Intel® Workstation Board S5000XVN

[Dozer]

HI LR.

Now i'm thinking about getting this board along with some Xeon's (prolly 2x 5435) since a friend of mine don't need it anymore and want to sell it to me. But i've got some questions about it, since i really don't have much experience with theese kind of motherboards.

First of, it's got 6 SATA ports, where 4 of them is for SAS. Even though they are SAS connectors, will i be able to connect standard SATA drives to them ?

Does anyone have any experience with OC on these kind of Motherboards, or is that just plain impossible with this chipset ?

It uses FB-DIMM DDR2 ram, but on local websites from my area, i can't seem to find any of these. Can someone tell me if it will be able to run on standard DDR2 ? And if not, can someone please try and find links to theese special ram ? That way i can use the product code to search more easy on my local websites for the proper RAM.

I saw the test that you guys had on LR with this motherboard and along with 2x Xeon 5365 (which is the biggest 65NM Xeon's on the market). But i was thinking about getting the 45nm's since the price is actually lower than with the 65nm's. Will there be any signifigant difference in performance whether i go with the 53xx series or the 54xx series ?

And if anyone has this motherboard, or others with this chipset, please feel free to come with any information you have about it. That would be greatly appreciated (:

- Dozer

[kenc51]

SAS controllers can work fine with SATA drives, just not vice versa

You cannot use standard unbuffered DDR2 with this board. It MUST be FB-DIMM RAM.

[Dozer]

Yeah, i figured i couldn't use SAS drives on normal SATA plugs, since SAS uses a slightly modified SATA cable.

Oh okay. Can you try and find some links to some FB-DIMM's for me then ? I can't seem to find any

And thank you

- Dozer

[Apoptosis]

Where are you located?

If you look for memory on sites like newegg you'll have to search under server memory then FB-DIMM - http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... R2+FB-DIMM

[Dozer]

I'm located in Denmark, so newegg wouldn't be the first place to look ;) But i did find the RAM blocks i need on local sites with some help.. And quite surpricingly, these ECC ram modules isn't that expensive as i thought, which is quite nice.

And as it is now, there is already 4 GB HP branded ram in it. So that leaves 4 slots open, which is more than plenty for upgrade.

But can any of you tell me what i should expect in performance from a beast like this ? Atm it's fittet with a single Xeon 5110 Dual-Core CPU, which isn't the fastest, but it's quite nice as it is.

- Dozer

[kenc51]

Yeah, i figured i couldn't use SAS drives on normal SATA plugs, since SAS uses a slightly modified SATA cable.

Oh okay. Can you try and find some links to some FB-DIMM's for me then ? I can't seem to find any

And thank you

- Dozer

2Gb Patriot DDR2 ECC Fully Buffered PC2-5300 - DKK 1,605.85 incl. VAT or 215euro
http://www.memoryc.com/computermemory/d ... mmkit.html
Memoryc.com ship worldwide and are one of the largest (if not the largest) memory supplier in Europe ;)

[Dozer]

2Gb Patriot DDR2 ECC Fully Buffered PC2-5300 - DKK 1,605.85 incl. VAT or 215euro
http://www.memoryc.com/computermemory/d ... mmkit.html
Memoryc.com ship worldwide and are one of the largest (if not the largest) memory supplier in Europe ;)

Great, thank you! I'll look into it right away

- Dozer