Nice!! congrats! Good job!

Thx!

By the way, the BIOS "05/08/1998" as listed at 'The Retro Web' under the single socket version does work, if you use a Flash-ROM chip that doesn´t provoke the "Unknown Flash Type" message at POST.

luckybob wrote on 2024-03-15, 22:50:

I mean, imgur has been around since like 2010. I'm not exactly worried. Also, I'm keeping the motherboard around, so if the image host goes down and someone else wants to do this, I'll be here to take new pics.

Please look at this "Retro Rig Photo Thread". At the beginning many (most?) pictures are missing.
Retro Rig Photo Thread

majestyk wrote on 2024-03-29, 09:43:

By the way, the BIOS "05/08/1998" as listed at 'The Retro Web' under the single socket version does work, if you use a Flash-ROM chip that doesn´t provoke the "Unknown Flash Type" message at POST.

wow you made it look so easy... Truth be told, I was expecting more trouble at the start!

CoffeeOne wrote on 2024-03-29, 11:06:

Please look at this "Retro Rig Photo Thread". At the beginning many (most?) pictures are missing.
Retro Rig Photo Thread

While i'm being honest, I just cant bring myself to care about EVERY single image on the internet. I still have several of these motherboards, they are (relatively) common. If the image I posted earlier goes away, and someone else comes across this thread wanting new pics, I will take new pics.

Missing pics are a huge problem for future tinkerers. We should do what we can to be sure our images, guides, threads stay conplete for future internet archeology there are many threads on vogons that would be gold mines of information were it not for some lost images. The very least we can try to do is describe what is in the pic so the information is preserved at least in txt if that is possible. Uploading here is another way to help. (Hopefully)

Some days, its all I can do to roll my fat ass out of bed and goto work. Please forgive me for not having the extra time/energy to submit photos to 3 different websites, annotate them for the future and submit them to the Svalbard seed vault.

I think this was a good example for a workable division of labor. Luckybob provided the pictures of the components that couldn´t be detected otherwise and I documented everything in text plus pictures stored on this board.
All information is available for future upgraders.

luckybob wrote on 2024-03-29, 15:49:

... Truth be told, I was expecting more trouble at the start!

I´m happy everything went smoothly here, but I´m expecting real troubles when I continue repairing the Supermicro P6DNE next week 😉
Supermicro P6DNE - Eaten by Varta´s barrel bomb -> back from the dead

luckybob wrote on 2024-03-29, 17:59:

Some days, its all I can do to roll my fat ass out of bed and goto work. Please forgive me for not having the extra time/energy to submit photos to 3 different websites, annotate them for the future and submit them to the Svalbard seed vault.

Haha. Props for knowing about the vault 👌 👍 😂
Did you know that during world war two? One? there was a similar facility, and the scientists there actually starved to death surrounded by edible seeds because they knew those seeds would be vital to rebuilding after the war.

https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/disapp … from%20doomsday.

Anyway. Good job at OP getting the dual cpu working. Let’s see some benchmarks! :pa

Awesome job majestyk
It's one thing to restore a dead system.
It's another level to restore functionality that was missing from the factory.

nice job 😁

Thanks for appreciating this project!

Warning:
If you love the old VXI VRMs as much as I do and you want to use them for this mainboard, make sure to bend the last 3 fingers of the Vterm regulator´s heatsink backwards before. The heatsink of the switching transistor on the VRM will exactly touch it at the top otherwise. The Vterm heatsink is at 1.5V, the switching transistor is definitely not, so CPU1 might (will) get damaged.