Find the error in this picture.
- Thread starter CougTek
- Start date
Jake the Dog
Storage is cool
it has ISA slots?
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
I'm pretty sure the heatsink on the north bridge is bigger than the ZIF socket...
time
Storage? I am Storage!
The CPU socket is in the wrong place, plus it's offset so the chip die won't be centered under the cooler.
The whole things looks like a cross between AT and ATX.
The whole things looks like a cross between AT and ATX.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
I thought about placement, but IMO if the northbridge needs a heatsink that big, maybe it's placed there to benefit from the fans in the powersupply. P4's already have pretty good thermal protection so maybe they DON'T need to be there.
It looks like it has 3 IDE sockets and no floppy socket (smaller) but it is supposed to have two ATA-100 sockets but only one of the IDE ports is appropiately color-coded to blue. It is also supposed to have two SATA ports supporting raid-0 and I don't see those on the board.
time
Storage? I am Storage!
Isn't that the same as saying, "I already have a seatbelt and airbag, so maybe I don't need brakes?"
Buck
Storage? I am Storage!
I wonder how many older Compaq and HP servers could benefit from an updated motherboard like this. Many of those older systems from the mid-90s were a cross between AT and ATX. Gateway did the same thing with their desktop systems.
Bozo
Storage? I am Storage!
It doesn't appear to be an P4 socket at all.
Bozo
Bozo
Buck
Storage? I am Storage!
Bozo said:It doesn't appear to be an P4 socket at all.
Bozo
It doesn't? It looks like a P4 to me. Plus it has all of the extra headers that SuperMicro lists, such as the 2-SATA, 3-USB 2.0, and infared. The board comes in different combinations. Another layout is without ISA slots, but with two ethernet connections.
CougTek said:
There isn't any error. It's obviously a modern mobo aimed at the Ludite community.
Eh... It really does come with 3 ISA slots. Not anything I'd be interested in, though. They're using a PCI-to-ISA bridge chip to provide the ISA bus.
- Chipset Intel 875P chipset
- Front Side Bus 800/533/400 MHz
- Memory Up to 4GB of DDR-400/333/266 ECC or non-ECC unbuffered DDR SDRAM
- I/O Expansion 4 32-bit, 33 MHz PCI bus mastering slots
[*] 3 16-bit ISA slots
Stereodude
Not really a
There's not AGP port on it.
Now, how about you give us the answer?
Stereodude
Now, how about you give us the answer?
Stereodude
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
It DOES have onboard video, SD.
zx
Learning Storage Performance
Very odd mobo. Why would someone need 3 ISA slots in a modern motherboard? (Ok, I know there are freaks out there, but not enough to be considered a market ).
).Stereodude
Not really a
Right, and that would be an error on their part.Mercutio said:
Stereodude
Buck
Storage? I am Storage!
If the onboard video doesn't suit your needs, you can always plug in a full-length CGA ISA card.
Fushigi
Storage Is My Life
It's soooo obvious. No MicroChannel slots. :wink:
- Fushigi
- Fushigi
Explorer
Learning Storage Performance
zx said:Very odd mobo. Why would someone need 3 ISA slots in a modern motherboard? (Ok, I know there are freaks out there, but not enough to be considered a market
To this day, there are still significant numbers of industrial users using ISA peripherals. Supermicro's main markets are industrial, telecomm, general purpose server, and technical workstation -- not gamers or home/office computer users.
Otherwise, ISA expansion bus peripherals are performance robbing lil' bastards because of their memory address limitation of 16 MB. Any data that an ISA device reads or writes above 16 MB has to be double-buffered (i.e. -- "copied" back into a reserve memory address range below 16 MB and vice versa).
Being that this mobo has the infamous ISA slots and build-in video (with no AGP slot), I'd say this is an industrial or low-end telecomm mobo. One would also have to suspect that Supermicro has been getting requests for such a mobo.
By the way, I realise now that I misspelled LUDDITE earlier. A Luddite is basically someone who opposes technological evolution (e.g. -- a 486 fanatic in the year 2003).
