EEVblog #720 - Mailbag

Dave opens his mail, to find an erectile antenna.

SPOILERS:

RF Solutions transmitters and receivers.

Automatic Voltage Regulator for an alternator.

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[EdEditz]

Who is that guy at 0:21 and why does he turn that oscilloscope upside down. Maybe they must be rotated every now and then like good wine, to get rid of sediment :p

[voltlog]

Dave, your intern seems to be doing a great job there in the background :-)

[mikerussellnz]

Who is the person in the background at the start?

[Sinusoidal]

Those unpopulated parts of your motherboard would be a SAS controller and its connectors, dead giveaway by the silkscreen markings. Oh and hello to your new assistant at the beginning of the video :)

[klaernie]

EEVblog that unpopulated area near the SATA ports was described on the silkscreen with SAS.. Which is a storage interface like SATA, more precisely SATA's bigger brother for really heavy lifting.

[ElectronikHeart]

5:15 If it wasn't already told, the unpopulated part of the Xeon Motherboard seems to be for some SCSI SAS ports.
SCSI HDDs are pretty common on servers, so it's an option that some may require.

[thunder]

Please do a video about the Chip Whisperer and its uses, should be interesting to hear more about the possible analysis and attacks!

[cogsinister]

Whats happening with that big train set that seems to have vanished off the face of the earth ?

[RicoElectrico]

These wiggly traces @ 10:15 are for impedance control purpose. It's to minimize impedance variations. If they were parallel to fibers, some lines could end up going directly over a fiber and some over a slightly thicker layer of epoxy.

[JeanYvesB]

Hi Dave! Those are SAS HardDrive connectors, and the big chip next to it is the SAS controller. They are used in Server applications due to the extreme reliability and very high R&W speed.

[Petertronic]

I used a Supermicro motherboard when I built my first PC in the late 90's. They were the ducks guts then, don't know if they are now but glad they still exist!

[BlackEpyon]

For anybody still wondering what the unpopulated headers on the lower right corner of that server motherboard are, they're SAS connectors (or at least they would be). Those connectors would connect between a RAID controller (which would be the BGA pad), and a hot-swap SAS hard drive bay (which would house 4 or more hard drives), so that you don't need to run individual cables. Serial Attached SCSI is compatible with SATA II.

[AValujevs]

What a surprise, hearing Latvia on EEVBlog. Dave, have you ever considered putting your mail on the map, so to say? Could be fun to find out that you've received mail from most of the worlds countries. But then again, word of warning, it might trigger some sort of competition between EEVBloggers and get you completely flooded in mail...

[ChongMcBong]

good to see your assistant is making sure your left-handed oscilloscopes are kept the right way up :)

[Brock]

I would highly recommend using 8 of the same DDR3 modules on that motherboard, that way you get quad-channel memory on both processors.

[TurboAdam]

Isn't an upside down oscilloscope the international symbol that the EEVBlog lab is in trouble??

[MiyukiiSenpaii]

The 2 missing ports on the bottom could be for msata ssd drives

[tjsimsgm]

on the server mother board the extra unpopulated spots are for a SAS raid controller and SAS connectors for SAS hard drives.

[JimGriffOne]

A ghost just turned an oscilloscope upside down.

[bartechdx]

Unpopulated places on motherboard are for SAS controller for sure. There are even labeled as "SAS0~3" and "SAS4~7" (usually there are 4 SAS ports on single connector, you have to use split out cable).