Supermicro P4DC6+ /Dual XEON /Socket 603 /RDRAM Build

[Irinikus]

Today, while scanning eBay, I came across this little beauty going for the hefty sum of EUR 30.00, so I grabbed it!

So this will be the start of my next build! (I've always wanted a machine featuring RDRAM, so now's finally my chance to build one!)

This will still have to be shipped to me from Italy via the snail mail, so it will take me some time to get into it! (I'm currently still busy with my dual PIII build anyway!)

Thinking ahead as to what case I'll use for this build, I'll probably end up going for the black version of the Corsair 7000X RGB case, as the white version has worked so well for my Dual PIII build featuring a supermicro board with the same form factor! (There are very few respectable looking cases that can house these full-ATX boards!)

 

[Irinikus]

I may end up going with ATI on this one, but I first need to receive the motherboard and confirm that it works!

This would be a journey, as I've pretty much always stuck to Nvidia!

Slotting one of these little cards upgrades the onboard SCSI to SCSI RAID:

A super cool option!!!

 

[Irinikus]

My board arrived today and it's unfortunately damaged!

There are some deep scratches on the back of the board which have completely cut through quite a few traces:

There's also a missing decoupling cap:

All of this will have to be repaired before I apply power to the board in-order to test it! (How annoying!!!)

 

[Irinikus]

I have an avionic technician at work doing repair work on the damaged board, but as a precaution I've managed to purchase another, this time a brand new unused one! (I'm going to be spending a fair amount of money on this build, so I don't want a sketchy motherboard!)

The seller has two more boards for sale: (this ones's an example)

Mine is still sealed:

I also got these specs from the seller:

From these specs, it's apparent that neither of the two boards were actually rated for the 3GHz 4MB cache CPU!

So I'll end up installing two 2.4GHz 2MB cache CPU's in mine in order to remain within the original design spec for the board!

 

[Irinikus]

It appears that the highest I'm going to be able to go here is a 2.2GHz chip with 2MB L3: (As the 2.4GHz chip doesn't come with L3, but has the same TDP of 65W!)

 

[Irinikus]

The broken traces on the board have been repaired and covered in a layer of epoxy:

Seeing that I've ordered a brand new board, this one will serve as a spare.

 

[Irinikus]

Here's a quote from a member on Vogons who's running this board:

I have a Supermicro P4DCE+ with the newest bios it works with the 3ghz gallatin's. I put heatsinks on the vrm to keep it cool works great

So this is good news!

Here's the VRM on TheOkMan's board: