Introduction

Once a duallie always a duallie – that’s been my motto of recent years. There are basically two computer “loves” in my life – dual processor systems and small form factor machines. That’s rather extreme isn’t it? Dual processor machines tend to be housed in rather large chassis, while small form factor systems are well – small! For much of the past year, I’ve focused on small form factor systems such as the Shuttle SS51G and the gBOX P4 systems. However behind all of that, I spend 90% of my time on my trusty and reliable SuperMicro P4DCE+ motherboard which houses dual 1.8GHz Intel XEON processors. These XEONs are the Prestonia builds which were the first Intel CPUs to feature the Hyper-Threading(HT) model. Of course a year later, HT is now featured on the latest and greatest of Pentium 4 desktop processors but let us remember that it was first seen on the XEON processor. The winter of 2002 saw the introduction of the E7505 chipset from Intel which brought AGP 8x and dual channel DDR support to the XEON platform. This was definitely an exciting moment since up until the E7500 chipsets, we only saw Rambus support on the higher end XEON platform which usually meant higher prices for system builds. My P4DCE+ motherboard used the Intel i860 chipset and housed PC800 RIMMS. When SuperMicro unveiled the X5DAE motherboard featuring the E7505, I decided to make the jump to this new platform and also upgrade to 2.4GHz XEONs with the faster 533 front side bus. Let’s see how this baby performs!

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