23-10-2011, 05:26 PM
I too have a fair collection of P3 and P4 hardware, and can't bring myself to part with any of it. Indeed, I still have my old motherboards going back to my 386 days. A decent P3 is still a viable machine; my experience is that it will run XP very well indeed, although most mainstream Linux distros are too resource-heavy if you plan to use the GUI (funny, because I remember a time - a long time ago - when Linux was touted as an ideal use for older hardware).
At the moment, I'm playing with an industrial single-board computer. I rescued it from a skip, and surmised that the 11 bulging capacitors might be a factor in its current location. Normally I wouldn't risk changing them on a multi-layer board because an attempt some 10 years back failed (inner layers breaking their connection to the via - luckily fixed with a short jumper wire). However, I had nothing to lose, and many of the capacitor pads were surrounded with vias to "beef up" the connection, so why not... An hour later, it worked perfectly
The board runs a P3, and has been maxed out with a 1GHz CPU and 1GB RAM (the latter for ~£5 from eBay). All the interfaces are on the board, but unfortunately the drive interface is IDE rather than SATA, and USB is only 1.1 - neither is surprising given the age. However, there are ways around these minor issues. Most importantly, though, this only takes about 40 watts from the mains when busy - less when idle, so is ideal for a server. So the thinking is to build this into a 1U case, along with a 1U PSU from a Dell server in a skip - should be good fun.
This board uses the PICMG form factor - I hadn't really investigated this in the past, but it's pretty standard so I'm not about to back myself into a blind alley. P4 boards are available for reasonable money second hand, but do require more power and cooling, of course. The board works perfectly without a backplane, but one of these will allow me to add a PCI expansion card, which sorts the USB 1.1 problem - it just so happens that a suitable backplane is in a queue at work, pending a trip to a skip. Patience is one of my virtues
All of this is getting off the point (one day I'll start a separate thread about it with pictures, etc), but is meant to illustrate that there is definitely life in old computer junk. I really resent paying £hundreds for a CPU, knowing that it will be a fraction of that price in a few months time, so am happy to bide my time. This machine is a Compaq P4 that was free. The CPU is now 3.06GHz and the RAM is 2GB, both the highest supported, and both thanks to eBay - I don't think I paid more than £20 for both, but could have paid a lot lot more if I'd bought the first items I saw. This machine can be a bit slow for Ubuntu, but I'm thinking of switching to Lubuntu, having tried it on my P3...
I've no idea what to use my P2 and older machine for - if nothing else, they are just so bulky. That said, I run Window 98 on a P2 333MHz, and that runs a lot of electronics-specific stuff - that machine hasn't been a moments trouble since building it, and it's amazingly stable too. I've boxes full of CPUs and RAM and expansion cards for machines of that era - if anyone wants anything, just ask! But, to return to the point of the previous posts, I suspect that these machines won't be especially collectable precisely because of their main virtue: their backward compatibly. Which I've always found amazing, BTW. The reason I still have BBC micros here is because the experience just isn't the same on an emulator - good though they are. No need to keep old Intel machines unless you need to run 1980s DOS games...
Thanks Paula for awakening this old thread which I hadn't seen before - very interesting :D
Mark
At the moment, I'm playing with an industrial single-board computer. I rescued it from a skip, and surmised that the 11 bulging capacitors might be a factor in its current location. Normally I wouldn't risk changing them on a multi-layer board because an attempt some 10 years back failed (inner layers breaking their connection to the via - luckily fixed with a short jumper wire). However, I had nothing to lose, and many of the capacitor pads were surrounded with vias to "beef up" the connection, so why not... An hour later, it worked perfectly
The board runs a P3, and has been maxed out with a 1GHz CPU and 1GB RAM (the latter for ~£5 from eBay). All the interfaces are on the board, but unfortunately the drive interface is IDE rather than SATA, and USB is only 1.1 - neither is surprising given the age. However, there are ways around these minor issues. Most importantly, though, this only takes about 40 watts from the mains when busy - less when idle, so is ideal for a server. So the thinking is to build this into a 1U case, along with a 1U PSU from a Dell server in a skip - should be good fun.
This board uses the PICMG form factor - I hadn't really investigated this in the past, but it's pretty standard so I'm not about to back myself into a blind alley. P4 boards are available for reasonable money second hand, but do require more power and cooling, of course. The board works perfectly without a backplane, but one of these will allow me to add a PCI expansion card, which sorts the USB 1.1 problem - it just so happens that a suitable backplane is in a queue at work, pending a trip to a skip. Patience is one of my virtues
All of this is getting off the point (one day I'll start a separate thread about it with pictures, etc), but is meant to illustrate that there is definitely life in old computer junk. I really resent paying £hundreds for a CPU, knowing that it will be a fraction of that price in a few months time, so am happy to bide my time. This machine is a Compaq P4 that was free. The CPU is now 3.06GHz and the RAM is 2GB, both the highest supported, and both thanks to eBay - I don't think I paid more than £20 for both, but could have paid a lot lot more if I'd bought the first items I saw. This machine can be a bit slow for Ubuntu, but I'm thinking of switching to Lubuntu, having tried it on my P3...
I've no idea what to use my P2 and older machine for - if nothing else, they are just so bulky. That said, I run Window 98 on a P2 333MHz, and that runs a lot of electronics-specific stuff - that machine hasn't been a moments trouble since building it, and it's amazingly stable too. I've boxes full of CPUs and RAM and expansion cards for machines of that era - if anyone wants anything, just ask! But, to return to the point of the previous posts, I suspect that these machines won't be especially collectable precisely because of their main virtue: their backward compatibly. Which I've always found amazing, BTW. The reason I still have BBC micros here is because the experience just isn't the same on an emulator - good though they are. No need to keep old Intel machines unless you need to run 1980s DOS games...
Thanks Paula for awakening this old thread which I hadn't seen before - very interesting :D
Mark
