Interesting, no? This thing is rocking a 3.0GHz Pentium 4 SL6PG processor. I tried booting it up when I first got it and it didn't post. I had to spend a little bit of time draining all of the capacitors and resetting the CMOS memory so that it forgot all of its configurations. Somehow, that trick worked, and I was able to get it to start.
The VGA is a little messy until the computer warms up (which is a very interesting behavior). Also, I couldn't do much in the BIOS - I could only view CPU temperatures and fan speeds. I'm not sure why that was, but I'd really like to get Hyperthreading going on this processor. This thing would be a beast once I got that enabled. We've discovered that it's a Tyan board of some kind. They make all sorts of server boards, so that explains the dual ethernet on the back of it.
I was able to install Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition (without Hyper-V... most of the branding makes this very very clear for some reason). The graphics were terrible at 640x480x8bpp but, then again, I don't know what I expected.
Cool. So, now that we've verified that it indeed works, what can we do with it? Given the fact it's a server board, I think we should do server stuff with it. Despite the high clock speed, the Pentium 4 isn't exactly the fastest processor in the socket. So it can't be a computation workhorse. I also don't have a PCI graphics card, and they wouldn't even be powerful enough to do stuff with if I did, so it can't be a GPU Compute Node.
This spawned an interesting idea: I'm all about not cutting sandwiches with chainsaws while repurposing hardware. I didn't want to get too far away from this one, though. So I had a thought that concerned all three of these old motherboards piled in the corner of my room (should they work).
So then, what's the plan then? I'd like to see if I can network these together into some meaningful parallel computational platform. One of them has a decent recent processor on it, but the other two are much older. We'll see what we can do. But first, I have to verify that they work. Let's start with the top one:
This motherboard has a AMD Phenom II in it, which isn't the worst. It also has six SATA ports which is pretty neato. The computer posts, which is great. I couldn't say that about the other two motherboards, though.
This one is pretty old - I currently have a Celeron processor in it. It doesn't start and I don't know why. I've tried debugging some of the signals, but it's not going well. I suspect it has something to do with the contacts on the side of the board, but more investigation will be necessary. I hope that it works because I think it'd be cool to have a machine like this to cut a sandwich with a knife, not a chainsaw. More to follow later.
Next we have this very interesting specimen:
After doing some research, this is a motherboard from a Neptune 1478 E-POS Machine. I know this processor works, so something else must be up with this board. I at least got this one to turn on, but nothing happened. The fan spun and that's it. I think the issue is that I don't fully understand the pinout of the front panel I/O connector because of the severely limited documentation of this non-standard board. It has a keylock on the front and I think that may be stopping it from posting.
That being said, I think it'd be really neat to try to get these things to - at the least - turn on. I have this idea of a quad-computer that's networked together into one box. But for that to work, I'd have to make them turn on. I'll keep working on it when I have more time. For now, however, that's where I'll have to leave it.
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