Tea
Storage? I am Storage!
zx said:Very odd mobo. Why would someone need 3 ISA slots in a modern motherboard? (Ok, I know there are freaks out there, but not enough to be considered a market
Nonsense, ZX. ISA is a significant factor in the market. There is a great deal of very expensive industrial machinery that uses ISA. Two weeks ago I got a call from the local office of a big multinational confectionary maker, looking for motherboards that support ISA, for example. (A firm big enough that everyone here would have heard of them.)
Industrial machinery is often highly specialised and it lasts for 10, 20, 30 years. To replace it can cost many thousands of dollars. Sometimes hundreds of thousands. Because there are lots and lots of different machines out there, all doing slightly different things, and because the highly specialised companies that make them often go out of business, supporting older machines is big business.
If you ain't got an ISA slot, then you need to buy a new interface card, and if you buy a new interface card, then you need a new machine to plug it into. From time to time I've suggested to companies running old, steam-driven computers that this might make more sense. It will take me a lot of time to sort out their computer, I say, and time is money. The response usually goes like this:
"Are you kidding? What's the absolute most this could cost me if you do it?"
"Well, could take quite a while - it might be $800."
"And if we do it the other way, we have to fly a (insert particular industrial specialty here) expert out from (insert only country in the world where they make that particular type of machinery)! Do whatever it takes, charge whatever you like, it's still going to be cheaper."
Just yesterday a guy came in wanting three ISA slots in a machine. "Huh?" I said? Turns out he has some kind of highly specialised industrial sewing machines (I have no idea what they do, exactly) and they are worth a couple of thousand dollars each. They use an ISA interface/control card. Result: I found him a Pentium III/550 with three slots, gave it 256MB and a nice little 10GB 7200 RPM Quantum. He went away happy.
ISA won't go away until all those machines that use ISA interfaces go away, and that will be around 10 years or so.
Tea
Storage? I am Storage!
Ha! We cross-posted, Explorer.
Tea
Storage? I am Storage!
By the way, about the guy with the three industrial sewing machines - he's no tin-pot little operation. I don't know what he's worth (didn't have much time to chat, it was a very busy day) but it turned out that he had a few beers with my brother a year or five back, at a time when my brother was a private pilot for a beach resort that has its own private plane for the convenience of guests.
You don't get to stay at that sort of place if you don't have a dollar or two spare.
You don't get to stay at that sort of place if you don't have a dollar or two spare.
Explorer
Learning Storage Performance
Tea said:
Ha!!!!!!
Well, at least we were on the right track about *Industrial* mobos.
I might add to Tea's experiences above, in that there is now -- and has been for years -- movement by just about every industrial interface vendor on the planet to come out with PCI cards (PCI 2.0, Compact PCI, etc).
But still, even to this day, there are custom peripheral cards being built around the ISA (16-bit AT or 8-bit XT) bus because the vendor just doesn't want or can't (fiscally speaking) modernise their damned peripheral card they sell, which would also require writing a new device driver.
There are MANY peripheral busses in the industrial computer realm. ISA and PCI are just 2 of them. A few other famous ones are VME, S-100, S-bus, Q-Bus, GPIB, MultiBus, VXI, etc...
mubs
Storage? I am Storage!
You had me going back in time there, Explorer!
In my brudder's office sits a Dell server with a Brooktrout 2-port ISA fax card in a Dell PowerEdge 2300 - a fairly critical part of the whole setup. It's been working flawlessly for almost 5 years. Brooktrout makes universal PCI fax cards now, but they're quite expensive.
Maybe I should resurrect my 486 mobos and sell them on fleabay??? There's a few in the garage I've been wanting to get rid of. They're still there because I didn't want to throw them in the trash - all those chemicals, mercury etc. Been too lazy to take them to a haz. mat. dump.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
ISA and RS232 are among the very few bits of a "modern" computer that are really, deeply hackable. You have to pay Intel a big wad of money to get the full specifications for PCI (or maybe to produce the cards?), but anyone with fair-to-middling working knowledge of electronics can hack together an ISA card. I'm glad to know that someone out there is making a really modern ISA motherboard.
blakerwry
Storage? I am Storage!
