The Anatomy of a Server - Expansion Cards and the Network Adapters
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The following are the three most common expansion slots on a motherboard (see Figure 12):
AcceleratedGraphicsPort (AGP) Designed for a high-speed connection between the CPU, memory, and video adapter for graphics-and video-intensive applications.
PeripheralComponentInterconnect (PCI) The most common type of slot, PCIs are used to add network adapters, modems, sound cards,video adapters (in the absence of onboard video or AGP), and controller cards, to add more hard drives. This interconnection between a microprocessor speeds up the operation, much like the AGP slot, but not as fast. The AGP slot runs at double the speed as the traditional PCI (66 MHz vs. 33 MHz).
IndustryStandardArchitecture (ISA) The original bus interconnection architecture for the older PCs’ motherboard, which ran at 16 MHz. You’ll rarely find one of these on a new motherboard, which is usually loaded up with PCI slots and the single AGP.
Figure 12 Expansion slots 101
Network Adapter
The Ethernet 10/100 Mbps network adapter is the PCI expansion card (see Figure 13) to set up your computer to communicate on a local area network (LAN)—or, linked to other computers within your offices, a wide area network (WAN) that extends to other office locations—and become a communications gateway to the Internet, setting up Internet sharing and firewall security. Windows 2000 Server can handle multiple network adapters. If you wish to set up this server as an Internet gateway, thus sharing an Internet connection with your LAN, you’d need two network adapters—one for the Internet and one for your internal network (more on this in Chapter 5).
Figure 13 The network adapter provides connectivity to and from the server.
AGP
The AGP card is a high-speed port designed for the display adapter (video card) only. It provides a direct link between the card and memory, and there’s only one slot of its kind on the motherboard. Introduced as a higher-speed alternative to the standard PCI-based adapter, the AGP makes for smoother graphics or video-intensive applications. If you’re planning to use streaming media or videoconferencing from your web server (another built-in function of Windows 2000 Server), you’ll need to consider a high-performance AGP card, rather than onboard video.
Figure 14 shows a few of the many choices in video adapters. Centered is a dual monitor, TV-out, 128MB 3-D graphics accelerator, great for PC gaming or digital video production, but do you really need it on a server? Considering that you’ll be using Windows 2000 Server Terminal Services to remotely administer your server from your laptop or from home, pick an inexpensive option (but make sure it’s compatible), something in the range of 16 or 32MB. At the top of Figure 14 is my choice, a 16MB Voodoo3 3000 graphics accelerator, which I picked up for $10.
Figure 14 A few examples of video adapters
If your motherboard doesn’t already have onboard video, you can also pick up an inexpensive (and compatible) Matrox MGA video card (see Figure 15) for a few dollars—an inexpensive alternative to today’s high-performance (and expensive) hardware graphics accelerators, and many of them do have Windows 2000 support.
Figure 15 The Matrox MGA 4MB video adapter is one of the older Windows 2000–compatible cards.  This chapter is from Build Your Own Server, by Tony Caputo (McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2003, ISBN: 0072227281). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today.
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