But it's our piece of crappy hardware, and we've bought three.
The first looks are okay, it seems to have almost all the bells and whistles that are necessary for a dual Xeon server board, except that pesky 4 GiB limit for RAM.
So, having installed the motherboard with CPU, RAM and whatnot into a 2U rack-mountable, it was time to boot and configure the BIOS, then install an OS.
1st annoyance
This motherboard takes forever to reach POST. And I mean to reach it, not actually pass it. I have to wait for nearly one minute every time I boot or reboot before the motherboard starts listing BIOS information about CPUs etc. Hrrrgh.
2nd annoyance
The motherboard comes with both PATA (IDE) and SATA connectors. Following fairly standard procedure, we like to install our servers from a CD-ROM onto a SATA disk. One should think that this is hardly unusual. One should also think that since there are precious few SATA CD-ROM (or DVD-ROM or rewritable) drives, it would work to install a bog standard server OS (i.e. Debian or Slackware) from said CD-ROM onto said harddisk. Wrong. The default setting for the motherboard is to not support both PATA and SATA devices simultaneously connected, you have to change something in the BIOS. Of course, the failure mode is less than obvious; you get to boot from a CD-ROM, but the OS cannot really use that CD-ROM afterwards. If you boot with a live-CD like Knoppix, you'll be able to load the OS. Not only that, you'll be able to install Debian using debootstrap, but you won't be able to boot to it, not with a rescue CD, either.
Solution: change the BIOS configuration as follows:
- Enter the Advanced section.
- Select Onboard Device
- Select SATA Configuration
- Change the On-Chip Serial ATA mode from Auto to Enhanced Mode
- Save the friggin' changes.
3rd annoyance
It's a motherboard with advertised support for "Maximum up to 4GB". Yep, that's probably the theoretical maximum, because you're not likely to see it. Although they sell it as a server motherboard, you can't rely on getting the full usage of your RAM, because -- as the manual puts it:
Due to chipset resource allocation, the system may detect less than 4 GB system memory when you installed four 1 GB DDR memory modules.
Our first installed motherboard reports 3.4 GB. This is what is usable by the kernel, too, even in PAE mode, the remaining 700 MB (not a typo, 4 GiB is about 4.1 GB) are simply unusable. Crap.
