14 DAY TRIAL // Micro-Star International, better known as MSI, just announced the immediate availability of two brand new products that are compatible with the latest Advanced Micro Devices generation of central processing units that are intended to be used in a server-working environment. The new AMD server processing units, the Barcelona class of products, are based on an internal quad core hardware architecture and the just announced MSI products, a server mainboard and a barebone server system, are compatible with that new technology.
The server mainboard from MSI is named K9NU Speedster, while the barebone server system is available under the commercial designation of P1-106 and they offer native support for the recently launched AMD Quad-Core Opteron processors, according to the news site digitimes.
The MSI server mainboard, K9NU Speedster, is powered by the Nvidia nForce 3400 specially designed chipset and just like the barebone server, it is aimed at the entry level server market, as they offer native support for the Quad-Core Opteron 2200 series processor, but unfortunately they can house only a single CPU. The integrated Nvidia chipset supports the HyperTransport protocol and thus it gives a full duplex functioning mode, while its data throughput can go as high as the 8GB per second level. The manufacturing company claims that the K9NU Speedster mainboard is capable of delivering a maximum memory bandwidth of 8.5GB/s when using DDR2 random access memory running at 533MHz and 10.5GB per second when DDR2 memories running at 667MHz are used.
Both of these new MSI products are able to house 8 memory modules as they offer support for a maximum amount of 32GB DDR2 533/667 memory, while the integrated XGI Volari Z7 graphics processor comes with 16MB of dedicated video memory. For users needing to add discrete graphics cards, two PCI Express x16 ports are provided that are compatible with Nvidia SLI technology.
The two MSI products, K9NU-Speedster and P1-106, are both coming equipped with dual Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports based on Marvell's 1116 PHY wired networking chips in order to provide fast access response times for higher efficiency and productivity.