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All the machines we tested use a flavor of the ServerWorks ServerSet III chipset from ServerWorks. The clear favorite is the ServerSet III LE chipset; only Dell Computer Corp. goes with the ServerSet III HE.
The HE chipset differs from its little brother, the LE, by providing true independent PCI buses and additional bandwidth to the memory bus. Both chipsets feature dual 64-bit 66-MHz PCI buses, but the HE's buses are fully independent. This increases bandwidth considerably for machines using the HE chipset with I/O-intensive add-in cards. Another area in which the HE chipset beats the LE is with its four-way interleaved memory architecture. This allows for greater bandwidth in memory-intensive applications, resulting in up to a 20 percent speed improvement over the LE chipset in certain situations.
The HE chipset also supports a feature called "chipkill." Chipkill makes it possible for the system to keep running even if an entire memory chip fails. This is done by spreading out the ECC data across the entire array of SDRAM. The HE chipset also supports advanced I/O caching technology to increase the sustainable I/O rate by off-loading common system functions to the cache, and the chipset reduces snoop traffic on the front-side bus to increase SMP performance.
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