What boards are they? I presume it is some sort of low form factor thing.

Lucky to find them sealed. Intel server boards are great.

SE7320VP2D2

I had an S5000vsa4dimmr. Sold it. Still have a quad 2011-3 and a dual lga 3647 board. And also an earlier dual p3 xeon built up. Yeah, I like Intel servers.

According to the manual that can be found on retroweb the board is capable of 800MHz FSB (200MHz quadpumped)
so the max cpu configuration is probably the Tulsa Xeon 7140m (2 Cores, 16MB L3 Cache, 150W TDP) Steppingcode is SL9HA

Hope the boards came with riser cards. But even if they did, it might be difficult to fit them in any case. But nice board.

What Slot2 Hardware do you have ?

oldhighgerman wrote on 2025-03-04, 09:05:

SE7320VP2D2

Ah yes it looks like one of those flat ones.

Six DIMM slots, it probably takes up to 12GB.

I guess the riser card will break out a pci express as well as a pci-x slot.

The E7320 is a cousin of the E7525 - I have a SE7525RP2 with two 3GHz Irwindale Xeons on it since new, it has been running non-stop for the last 19 years. Still one of the best computers I have. I believe the E7320 has the same cpu support than the E7525, in which case it maxes out at 3.8GHz Irwindale cpus.

Intel did a funny thing with the onboard lan on this generation of boards, it either has an Intel PRO 1000MT on pci or a Marvell 88E8050 on pci express. If it has two interfaces, it is one of each. The pci express route is faster, since it goes directly to the north bridge. The hub link between the north and south bridges is only 266MB/s and carries all pci, pci-x and onboard ata/sata traffic.

120 tdp max off the top of my head. There's another version that uses ddr2. 3.6ghz max on clock, and single core afaik. Don't quote me.

Nooope. SL7ZB is top end of cpus it supports. 3.8ghz, 2mb l2, 800mhz fsb, 110 watts, single core.

I am not interested in peak performance for these. They just came so cheap, and have pci-e, and a floppy connector. Later Intel boards don't have floppy support. If I want to go high end I'd go with a later board. As I said these just came real cheap. Whatever performance I get out of them (for dos, Win XP/2000/2003) will be plenty.

But need to find a riser card ...

... and apparently these are the DDR2-400/SATA versions. I almost bought chips to populate 1 of them. Good thing I looked

And totally forgot I have most of the guts of an IBM quad slot 2 xeon.

Yes that was the registered DDR2-400 era.

If the south bridge is a 6300ESB, which I believe it is, the sata runs in ide mode. No ncq or ahci or anything.

These things were beastly top of the line hardware in 2004-5. Intel Core in 2006 rendered them instantly obsolete.

I ran a twin Irwindale rig as my backup server (and briefly as my main rig) for ten years. I finally retired it last year as it was becoming flaky and difficult to start up.

Windows Server 2008 R2 / 12 GB RAM (DDR2-400) / two 3.60 GHz Irwindales / Geforce 730 / SATA Blu-Ray drive and SSD / PCIe RAID card with 8 SATA HDDs.

oldhighgerman wrote on 2025-03-06, 16:04:

And totally forgot I have most of the guts of an IBM quad slot 2 xeon.

I have a Netserver LH4 with quad Drakes next to me now.

Mine also had powering on problems, luckily it was only the case switch. I swapped over to the reset button, that one lasted another decade. Now I just set bios to always power on, so I no longer have to fiddle with switches. It is supposed to stay on anyway.

That lh4 is a beast. I had a simple 386 based HP tower years ago. I still kick myself for selling it (1995-6).

^^ there was one of those on sale on ebay for a long time, located eastern Europe. I hesitated over the auction many times.

However it was expensive including postage (around 200 euros IIRC) and I didn't trust that it wouldn't be damaged in transit. (I'm in the UK). So I let it go.

I wonder who ended up with it.

st31276a wrote on 2025-03-06, 16:59:

Yes that was the registered DDR2-400 era.

If the south bridge is a 6300ESB, which I believe it is, the sata runs in ide mode. No ncq or ahci or anything.

So does this eliminate the ability to use a modern mechanical or SSD? I don't need anything big.

I remember buying iirc an eSATA drive for a Wyse small client. Would one of those work with some sort of adapter? I'd just as soon buy a full size drive (that thing was just a board/module). Just wundrin.

oldhighgerman wrote on 2025-03-07, 16:22:

So does this eliminate the ability to use a modern mechanical or SSD? I don't need anything big.

A normal sata ssd should work just fine on it, it will just not use the more modern ahci driver and instead issue commands one at a time like udma ata did. It is basically ultra ata 150 over a serial link.

Some speed can be gained by plugging a pci express sata2 or sata3 controller and plugging the ssd into that, but the ssds are typically so fast in terms of latency, I am unsure if that will make an order-of-magnitude kind of huge difference like going from a spinner to an ssd would.

I run a single port pci express sata controller in mine (which I picked up for free, so I could not choose the number of ports) to connect a samsung 860 ssd to run the operating system off; io performance is great. A stack of six sata spinners in a raid6 hangs off the two motherboard sata ports and a silicon image 3124 4-port sata controller on pci-x, with mdraid.

I'm more concerned about options then speed. The ability to find something that will work.

But oh - power supplies. I had a modernish practically no name (Xion, how appropriate) 800 watt connected to my old socket 771 board. It ran fine. I got that thing for about 20$ with rebates. So I assume anything modern is fine for boards of this vintage - ?

Yes - any sata or ide drive should just work.