Wednesday, March 23rd, 2022
How I got my holy grail
=======================
..twice...
...sort of...
It's been almost two years since I wrote the post about searching for
my holy grail - the dual-CPU board Asus P/I-P65UP5[1], which I used
between 2003 and 2012 when it burned out.
For years the board was nowhere to be found. Then it appeared twice
in a period of two weeks: one on eBay, one on a local auction portal.
There was a huge amount of bidders on both and the price skyrocketed.
It wasn't that high, to be honest, but as I was saving pennies to buy
the Blackbird[2], it was too high for me.
Another year passed and nothing, not a single P/I-P65UP5 for sale.
Then one appeared on eBay - located in Prague, literally quarter of
a mile from my office. It was cheap (kind of, $200) because it didn't
have the CPU card. The very CPU card, which was the only thing I got
left from my original setup.
The seller declared it as tested and working, so I bought it on the
spot. One of my friends flashed for me the correct BIOS (each of the
existing CPU cards, Socket 7, Socket 8, Slot 1, needs different BIOS)
and...
..the board was dead.
Me and several my retro-computing friends tried everything possible,
the best we ever got were some errors on a POST card when we applied
pressure on various parts of the board. Otherwise it didn't even have
all the necessary signals on the bus. I'm sure that there are some
broken paths on one or more of the board layers. You probably won't
be surprised when I mention, that I didn't ever hear about the seller
since, never got any response to any of my e-mails.
Another year passed.
I was googling the board like I did every couple of months since 2012
and found one on some hardware portal in Belarus. I asked the seller
only to get the info, that he does not sell abroad. But he directed
me to another seller, who had the board. The problem with this one
was similar - he was not exactly happy selling to the Czech Republic,
because he would get much more money selling it western Europe. Yeah,
the rich West...
..but he pointed me to another seller. It is almost fascinating, how
many people suddenly own this board, isn't it? Finally, this time I
was successful. The seller indeed sold me the board with a populated
dual Pentium Pro card for some $500 including postage.
So now I have two P/I-P65UP5 - one fully operational[3], one mostly
dead[4]. I also have one C-P6ND[5] (a dual-socket 8 card with two
200MHz Pentium Pro CPUs[6]) and one C-P55T2D[7] (a dual-socket 7 card
with two 200MHz Pentium MMX CPUs). The only thing I don't have is the
third type of CPU module - C-PKND - for two Slot 1 CPUs. I don't mind
that because I didn't buy it as a collectible item, but because I'd
like to make a full working system around it.
As I mentioned in my first post about the board, I learned on it many
things about Linux and SMP in times, when multithreaded desktop
applications didn't almost exist and neither did multi-core CPUs, so
having multiple sockets with multiple chips was the only solution.
There will be several obstacles on the way to a fully working system.
For example the power supply. I certainly don't want to use a quarter
century old AT-style PSU, because I already saw this board dead too
many times for one lifetime, but when using AT-ATX converter, there
will be a problem with modern PSUs having quite a weak 3.3V and 5V
power branches. But I'm looking forward to finding solution for these
problems. The old big-tower box that hosted my first P/I-P65UP5 is
still waiting...
[1]
gopher://i-logout.cz/0/phlog/posts/2020-06-21_quest_for_the_holy_grail.txt
[2]
gopher://i-logout.cz/0/phlog/posts/2020-09-26_my_new_desktop.txt
[3]
gopher://i-logout.cz/I/phlog/posts/2022-03-23_p65up5-2.jpg
[4]
gopher://i-logout.cz/I/phlog/posts/2022-03-23_p65up5.jpg
[5]
gopher://i-logout.cz/I/phlog/posts/2022-03-23_cp6nd-nocpu.jpg
[6]
gopher://i-logout.cz/I/phlog/posts/2022-03-23_cp6nd.jpg
[7]
gopher://i-logout.cz/I/phlog/posts/2022-03-23_cp55t2d.jpg
