First post, by justin1985
I've always had a thing for small form factor PCs, so I put in a low offer when I saw this Fujitsu PIII system listed online as 'won't start'. I'd clocked the Y2K sticker and had a good feeling ...
After a little bit of tinkering, a fresh CMOS battery, and listening to beep codes, I got it start! I had been worried about the custom pin-out PSU, but although the fan on it seemed a bit reluctant to start to begin with (so I'll try to replace eventually), thankfully that wasn't the problem.
I was really surprised to find the RAM was Rambus RDRAM - the first time I've seen this 'in the wild'! It took several goes at removing and reseating the RIMM (128Mb) and the blanking card, and swapping them over, to get it booting, but it got there 😀 I'd always thought of Rambus as a P4 thing, and didn't even know about the Intel 820 chipset this thing has. Pleased it has onboard Crystal CS4281 (rather than AC97) and a dedicated VGA chip with its own RAM - haven't actually worked out what yet. The hard drive actually worked, and it booted XP, but in a weird locked down configuration for some kind of training suite - clearly this system had been used in some kind of industrial setting.
The fan on this Slot 1 cooler sounds HORRIBLE though. There was a *thick* layer of black dusty gunk between the fan and the very light fins. The fan definitely needs to be replaced - there doesn't seem to be any accessible bearing to oil on either side.
When I unclipped the fan assembly, the fins completely fell away and unpeeled into a C shape. It looked like they'd been stuck to the central solid aluminium lug of the cooler with thermal paste, or some sort of thermal glue? The plastic seems to clip the fins back together well enough, but I can't work out how to get the fan off the clip part? It looks like it simply clips into the screw holes, but I can't see a way to unclip?