SUPERMICRO MBD-P4SCA-O ATX Server Motherboard 478 Intel E7210

Pros: ISA support, and apparently the only P4 MB to offer it. I tried an Athlon XP-based motherboard, which has one ISA slot, but could not get it to work with my ISA digital audio card. This motherboard was my next attempt, and it works perfectly.

Cons: Finicky USB support. It sometimes will recognize my external USB hard drive, and sometimes will not; all of my other computers work fine with it, including my HP laptop. Other USB devices seem to work well, though.

Overall Review: I bought this to make one last attempt to resuscitate my ZA2 ISA digital audio card, which does not have a comparable, affordable PCI equivalent. Happily, I was able to get it installed with Windows 2000 on this system, which will eventually be a media server to play audio digitally through my two A/V receivers. I coupled it with a 3.0 GHz Prescott P4, a Zalman CNPS 9500 CPU cooler, and 2GB of Corsair ValueSelect DDR 400 SDRAM (4x512MB), and have it overclocked at 3.43 GHz for now (I may lower it later, I'm just torture testing it now). Running Prime95, it's showing a CPU temperature of 35C, and it's been running for over 24 hours straight at 100% CPU utilization. Needless to say, I'm VERY happy with this result! To get this MB to work with the ZA2, I had to go into the Advanced->PnP/PCI Configuration section of the BIOS, and change the "Resources Controlled By" value to "Manual," then set the two DMA channels that the ZA2 uses to "Legacy ISA." After that, the ZA2 worked fine.

Comments: Newegg was great to work with on this order. This is a great board, setup and install was easy, and it is working fine under NT4.0. The ISA slots are a godsend to support our older ISA motion controllers. However, the system formats data in our app slower than the old Compaq ProLiant PIII-450 that it replaced. Regardless, we'll probably buy more as our older systems die.

Pros: Great board for industrial use as it has three ISA slots that we need for machine control use.

Cons: None

Pros: A PCI/ISA motherboard that supports reasonably fast P4 processors. Difficult to find if you have proprietary legacy ISA cards that still have to be used.

Cons: Seems to have a strange 20-30 second delay during boot up but nothing that otherwise affects the performance or usage. Not cheap for a "basic" board but then again you don't really have any other options either.

Pros: #1. 3 ISA slots!!! This is critical for our needs. My other choice was to look for surplus PIII motherboards.

Cons: None that I can think of right now.

Overall Review: This is an update to an earlier review. I stated previously that performance in our app was slower than an old Compaq PIII. This was under NT4.0. Upgrading to XP Pro, and tweaking settings to make the app work, was what was really needed to wake up the performance. We are 100% satisfied with this board now!

Comments: Great Board! Our workplace has systems that require ISA-based connections, but have data traffic that needs P4 HT and 1 Gb of Memory for processing. Supermicro is the only company I know that provides both old (ISA) with the new processing capabilities. Throw in SATA ease and Supermicro stability and you have an indespensible product. If New Egg keeps stocking them, we'll keep buying them.

Comments: This board was purchased for use at MPM Technologies, Inc. as an upgrade for current customer machines while maintaining backwards compatability for the older, and somewhat slower evolving, data acquistion market. The 3 ISA slots are a boon when matched with the computational prowress of Intel's latest offerings. Outfitted with 2GB of RAM and a 3.2GHz P4, this system has been happily fulfilling our neutron transport needs. We plan on purchasing more in the future.

Comments: Outstanding server motherboard for a small business that does not need the power of more than one processor. First board I have seen that supports Raid 1, single P4 with 800FSB and Dual Channel PC3200 memory and does not come with a lot of wasteful extra's. Great board and good price.