RIOWORKS PDB-S Dual Slot-1 BX

The Bad

The PDB-S does have it's downsides as you would imagine.  The lack of a second ATX power supply connector means that the board does not support redundant power supplies, a feature which is greatly desired by those that are keen on keeping their servers up 100% of the time.  The aforementioned lack of any external thermistor headers is an oversight that may sway many server administrators since diagnosing an overheating problem with a server that is out of your immediate reach is quite difficult without a full set of hardware monitoring reports to keep you posted. 

RIOWORKS' decision to make the PDB-S a BX only solution will immediately take a large portion of customers interested in running a high end web server out of the target market, as 1GB of system memory translates into very little when it comes to a web server with enough traffic to eat up that mere gigabyte quickly.  Database servers will also find themselves running out of memory as the amount of concurrent user sessions goes up, leaving the scalability of the PDB-S a little iffy when it comes to future memory upgrades.  If you don't anticipate needing more than 1GB of system memory, then the BX chipset is just as good as the GX chipset for you, and the PDB-S all of the sudden isn't that limiting of a motherboard solution.

The overall quality and stability of the PDB-S could be improved, and the layout definitely could use some tweaking, however in this market, you get what you pay for, if you had the budget to get the world's most reliable motherboard then you would, otherwise you have to settle for what is reasonable and that's what the RIOWORKS PDB-S is, reasonable.

USB Compatibility

• Number of Front Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 0

• Number of Rear Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 2

• USB IRQ Enable/Disable in BIOS: Yes

• USB Keyboard Support in BIOS: Yes

Recommended SDRAM

Recommended SDRAM: Mushkin SEC -GH PC100 SDRAM; Memory Man SEC -GH PC100 SDRAM
SDRAM Tested: 1 x 64MB Mushkin PC100 SDRAM; 1 x 64MB Memory-Man PC100 SDRAM; 1 x 256MB Corsair PC100 SDRAM DIMM (for compatibility testing only)

Manufacturer: The Memory Man
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.memory-man.com

Manufacturer: Mushkin
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.mushkin.com

The Test

In recent times, choosing a motherboard cannot be completely determined by a Winstone score. Now, many boards come within one Winstone point of each other and therefore the need to benchmark boards against each other falls. Therefore you shouldn't base your decision entirely on the benchmarks you see here, but also on the technical features and advantages of this particular board, seeing as that will probably make the greatest difference in your overall experience.

AnandTech Motherboard Testing Methodology