Without a safety net

Having perused many websites about the topic of motherboard repair, I am going to attempt replacing the capacitors on my ECS D6VAA. I have two reasons for doing this. The first is that it may well resurrect the board at quite a small cost to me. The second reason is that dual processor boards are now stupidly expensive, and even if I have to pay a few hundred bucks for capacitors, it's still much less than $3k for a dual Xeon board and $4k for the processors.

Intel are screwing us really - I was able to put a dual PIII machine together for about $3k a few years ago, but there seems to be no budget SMP option available now at all. This is a crying shame - Intel are making a big long term mistake by making SMP so expensive. The end result will be that no one has any experience with multiple processor machines and the usual run of MCSE idiots (with apologies to anyone who has one of these useless qualifications and who isn't an idiot) will have no experience with anything other than single processor machines. All company networks will have very fast processors and slow down or stop on the first high priority task they come across.

One of my favourite SMP machines was a Compaq DL580. Four PIII Xeons at 700 MHz. Not the fastest machine ever, but it never stopped responding. You could load that thing out the Wazoo and it would still be there for another bit of work.