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Intel L440GX+ DP Server Board
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Reviews
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Date product posted
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0
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2195
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06-27-2004
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Recommended By
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Average Price
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Average Rating
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No recommendations
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None indicated
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None indicated
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Description:
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From the specs:
- Volume server platform based on the Intel Pentium II and Intel Pentium III Processor. On the L440GX+, these processors operate with a 100MHz front side bus. The L440GX+ provides two 100MHz 242-contact slot connectors
- Using dual processors, the system is fully MPS 1.4 compliant.
- System design based on Intel 440GX AGPset, PIIX4e and I/O APIC devices
- 100MHz main memory interface supporting up to 2GB of PC/100-compliant commodity SDRAM DIMMs (ECC and Non-ECC)
- PCI I/O system, compliant with revision 2.1 of the PCI specification
- Integrated Adaptec 7896 PCI dual-port SCSI controller providing separate Ultra2 and Ultra wide SCSI channels
- Integrated Intel EtherExpress PRO100+ 10/100Mbip PCI Ethernet controller. Intel 82559.
- Cirrus Logic GD5480 High performance 2D PCI video controller with 2MB of SGRAM onboard
- PCI IDE controller (in PIIX4e) providing dual independent Ultra DMA/33 IDE interfaces, each able to support two IDE drives.
- 4 - PCI 33MHz, 5-volt, 32-bit expansion slots
- 2 - PCI 33/66MHz, 32-bit "Universal" expansion slots
- 1 - ISA expansion slot (not shared)
- 0-channel RAID expansion slot - specific support for Adaptec 1130U2 RAIDPort III Raid Card only
- Compatibility I/O device integrating floppy, serial and parallel ports
- Dual USB ports
- Emergency Management Port
- Platform Event Paging
- Flash BIOS support
Okay... that was all the technical marketing stuff. Here's my experience with this board:
- In spite of the fact that the 440gx chipset is apparently AGP-capable, because this is a server board, you don't get an AGP slot
- This board has been out of production for some time, so BIOS support is frozen at v14.3 which was released on 3/26/01.
- The LBA48 spec came out after this BIOS release, so inherent support for drives >128MB is limited (Linux seems to handle this okay, though)
On the plus side, however, it is a rock-solid board. I've been running RedHat 8 on it for about six months without any flakiness whatsoever. Add to that support for up to 1GHz Slot 1 P3 CPU's on certain newer versions of the board with the current firmware, and you've got an extremely potent machine.
Really, at this point, the only complaint I have about the board is the fact that it has a buggy BIOS when it comes to IRQ routing. There was an issue with RedHat 7.x with this board not initializing correctly, which was fixed later and stable by the time RedHat 8 came out. Unfortunately, this problem has cropped up again with the 2.6 kernel in Fedora both FC1 and FC2.
The issue with Fedora is apparently fixed as of 2.6.6, but I don't have a way to do an install from scratch, as the install CD comes with an earlier unpatched version.
The bottom line: it's a great board. I'm confident that the issues with the BIOS IRQ routing will be fixed and it will continue to be supported. Add to that the fact that you can pick these suckers up on eBay for around $60 as of June '04, and a pair of processors for less than $100 (as long as you stay below ~700MHz), and you've got a great SMP board for a reasonable price. It would make a terriffic small-office server.
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Keywords:
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intel dual p3 440gx server motherboard smp piix4 100MHz
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Chipset:
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440gx
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