First post, by iulianv
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Today's item: HP Vectra XW (or XU 6/xxx) dual-socket8 mainboard.
I got this huge baby sometimes last week, and was told that it had been tested and found dead. When I first saw it I thought "oh no, another proprietary board, it will be a pain to find a proper PSU!", but further searching revealed its identity, and it turned out that an ordinary ATX PSU should do the trick.
As seen in the attached photos (beware, 8-900KB each) it uses the Intel 82450GX (Orion) chipset (although 450KX is the one mentioned in the manuals) and among other things comes with on-board Vibra 16S, YMF262-M OPL and CMD 646 IDE chip (will have to check if all the 64x series suffers from the infamous data corruption bug, or just the 640). CMOS data is preserved not by a battery, but by a "gold capacitor" which, according to the manuals, can last for about a week and can be recharged in about an hour just by plugging the system in.
Now, to get back on-topic, I'd be thrilled to test this baby if I only had some FPM DIMMs. That's right, FPM - EDO DIMMs are already pretty hard to find, and I'm guessing FPM DIMMs are rarer than hair on a frog - and to make matters worse, a pair of them is needed. The bright side of this is that there is a chance that the previous tester was wrong (I seriously doubt he had the right memory sticks for it)... will keep this one stored until luck strikes me.
