I've finally found a Socket 479 board! Been looking for either the ASUS CT-479 adapter, or an appropriate board, to tinker with Pentium M on the desktop. I put up a wanted ad, and someone pointed me to a Dutch online computer store that still had two of these lightly used AOpen i915Ga-HSF boards, one with a Pentium M 770, and another with a Pentium M 730. Given the added price for a 770 was more than what they can be obtained for from China on eBay, I went for the 730 bundle. It came with the box (which has sun faded on the left side), manual, quick install guide, CD, heatsink (which is custom to the board) and I/O bracket. Quick test shows it works fine. Cost me €44, more than I'd normally spend on used 2000s motherboards, but this 479 stuff is rarer and often goes for more than this.
This will likely go in the freebie Lian Li PC60 case I got, and I want to pair it with an time appropriate GPU, maybe a 7800 GTX, to build a Pentium M gaming rig, because I can 🤣
One thing I'll look into, is seeing if I can mount a chipset heatsink on the CPU, AliExpress has tower-style coolers with the heatpipes, for example. The fins on those are small, but they can accomodate an 80mm fan, so it might cool the CPU better than the stock aluminium heatsink with its 40mm fan. And given I might grab another 770 and do a pin mod to set its bus speed to 667MHz instead of 553MHz, for some overclocking, I want all the cooling I can get 😎
Image removed for copyright reasons.
(And in case you find that PCIe x1 slot weirdly placed, yeah, that's actually a design fault from AOpen, they aligned it with the regular PCI and not the PCIe x16 slot... 🤣)