Anyone used or heard of this motherboard?

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

sapper6fd

Member
May 21, 2013
48
1
8
Its the Supermicro H8DME-EX-LS006. I cant seem to find any information on it anywhere on the internet other than on the ebay sellers auction pages.

Here is the auction page. New Supermicro H8DME EX LS006 Server Motherboard 3X Socket F AMD Six Core 8XPCIE | eBay.

The price is nice, supports up to three opteron processors with up to six cores each but I cant find any info on memory requirements or even a manual for it. No mention of the board on Supermicro's site. They have large numbers of these board up for auction, lots of up to 395 board in total.
 
Last edited:

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
12,511
5,792
113
That is an interesting board. Surely had a custom enclosure.

Socket F is very old though. DDR2 era. Onboard IB is good but that seems totally bizarre with 3x processors.
 

sapper6fd

Member
May 21, 2013
48
1
8
I emailed the seller asking if he had any documentation on it or a link to the manufacturers site with the documents and got a reply back a few moments after posting this. I got the following reply.

No it was a custom motherboard for 3leaf systems, they went out of business and we bought all the boards. I've asked supermicro but they don't have anything either. It is a very nice board for the price though
So it not only looks like it needed a custom enclosure, but it also looks like its a custom built board. Doing a quick search of 3leaf systems shows they were a technologies company that was developing scaleable systems for super computers and virtulization.

3Leaf was building technology for dynamically scalable supercomputers. In the same way you can use a box of Legos to build up toys of almost any shape, the idea that 3Leaf had was to use lots of processors to build up a specialized, parallel super-computer of pretty much any architectural need.
Interesting piece of kit. The system included the board, three processors, 1TB or shared memory and 8TB of disk space at a bargain of a price.... $250,000 each. Yours for only $64 plus shipping.... lol


http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1172150
 
Last edited:

mobilenvidia

Moderator
Sep 25, 2011
1,956
212
63
New Zealand
Very unusual board, nothing like SM standard H8DME mobo at all
I also see one ebay store has 1000 of them, so a rather large company must be shedding them
 

ColdCanuck

Member
Jul 23, 2013
38
3
8
Halifax NS
Speculation only:
Judging from the linked eetimes article it is two processors. The third socket (by the two DIMM sockets) is for their (3leaf's) ASIC for the fabric interconnect. Good luck finding one of those . The eetimes article has a picture of the board.

I'd give it a pass.
 

sapper6fd

Member
May 21, 2013
48
1
8
Speculation only:
Judging from the linked eetimes article it is two processors. The third socket (by the two DIMM sockets) is for their (3leaf's) ASIC for the fabric interconnect. Good luck finding one of those . The eetimes article has a picture of the board.

I'd give it a pass.
It very well could be. After I learnt it was a custom built mobo for a specific application I'm passing on the auction. The last thing I need is driver issues (although I'm sure the drivers for the H8DME board work just fine with this revision, I don't want to find out the hard way).

I did manage to find a few people who have used the board without issue for their specific applications.
 

ouest

New Member
Jul 17, 2013
11
1
3
Hi,

I have this motherboard.
My small blog is this motherboard dedicaded , you want information need ?

Sorry for my english :)
 

milosz

New Member
Aug 10, 2014
1
2
1
69
These board were custom made by Supermicro for a company called 3Leaf Systems, 3Leaf had the idea of creating a FPGA that would act as a hypertransport switch, and allow connection of a big stack of dual Opteron servers to be set up as a "flexible" cluster supercomputer. Need 400 CPUs? OK, just set it up. Need four 100-CPU machines? Sure, just reconfigure it in software. That's what the "Aqua" chip socket is for, the special FPGA that connected the hypertransports of any number of these boards together. It LOOKS like a Socket F for another Opteron CPU, but it is NOT for an Opteron. Anyway, the venture capitalists dried up and blew away in the crash of 2008 and 3Leaf went belly up. As far as I know, you can't get the FPGAs or the special software that was needed to make this scheme work.

HOWEVER, just ignore all the Aqua hypertransport switch stuff, and use this board as a regular Opteron 2000-series board, it works JUST GREAT and it's selling lately for $50. A couple of 2.9 GHz 4-core Opterons and 16~32 GB of DDR2 ECC DRAM doesn't cost a whole heck of a lot these days, and so for about $150~$200 you can have yourself a very useful small server. And remember these are available as NEW boards, not "pulls" - I have had a lot of bad luck with motherboard "pulls" and I'd rather buy a NEW board any day- and here are NEW boards that are CHEAPER than pulls.
 
