Behind AnandTech - Upgrading the Server Farm

A New Motherboard

Luckily we were able to find another ServerWorks board that would work with the BoomRack chassis and the two riser cards.  The ASUS CUR-DLS, a board we happened to be reviewing in the lab at the same time fit perfectly, so we went ahead and ordered another one right away. 

We did get one benefit out of the Intel STL2 board however.  During our preliminary testing before the chassis arrived the STL2 was able to detect a bad memory module we had and disable it.  This feature is not present on the ASUS CUR-DLS and is very useful since it would otherwise be very difficult to diagnose a bad memory module.  The memory would count up properly and Windows 2000 would run just fine for a little while before popping up the dreaded blue screen of death and list the error as a "Hardware Malfunction." 

This is a server-level feature that we would actually like to see on more motherboards since it can be a very useful function.  Upon a reboot if the STL2 detected a memory error it would not only complain about it but it would also disable that memory bank so that the system can start normally until that bank can be replaced. 

Due to time constraints we just sent the server up to our host in Pittsburgh with "only" 1.5GB of SDRAM rather than delay the upgrade another week to get a fixed memory module.