Iwill bares soul in blast of dual Opteron servers

First let's start out with motherboards, and there were a bunch, mostly in the workstation and server class. You have seen pictures of the DK8N, the NVidia NForce3 250 power dual Opteron, but have you seen the DK8E?

Before you say: "Oh, a PCI-E version of the DK8N with AGP and PCI-E 16x, 8 DIMMs and 6.1 channel sound, who doesn't have that?" slow down a second. You may be right, but have you heard of the Nvidia CK804 chipset before? Thought not. Either way, this one looks hot.

The next computer has been the hot topic on all the message boards lately, it is a dual CPU SFF Opteron computer. The chassis is the same as the ZMAX linked above, but the motherboard and heatsink are new. Not much to say here yet, but I can't wait to get my hands on one, they should start to hit the streets in a few months.

Last up is the ZPC, a rSFF computer, really Small Form Factor. This class of machines, affectionately known as a 'toaster on a stick' by a friend is a really small computer, about half the volume of a shuttle box.

While the ZPC may use a lot of laptop components to save space, it doen't lose many features. You can get versions with a P4 or an A64, and some even support an AGP card. While you can't have a PCI card AND an AGP, one or the other should suit most people in this market. If you get one, and it decides to spontaneously fly apart, it will look kind of like this, but we here that is an exceedingly rare occurrence. µ