Spent this morning cleaning and testing the parts I
harvested from the Compaq. Everything is in really good shape,
amazingly! The motherboard has a Compaq part number of '120694-'
which is not terribly descriptive! The CPU is an AMD K6-2, so
it's a little wasted in this Socket 7 machine. The heatsink
appears to be glued to the top of the chip, and I didn't want to
mess with setting up a HDD to run a CPU checker, so I don't know
which K6-2 it is precisely but as I received the machine it's
running at 200MHz (oddly low). I also managed to recover a PCI
Ethernet card, an optical drive, a floppy drive, a ZIP100 drive,
a 15GB HDD and 256MB of 168-pin DIMM RAM.
Somebody else has done some work on this machine in the
past, apparently. It's a Presario 5300 series tower, but no
factory configuration of those machines included both a K6-2 and
a 15GB HDD, and absolutely no configs had anywhere near 256MB of
RAM. It was also running Windows XP, despite having a manufacture
date on 1999. However, there was still an unbroken Compaq
warranty seal on the case, so perhaps it was sent back to Compaq
themselves for upgrades at some point?
Research on the mobo's chipset suggests it should support up
to a gig and a half of RAM, and I can see very plainly it has an
ESS Solo-1 chip for sound, but I am not quite sure what the on-
board video is capable of. I cannot imagine it's terribly
powerful, and since there's no AGP slot on the board, using this
as part of a Win 95/98 gaming machine is off the table, so I've
decided instead I'm going to use it as part of a Sioux server for
my home network. I'm still in the process of putting together the
buildlist, but hopefully I'll be able to get started on it before
the end of the month.
