thechangelab.com

Day 1 – thechangelab project

Time to upgrade: motherboard and cpu.

I found this board at the used section of a local computer store. It was under a pile of other boards, in a bookcase filled with shelves of old network, sound, video cards, CPUs, RAM, optical and hard drives, all in varying states of distress. While it wasn’t in perfect condition, the staff at the shop did respond to my request to see it post to it’s BIOS. It was a gem at a fraction of the price I’d have paid at on online site.

The Iwill DBD100. A dual slot 1, Intel 440BX chipset. Outfitted with two 800 MHz PIIIs.

A simple board, but has the basics of its day. PS/2. Serial. Parallel. USB.

First, opening the chassis and removing the PSU to prepare for the upgrade. That’s the 250Watt PSU on the floor.

It was a LITTLE DUSTY inside. Not being one to spend on a can of compressed air, I took a tissue to wipe the inside and vacuumed up the dust that fell to the floor.

Anyway, here’s my RAID card ( Promise Fasttrak66 ) that’s let me use 120GB hard drives with the older BIOS on my ASUS board. While I may not need it for the Iwill, the card does do UDMA at 66. The Iwill can only go as fast as 33.

A fond farewell but not forgotten.

The Iwill turned out to be too big to easily fit into the chassis. So, I removed the backplate and mounted the board onto it.

After screwing the backplate back in again, it was time to plug all the cards in. An AGP 2x video card from ATI. A Yamaha sound card. An IBM NIC.

 

 

 

 

 

After closing the case and switching it on. It all came to life.

Everything looked okay, as the BIOS posted to show 2 CPUs present.

The interesting thing about this board was that I had to manually set the CPU freq. Overclocking is not my thing, so I stuck with the 8 x 100 setting.

A problem that came up was the RAM. There are four slots intended to allow for up to 1GB of SDRAM. However, it only recognized my two sticks of 128MB and not the two 64MB sticks. All are PC100, except the former are double sided. I don’t know enough if this double sided stuff has any impact, but all sticks worked on the previous Asus board.

Next problem was my distro. I had installed Debian’s 2.4.27-2-686 kernel for a single CPU. I was not in the mood to recompile my kernel, so I re-installed my distro using the SMP kernel this time.

Anyway, no explosions so far.