.

[Mntsnow]

Log into the photogallery using the same username and password you use for here in the forums :)

[Alchemist]

I logged off and logged back in and it worked now, Thanx!

[Stan]

Supermicro motherboards are very reliable and stable.
Like NDC said, these boards are built for stability and not really for overclocking.
They are server boards... and I do not know of any sysadmin who would overclock a live server...

One of my servers is running on a X5DAL-G
It's been very stable since I've switched it on in July 2003.
NDC and I had quite a long chat (http://www.xtremepccentral.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=1160) about Xeon motherboards. Maybe you want to read through it and you might find some information relevant to you...

Stan