Tea said:
you have a brother Tea?
Tea
Storage? I am Storage!
Err, zorry. He's actually Tannin's brother. Which makes him a sort of brother of mine too, by courtesy, seeing az I am Tannin's baby sister. Maybe he's a ztep-brother in ztrict point of law.
Howell
Storage? I am Storage!
Back in one of the plants where I used to work we were upgrading all of the office machines. We tasked the engineers to figure out which of their own equipement would work in the new machine and buy new stuff if needed.
While switching out his old Optiplex with a new one he hands me an ISA card. I politely show him that this card will not work in the little white slots; they need the big black slots. "I'll carry this old machine off and come back to help you pick out a proper new card."
While I was gone, he had called the manufacturer to price a new card. At this point he tells me that the cards function was to monitor and control the HVAC system for four buildings. :eekers: "Maybe it won't be as expensive as I think", I think. Then he tells me the PCI version of the card, which they have readily available, is $3000. "Hmm, OK. I'll go retrieve your old machine."
While switching out his old Optiplex with a new one he hands me an ISA card. I politely show him that this card will not work in the little white slots; they need the big black slots. "I'll carry this old machine off and come back to help you pick out a proper new card."
While I was gone, he had called the manufacturer to price a new card. At this point he tells me that the cards function was to monitor and control the HVAC system for four buildings. :eekers: "Maybe it won't be as expensive as I think", I think. Then he tells me the PCI version of the card, which they have readily available, is $3000. "Hmm, OK. I'll go retrieve your old machine."
Buck
Storage? I am Storage!
Nice example Howell.
mubs
Storage? I am Storage!
In the mid-late '90s I worked at a small company. We installed a new telephone system with "integrated voice mail" from AT&T. The voice mail part happened to be a PC.
I was really crestfallen to see that it was a 486-33 white box PC (with AT&T screen printed on the front); 0.5 GB IDE hard drive; 8 MB Ram; ISA SCSI controller connected to a QIC tape drive; ISA 4-port voice card; AT&T System V unix; Oracle RDBMS! The damn thing worked ok, though.
I never understood how Oracle shared 8MB with the OS, and how the system could concurrently digitize and store 4 voice-mail messages with so slow a processor and an IDE HDD.
I was really crestfallen to see that it was a 486-33 white box PC (with AT&T screen printed on the front); 0.5 GB IDE hard drive; 8 MB Ram; ISA SCSI controller connected to a QIC tape drive; ISA 4-port voice card; AT&T System V unix; Oracle RDBMS! The damn thing worked ok, though.
I never understood how Oracle shared 8MB with the OS, and how the system could concurrently digitize and store 4 voice-mail messages with so slow a processor and an IDE HDD.
Explorer
Learning Storage Performance
mubs said:
Explorer
Learning Storage Performance
mubs said:
On a side note:
Another major bugaboo that is more common than one might suspect is the fact that some of this specialised hardware (and software) can either be tied directly to the clockspeed of the host computer or is incompatible with a host computer above a given clockspeed.
So, what you end up having to do in case the computer fails and cannot be replaced is to replace your entire setup. With the possibility of this occurring, it would be a smart move to buy a spare computer and stash it away. By the way, remove the BIOS backup battery if you do this.
mubs
Storage? I am Storage!
Yes! The company moved, and while I moved all the computing stuff, I had weird feelings and refused to move the phone stuff and paid AT&T to do it. The guy showed up, put it in his truck, moved it, set it up, and the voice-mail PC wouldn't boot. According to him, this was an outdated model and he didn't have a clue what to do. He spent nearly 10 days scrounging around inside AT&T (had become Lucent by then) for spares and software before it finally got fixed.
They sell that shit for outrageous prices. My then CEO thought he was getting a great deal when he signed the lease. When we moved, there was another 6 months to go before the lease was up; I advised the company not to buy the equipment at "fair market value" when the lease expired. A short while later they laid me off and paid Lucent for that crap.