  • Like
Reactions: SPA+GUY and Patrick

zman1276

New Member
Feb 4, 2015
1
0
1
42
I have this board running two opteron 2419 six-core cpus. I have installed 16gb of ddr2 667 ecc ram and two hdd's in raid 0. It is a very powerful machine for not a whole lot of money. It runs windows 7 perfectly except the ati es1000 video chip cannot do more than 1024x768 resolution so I installed a cheap video card via pci-e x1 to pciex16 adapter. I have Virtual Box running everything from windows server 2012 to centos to ubuntu on it and it doesn't stutter. Here is my price breakdown.
===============================================================================================================
Motherboard $50 ebay.com
DDR2 Server Ram 16gb 2x8gb $24 ebay.com
(2) Opteron 2419 CPU's $20 ebay.com
Socket F to AM2 Fan/Heatsink Adapter $15 ????.com
(2) Glacial Tech AMD Cpu Heatsink w/Fans $12 ebay.com
(2) New Whitelabel HDD's 250gb $50 ebay.com
Radeon 3470 Graphics Card $8 ebay.com
pciex1 to pciex16 adapter ribbon cable $5 ebay.com
Extra used PSU from buddys old pc $free
extra used dvd burner also from somewhere $free
===============================================================================================================
I attached a screen shot of my windows experience breakdown.
 

Attachments

NeverDie

Active Member
Jan 28, 2015
307
27
28
USA
I have this board running two opteron 2419 six-core cpus. I have installed 16gb of ddr2 667 ecc ram and two hdd's in raid 0. It is a very powerful machine for not a whole lot of money. It runs windows 7 perfectly except the ati es1000 video chip cannot do more than 1024x768 resolution so I installed a cheap video card via pci-e x1 to pciex16 adapter. I have Virtual Box running everything from windows server 2012 to centos to ubuntu on it and it doesn't stutter. Here is my price breakdown.
===============================================================================================================
Motherboard $50 ebay.com
DDR2 Server Ram 16gb 2x8gb $24 ebay.com
(2) Opteron 2419 CPU's $20 ebay.com
Socket F to AM2 Fan/Heatsink Adapter $15 ????.com
(2) Glacial Tech AMD Cpu Heatsink w/Fans $12 ebay.com
(2) New Whitelabel HDD's 250gb $50 ebay.com
Radeon 3470 Graphics Card $8 ebay.com
pciex1 to pciex16 adapter ribbon cable $5 ebay.com
Extra used PSU from buddys old pc $free
extra used dvd burner also from somewhere $free
===============================================================================================================
I attached a screen shot of my windows experience breakdown.
When did you buy it? I don't see it available for cheap anymore.
 

ouest

New Member
Jul 17, 2013
11
1
3
On my site ( see higher ) , I made a post on the last good deals motherboard.

There is a DDR2 generation and beautiful one step expensive DDR3 opteron 6300.

All quad CPU ;)
 

SPA+GUY

New Member
Jun 17, 2015
2
0
1
65
ZMAN1276, I talked to the guy that was the head of 3Leaf and he said the Aqua CPU is a node controller so it is a special controller and he said just run it with the 2 processors. The problem I'm having is getting it load the O/S. I get 2 beeps when starting it up but the documentation doesn't say what that means. I can find info on a couple of the beep codes but not on the 2 beeps. I wish I had a Memory tester to go through the 72GB of memory I have for this motherboard. According to Supermicro they said to use the H8DME documentation. The Aqua CPU is a 3Leaf TLH1550 CPU or something close to that. That socket F to AM2 adapter, is it plastic? Thanks foe any for you could give me. :)
 

whitey

Moderator
Jun 30, 2014
2,766
868
113
41
My suggestion, start w/ barebones mem config (2x) and see if you can even get it to post cleanly if you are unsure of good/bad dimms. If your unlucky to pick a bad dimm in the pair swap out a few times/try different combos, if it last longer than that something else is wrong I'd venture to guess.

That's my lame-ass/poor mans TS technique o' the day. :-D
 
Last edited:

SPA+GUY

New Member
Jun 17, 2015
2
0
1
65
Well I got XP to load, then I put SP3 on it and loaded the drivers for the board but I still want to get 7 on it or maybe even 8.1 since it has more features than 7.