First post, by compgeke
I've got a real problem guys, I keep getting giant 486 towers. First that NCR 3450 Dual 486, then the NCR 3434 Single 486, and now an Intel XBASE8TE8F. It's tearing my family apart and I don't know what to do.
Anyway, onwards. I just recently pick up this bad boy. As is normal with 486s I pick up, it's a monster.
Once we get it inside the house, we find it's a bit dirty but wow, is it big. I haven't measured it against an NCR but it does feel a bit smaller.
Let's flip it around. On the back we have the normal I/O selection, as well as SCSI and a funky DE9 card, more on that later. The empty slot I bet had a NIC at one point, there's no way someone spec'd this out and didn't opt for one.
The model plate gives us the typical absolutely useless Intel model number they assigned to servers. They couldn't give a good name to their server platforms if their life depended on it. A trend that continued until they scrapped making their own server chassis.
Time to crack it open. The lock on the back was locked and needed some finessing to open. Always keep some picks around 😀. As we can see, there's a lot of space in here. Room for 8 hard drives, a plethora of EISA cards, 3 5.25" devices. There's a CPU card on the top, and an unused RAM card slot below that (instead using onboard 72 pin simms).
The CPU card itself has two CPU sockets as well as a turbocache socket. Based on PCB markings and the lack of documentation, I'd assume the 2nd CPU slot is for an overdrive or similar CPU, and not a 2nd CPU. I highly doubt it's an SMP capable machine, at least, not with that CPU board. Particularly since the CPU already on it is soldered.
The CPU that's soldered on is an Intel 486 DX2-66, at least, that's what the label on the heatsink says.
Moving on let's get back to that DE9. In one of the slots is an Imagraph "IPX"
Based on what info I can find, it's likely a different marking of an Imagraph Potrait Plus, and does 1280x1024 on a proprietary display. It does have the Bt RAMDAC so I bet it's analog RGB, just on a different connector so you wouldn't blow up your 640x480 monitor plugging it in.
As far as SCSI goes, it's got the typical Adaptec ISA SCSI card. I'm a little surprised it's not the EISA one, but then again, in this machine it's just running the MO and tape drive.
For whatever reason, the hard drive is IDE. A big surprise for such a high end machine.
Now that we're familiar with the internals, let's see if it works! To start with, what's the screen do? Well, for BIOS it has BIOS version as well as the error codes it's throwing for a bad battery.
After this, it all went down hill. Started doing RAM counts and beeping at me about dead battery when I smelt the characteristic "Oh shit, something's on fire in this computer". I've not yet identified what it is, but it seems the power supply's gone on me. Even after disconnecting all the drives and removing expansion cards, it no longer powers on after I shut it off. There's nothing obviously burnt on the motherboard so it's unlikely the issue is there, based on how strong the smell was. I'm going to need to rip out the PSU when I get a chance and see what's up.
Even better, it wasn't my night for testing machines. After this machine went bang, I tried out a DECpc axp150 I picked up for $45 and a tantalum on the back of that board went bang. It really wasn't my night for computers.
