First post, by chinny22
- Rank
- l33t++
So having a clear out at one of my clients as we are closer to moving away from Windows 7 🙁
I was focusing on the "high end" shelf, basically servers, workstations, anything that's not a standard PC. Amongst it was this industrial PC I'd never really given much attention knowing it would be some boring Core 2 or similar.
The previous user definitely had his 5 a day 🤣
I opened it up to grab the HDD's and was greeted by a very nice sight, an ISA slot! No bloody way it's been here waiting for me for over 12 months!
I couldn't really check anything else as if you look at the power socket it was hard wired to the printer. I would have to wait till I got home and swap it out for a standard PSU
Once home I stripped it down as it was filthy from running 24/7 in a big dusty print works. Also better view of the motherboard.
So here are all the cards
The 3 cards connected SLI style are what connected to the printer, cool but useless.
Had another 2 PCI "Controller" cards or something, not sure need to do more research on them
Most interesting is the CPU card this is a WSV-Q354 Made by IEI. Based off the Q35 chipset with a few legacy connecters like IDE, Floppy.
The Backplane card with the isa slots is a PX-10S UM, Looking at IEI's website they have a few different boards to fit different form factors.
The 2 row's that have ISA and PCI in a line is where the CPU card goes, I'm not sure why they have 2 though, looking at the manual I cant see it supporting a blade like setup (remember this is just like a riser the chipset and everything live on the CPU card).
it supports AT, ATX and hard wired power as well.
I also scored some nice HDD's out of it.
And what did this system do for a living? It's not the most amazing hardware wise, a E7400 utilising CPU graphics and 4GB ram running WinXP x32.
It ran this which was set the desktop background
An Agfa Mpress 2 if anyone want to look it up. It lived in one of the doors under where it says mpress and ran the software on the screen and was basically a big print spooler, jobs would be submitted to a dedicated server (HP ML350 duel CPU) in the office which does all the grunt work and holds it. the printer operator selects the job which will then spool on this local computer then prints it out.
Which is why this is a bit over engineered, we had 3 of these things attached to different but similar printers so no doubt the ISA slot is for other printers sold where the controller card is still ISA.
Sadly I wont have time for this project so it's gone into storage for now, funny enough 2 blocks from the company. I've held onto the hard drives though. Doubt I'll need anything that big in whatever I end up doing with this.
What's really sad though is the 2 computers have already gone. One went back to the support company so probably replacement for some other printworks but the other was thrown out with the printer as they didn't realise it had the PC inside 🙁