Hi Lyvim, The 1U servers I have do not have expansion slots in the chasis... In fact, I have never seen any 1U server chasis with expansion slots. I've seen plenty of PC cases with expansion slots. The servers in question are Compaq DL360 1U servers. I haven't had a chance to do a google to see what kinds of motherboards the boxes may have had. I'm assuming that given that these would have been top of the line Compaq hardware, that the boxes should accommodate one of the "standard" sized motherboards with no problem. I'm also assuming that there are only a handful of "standard" sized motherboards, with the scre holes for the boards in a given location/setting. My more pressing concern is that I find the right priced board, that matches the screw hole settings that the chassis already has. -bruce -----Original Message----- From: Lyvim Xaphir [mailto:knightmerc@xxxxxxxxx] Sent: Friday, May 19, 2006 3:27 AM To: bedouglas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: RE: Replacing Motherboards... On Thu, 2006-05-18 at 21:14 -0700, bruce wrote: > hi... > > i'm not physically at the boxes so i can't tell the number of expansion > slots. however, i wasn't aware that any 1U servers had expansion > slots.. or are you referring to the slots on the mobo for the 1U > horizontal/parallel risers... > > -bruce > Hey Bruce, First of all, I'm in the business of upgrading difficult proprietary boxes with much nicer motherboards, so I am used to this sort of thing. Just thought you should know. Second, to answer your question, the type of motherboard you need will depend on the type of chassis you have. This can be determined by the number of slots that the chassis have, that are used for expansion cards. Every industry standard computer system built since the late 1980's has expansion slots (not more than 8). The expansion slots are for use by cards that plug into the motherboard. The motherboard never has more expansion slots than the chassis, they are supposed to match up. The newer mass produced boxes usually only have 4 expansion slots. The older third party chassis had up to 8 slots; alot of them do not have that many anymore, even some of the newer third party chassis only have a maximum of 7 slots. Same with the motherboards these days. Motherboards are sized and have mounting holes according to their "form factor". Motherboards with four slots have one form factor type, and motherboards with more than four slots can have other form factor types. By counting the number of expansion slots on the back of the chassis, that will tell me what form factor motherboard you require, and we can go from there. If you are still confused at this point, get the model number(s) of your servers and send that over, and I can advise you from that standpoint too. From the model numbers I can discover the form factor type of the motherboards. Take care, LX
