Motherboard: ASUS CUV4X-DLS

Today’s motherboard is one of the more unusual in my small collection, it’s a server/workstation board that takes two Pentium III class CPUs. Boards like this one were (and still are) quite unusual for the PC architecture, most only have one CPU socket to keep costs low and the complexity of the motherboard down. Dual CPU sockets were much more common on other architectures such as SPARC, MIPS, and PowerPC. I’d guess this particular example was for the server market as the game-port and on-board audio are not populated, although the foot prints are on the board and it has an AGP Pro slot so it may have been designed as a workstation board. I was given this particular board by a colleague who knew I like to collect old parts. It’s from a decommissioned server.

Here’s an overview of the board.

Here is something you didn’t normally see on socket 370 boards, an auxiliary power connector. This connector was also used later on early Pentium 4 boards, and is used here for a similar reason, to supply additional power. This would have been necessary in order to power the second CPU. Unfortunately this isn’t a common connector any more, so finding a power supply for a board with one of these can be difficult. Note there’s many capacitors on this board, and despite it’s age none appear to be bulging.

Another clue to this boards server origins is this, an on-board LSI Ultra SCSI controller. When this board was made SCSI was the go-to standard for server hard disks, mostly because of how much faster it was, but also because you could connect more disks to one controller. SCSI however was generally fairly expensive, so it usually didn’t make it to workstation or consumer level boards as those machines usually had cheaper IDE/ATA drives. Also note the very large power diodes very near to the SCSI port, quite an unusual feature!

Something I thought odd at first was the choice of a VIA chip-set, but thinking about it VIA made some of the better chip-sets of that era, often out-performing other manufacturers offerings. Later VIA became more known as a value chip-set, but this wasn’t until after Intel made significant improvements to their chip-sets.

Specification wise it supports Coppermine Pentium III up to 1Ghz and up to 4Gb of PC133 ECC(optionally) SDRAM. It’s unlikely that anyone would have actually installed the full 4Gb as the largest SDRAM DIMMs I saw in common service were 256Mb, although larger ones were available they were quite expensive until after DDR SDRAM became the norm. The graphics slot on this machine is an AGP Pro/4x slot which is also quite unusual. AGP Pro doesn’t actually extend the standard much, it mostly just provides more power to graphic card. They were beginning to require much more power, a problem which was later solved with a direction power connection on the graphics card. Luckily standard AGP cards will work quite happily in this board.

Here’s the memory I got with the board, it’s 256Mb 133Mhz ECC SDRAM made by a company called Viking. I’ve never heard of them before so the brand doesn’t inspire confidence, but usually memory of this type is of good quality and reliable. I have a total of 512Mb for this board.

I found the manual for this board fairly quickly but was surprised to not find it on the ASUS website. Not that you’d need it as the silkscreen has all the headers, DIP switches and jumpers described in detail including tables for setting the CPU speed. You only need to set the speed of the CPU manually if you wish to over/under clock them as the board is set for auto-detection by default. You’ll note that there is only one speed control for both the CPUs, this is because dual socket PC main boards require you use identical processors. Most technicians wouldn’t need the manual to work on this board.

I’m guessing this board saw very few end users being from a server, but for those that did use one as a workstation they would have likely used them at work in a CAD machine. With dual processors and the ability to use high-end workstation graphics this would have suited the task quite well with a few caveats. You would have had to use Windows NT (or it’s descendant Windows 2000) instead of Windows 9x as the later doesn’t support SMP. Neither Windows NT or Windows 2000 had as much support as the more consumer oriented Windows 9x series, so software and hardware support either cost more, or was simply non-existant. You could have also used a commercial Unix or a free one like BSD or Linux, which come with their own problems.

I used this board for some time running debian linux as a basic file server and web cache, it performed quite well at the time, but that was some time ago and I doubt a modern Linux distribution would run well now. It would probably suite running something like NetBSD which tends to require much less resources and can take advantage of the second processor. Last time I powered it on only one processor fan appeared to power up, I need to spend some time to determine if the power supply I have for it is the cuplrit or if this board has suffered some kind failure.