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Printable Version of Topic "Whats the difference between server motherboard and PC MB?"

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-- Posted by jamesc06 at 3:09 pm on Sep. 5, 2008

Other than that most servers have 2 x Xeon processors and 6-8 slots for memory, are there any fundamental differences between a Server motherboard and a PC motherboard?


If someone wanted to spend an insane amount of money to make the ultimate gaming computer, they take take a high end server motherboard, load it with with 32 gb ram, dual CPUs, and multiple graphics cards, right?

Most of that would be a waste, of course and mostly for bragging purposes.  But it would still be fundamentally the same as a PC?


-- Posted by espresso8097 at 6:50 pm on Sep. 5, 2008

With all of that power from the memory and CPU the bottleneck would be with the video card.  Server motherboards usually only have one if any graphics card slots.


-- Posted by jamesc06 at 7:58 pm on Sep. 5, 2008

Quote: from espresso8097 at 6:50 pm on Sep. 5, 2008


With all of that power from the memory and CPU the bottleneck would be with the video card.  Server motherboards usually only have one if any graphics card slots.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813151162

PCI-E 16x -- 2
PCI -E 8x --1
PCI-X -- 1
PCI -- 1


Not bad. PCI 16x will support some pretty decent GPUs for quite awhile yet.


128 GB ram

2 x 32. ghz xeons

Ultimate multitasking computer.



-- Posted by jamesc06 at 7:59 pm on Sep. 5, 2008

Massive waste of money, but you can say you have 128 gb ram.

Good project for rich kids with money to waste


-- Posted by Jay JWLH at 2:52 am on Sep. 12, 2008

No it wouldn't be worth it. With games they can't usually utilize more than 2 of 4 cores most of the time, so I doubt they could really use more than 1 CPU all together. If anything someone using terminal services to use your computer in the background wouldn't hurt the performance of a game you are playing.
SLI or crossfire setups with graphics cards might give you quite good graphics performance, but the CPU is bound to become the bottleneck. Better off getting a good CPU, overclocking it, and using water cooling. Also get solid state drives in RAID, and high performance RAM.

To top this all off, only server OS's make use of nearly as much as all this hardware, so you would have to make sure the game plays on that OS.


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