You may remember back in May Patrick did a review on the ASUS P8Z77 WS workstation motherboard. Since he tests a lot of hardware, this board made it my way to replace an old ASRock P55 Deluxe3 and try it out long term. Below is a write up on my experiences setting up the ASUS P8Z77 WS motherboard, getting it working and using the motherboard for some time.

Supermicro has just released a couple of Quad Xeon E5-4600 based motherboards. These boards are behemoth in size, much like quad AMD Opteron G34 motherboards, for obvious reasons. Packing Quad Intel Xeon E5-4600 CPU’s, 32x DDR3 DIMM slots capable of up to 1TB ECC memory and a few expansion slots to boot makes these new Supermicro Quad Intel Xeon motherboards very tightly packed despite their gargantuan size. They have options for built-in LSI SAS2208 RAID controller, Intel X540 Dual 10GbE LAN and  IPMI v2.0. Strangely enough, there are only two PCIe 3.0 x16 and two PCIe 3.0 x8 slots for a total of 48 PCIe lanes from a total of 160 (40×4) available through the CPUs. Clearly [...]

Recently I have been testing several AMD G34 and Intel 5520 series platforms. Each AMD G34 CPU requires four sticks of memory for full quad channel operation, and each Intel CPU requires at least three DIMMs for triple channel operation. With fourteen G34 sockets and dodeca core Magny cours CPUs in various stages of testing, the G34 platforms alone require a minimum of 56 DIMMs. Needless to say, recently I have found myself scrambling to find sets of matching DIMMs and purchased Amazon.com’s entire inventory of 2x 1GB ECC 1333 DIMM kits one week (over a dozen pairs.) This led me to alternative sources, which turned out to be perilous.

Regular readers of my site know that I am a fan of the Kingston KVR1333D3E9SK2/4G 4GB (2x2GB) ECC Unbuffered DIMM kit. It works in Intel 3400 chipset motherboards that are picky about memory. Two major changes have been happening with regard to this memory.