[geeks] Need geek assistance

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Sun, 18 Apr 2010, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:

> Is it just me or is it a bit odd for such a powerful motherboard to have only 
> 1x PCI-e slot and 1x PCI?

Given that it has onboard "server-class" graphics, it was probably
intended to be an application server or compute node.  Thus, you'd only
need your cluster interconnect or storage controller for I/O.

Tyan frequently does this.  They'll have two very similar boards: one
with onboard graphics and very few I/O slots and another with no onboard
graphics and plenty of I/O.  The latter is billed as a "workstation"
board.

With virtualization maturing on the PC and there being so many attractive
blade offerings from various vendors, that "server" class of board will
likely become more and more of a rarity as time progresses.  Unless you
need a ton of dedicated memory bandwidth, there just isn't a lot of reason
to have a bunch of power-sucking machines running 70% idle.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke  ) "Oh, judge, your damn laws: the good people don't
Elgin, TX         (   need them, and the bad people don't follow them,
USA                )  so what good are they?"          --Ammon Hennacy