Replacing Motherboards...

bruce bedouglas at earthlink.net
Fri May 19 14:06:26 UTC 2006


Hi Lyvim,

The 1U servers I have do not have expansion slots in the chasis... In fact,
I have never seen any 1U server chasis with expansion slots. I've seen
plenty of PC cases with expansion slots. The servers in question are Compaq
DL360 1U servers. I haven't had a chance to do a google to see what kinds of
motherboards the boxes may have had. I'm assuming that given that these
would have been top of the line Compaq hardware, that the boxes should
accommodate one of the "standard" sized motherboards with no problem.

I'm also assuming that there are only a handful of "standard" sized
motherboards, with the scre holes for the boards in a given
location/setting. My more pressing concern is that I find the right priced
board, that matches the screw hole settings that the chassis already has.

-bruce


-----Original Message-----
From: Lyvim Xaphir [mailto:knightmerc at yahoo.com]
Sent: Friday, May 19, 2006 3:27 AM
To: bedouglas at earthlink.net
Subject: RE: Replacing Motherboards...


On Thu, 2006-05-18 at 21:14 -0700, bruce wrote:
> hi...
>
> i'm not physically at the boxes so i can't tell the number of expansion
>  slots. however, i wasn't aware that any 1U servers had expansion
>  slots.. or are you referring to the slots on the mobo for the 1U
>  horizontal/parallel risers...
>
> -bruce
>

Hey Bruce,

First of all, I'm in the business of upgrading difficult proprietary
boxes with much nicer motherboards, so I am used to this sort of thing.
Just thought you should know.  Second, to answer your question, the type
of motherboard you need will depend on the type of chassis you have.
This can be determined by the number of slots that the chassis have,
that are used for expansion cards.  Every industry standard computer
system built since the late 1980's has expansion slots (not more than
8).

The expansion slots are for use by cards that plug into the motherboard.
The motherboard never has more expansion slots than the chassis, they
are supposed to match up. The newer mass produced boxes usually only
have 4 expansion slots.  The older third party chassis had up to 8
slots; alot of them do not have that many anymore, even some of the
newer third party chassis only have a maximum of 7 slots.  Same with the
motherboards these days.

Motherboards are sized and have mounting holes according to their "form
factor".  Motherboards with four slots have one form factor type, and
motherboards with more than four slots can have other form factor types.

By counting the number of expansion slots on the back of the chassis,
that will tell me what form factor motherboard you require, and we can
go from there.

If you are still confused at this point, get the model number(s) of your
servers and send that over, and I can advise you from that standpoint
too.  From the model numbers I can discover the form factor type of the
motherboards.

Take care,

LX




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