The Supermicro P4DC6 Motherboard

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THE SUPERMICRO P4DC6 MOTHERBOARD

Introduction

The supermicro P4DC6 Motherboard is a server motherboard that has the most up-to-date specifications and features. The PC motherboard was first introduced in 1960, when Digital Equipment introduced the first minicomputer (PC). The PDP-1, which sold for US$120,000, was the first commercial computer equipped with a keyboard and monitor. This motherboard was MUCH larger than the ones we see today. Today’s motherboards are merely one-tenth the size of the one’s in 1960. The SUPER P4DC6 is a little bigger than the normal ATX (8” x 10.5”) at 12” x 13”.

The SUPER P4DC6 is an extended ATX form factor (as stated earlier the extended is larger) motherboard. Using the latest Intel technology in the form of the i860 chipset means stability and reliability will be in the forefront of this board features. The Intel i860 chipset utilizes the new modular design of the 800 family of chipsets. Like other 800 series chipsets, the Intel i860 chipset has two core components. The first half is the 82860 Memory Controller Hub (MCH), which is the main interface to the processor host bus, the memory, and graphics interface. This is scalable design architecture with many benefits.

The second half of this chipset, the 82801BA I/O Controller Hub (ICH2) delivers twice the I/O (input/ output) bandwidth over traditional bridge architecture and provides dedicated data paths, which fully optimizes the additional bandwidth available for improved performance across the board. A prefetch cache (stores what it thinks your next process will be before you do it), integrated into the Intel i860 chipset, allows highly efficient data flow and also helps to minimize system inconsistencies enhancing stability in the board’s performance.

The P4DC6 utilizes Dual Intel 603 Xeon CPU’s in speeds from 1.5 GHZ – 2.0 GHZ, and will allow higher speed processors at the BIOS through flash updates. The i860 chipset supports a 400MHZ system bus which is quad piped 100MHZ FSB that uses the dual channel 600/800 MHZ RDRAM (Rambus Dynamic Read Only Memory) with memory transfer rates as high as 3.2 GB/s. Due to the large power requirements and to ensure system stability, a 400W (min.) ATX12V power supply (with both 4-pin and 8-pin +12V power connecter) is required for operating the SUPER P4DC6 correctly. There are many main parts of the SUPER P4DC6 motherboard, but the 3 main parts discussed in this paper are the memory slots, chipset and integrated I/O ports.

Figure 1.

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