At 14:00 04/14/05, rls wrote:
I found an old Asus 2B-D with 2 300 mhz Celerons in it.
If I can find a pair of PIII 750's or 800's would this thing be
worthwhile as a household server?
It does have nearly 600 mg of ram on it. 256 + 128 + 128 + 64
Good enough to make into a multimedia server for the home network by
putting a TV card in it and installing Media Center 2005 on it?
Recording TV Shows etc?
Guess I could stick a modem in it for network faxing too?
I was going to pick up an AMD64 system for the above but was thinking
with the dual processors maybe it might not be too bad.
What does the collective think
The Asus P2B-D board must be revision 1.06 D03 (**) to handle a
Coppermine PIII. (That is, a PIII 600 MHz. or faster.)
Older P2B-D boards (e.g., 1.03, 1.04, 1.05, 1.06 before D03)
can't provide a low enough voltage for "slot one" Coppermines.
(Unless you modify the specific pin on the processor cartridge
to trick the board into providing 1.80 volts, the lowest voltage
that older P2B-D boards can provide. This is higher than the
1.65 volts that 850 MHz. Coppermines ask for...but still within
the official 10% error range.) If the board is *incapable* of
supplying the voltage that the processor asks for, the board will
simply shut down. I did find one 1.05 board that provides the
lower processor voltages. (But it won't do 133 MHz FSB.)
If you have FCPGA (flip chip) PIIIs, you can get Asus S370-DL
slotkets (or equivalent from some other company; be careful...they
aren't all dual processing capable) and set the slotket jumpers
to ask for 1.80 volts. This overrides the voltage that the
processor asks for.
Powerleap makes slotkets that have on board voltage regulators
that will work with Intel PIII up to 1.4 GHz. on the 1.06 D03
P2B-D boards. But they're too expensive.
Also, P2B-D boards before revision 1.06 don't all work at 133 MHz.
FAB (front side bus). If you have one of these boards, you'd be limited
to 800 MHz. (8X100) Coppermines.
You also need to flash to the latest BIOS (1012 or 1013b) for most
P2B-D to boot a Coppermine.
(**) Look for the presence of an orange/yellow sticker near the middle
of a P2B-D board that shows the 133 FSB jumper settings. Interestingly,
this sticker has the jumper settings wrong. But its presence
means that the board is a 1.06 D03...or a counterfeit. The 1.06 is
stencilled on the motherboard between two of the PCI slots. The D03 would
be on a white bar code sticker attached next to the outmost ISA slot.)
I have three P2B-D still chugging away doing dual 1.4 GHz. But using
the 133 MHz bus is tricky. It runs very stable, but for it to recognize
all the RAM, I have to enter and exit the BIOS each time I boot (or reboot)
the computer. (It's a BIOS bug thing.)
Regards,
Bill
