MSI K8D Master Mainboard for Dual Opteron Processors

by Anton Shilov
04/16/2003 | 06:04 AM

Last Summer we published plenty of pictures of AMD Athlon 64 intended mainboards, but AMD postponed the release of its x86-64 chips for two quarters afterwards and after all the release of desktop AMD Athlon 64 processors is set on September 2003, while Opteron chips will emerge officially in less than a week. So far we have not heard much about mainboards intended for AMD Opteron processors, but t-break web-site decided to fill this space for all of us.

The guys managed to find a picture of MSI K8D Master mainboard for two Opteron processors and even reveal some of its technical specifications:

• Supports two Socket 940 AMD Opteron processors;
• AMD 8131 and 8111 I/O tunnels;
• 6 DIMM slots for up to 12GB of registered PC1600, PC2100 or PC2700 DDR SDRAM memory;
• 2 PCI (32-bit/33MHz) slots, 3 PCI-X (64-bit/100MHz) slots, 1 miniPCI slot;
• ATI Rage XL integrated graphics controller with 8MB of SDRAM memory;
• 2-channel ATA-133/100/66/33 integrated controller;
• Dual 64-bit 10/100/1000Mb/s Ethernet from Broadcom;
• 4 USB 2.0 ports;
• 2 PS/2 ports, 1 Parallel and 1 Serial ports;
• Server Management (IPMI 1.5): NS mBMC on board with MSI Management Suite (MMS);
• E-ATX Form Factor (30.48cm x 33.02cm).

No idea about pricing or availability, but I would expect that it will appear for sale quite soon. This is definitely a mainboard for servers, but not for workstations since there is no AGP on it. But if it is intended for servers, why there are no SCSI connectors or, at least, trendy Serial ATA-150 ports? Strange, isn’t it?