3. Birthday splurge
Small update: as a part of my birthday celebration I spent some cash on a few items for this machine. A used 1 Gb Ethernet card, a brand new USB3 card…
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…and a PL-P4/W adapter.
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This adapter was sold with a bundled 1.6 GHz Northwood, but it only works with s478 Willamette CPUs. Indeed, I tried it out and it would not work out of the box. I bought it after examining the datasheets for Willamette and Northwood CPUs in 423 and 478 sockets, to see if I could mod it to run Northwood CPUs. Also they are on the rare side, which I get a kick out of. And finally, I also appreciate that it adds to the parallels between this system and my previous build: both are in essence MaximumPC Dream Machine builds (though I didn't intend them to be that), and both use—hopefully, we'll have to see about this one here—adapters to run more powerful CPUs.
Attempting to make this adapter work will be my end of year retro-project—fun! 😀
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As an update, currently in the machine I have the 1.6 Willamette overclocked to 1920 (16*120) which leaves the PCI bus running at 30 MHz. At these speeds the SATA card behaves properly. The LAN card worked without any trouble, but I've yet to try the USB3 card. I tried both Windows7 Starter and Windows7 Pro and to my surprise W7 Pro feels snappier out of the box, something I have no explanation for. Disabling Windows Search made it even better, too! This is good news because I have a legit W7 Pro license that I can use for the machine.
Also, reading around I found out that the GeForce 6800 I am currently using in the build does not have hardware decoding. It was advertised, and the PCIe version has it, but the AGP card never could do it. I will try a GeForce 7800GS and will read about Radeons to see what's up.
I'll update later when I try the USB3 card and maybe post some benchmarks of it.
Outrigger: an ongoing adventure with the OR840
QuForce FX 5800: turn your Quadro into a GeForce