This is the motherboard that came inside of our son’s very first PC.
I bought the PC used at the time for about $40 and gave it to our son when he was just 4 years old.
The tower, original 40GB IDE drive, and the original sound and graphics cards are long gone of course, but the primary motherboard components are still in tact.
Dug this out of the box a while ago and though it needed, and still needs a good cleaning, I paired it with a 60GB IDE drive, an MSI N1996 (VGA) graphics card, and a Compaq netelligent n119 ethernet card.
I’ve got a Startech Pexsound7ch sound card that I’ve been thinking to try out, but since this mobo is so old, I may have to dig around a bit for an older card for the sake of compatibility.
This particular Pentium 3 processor is pretty slow by the standards of today, but back in the day, it might have been the Bee’s Knee’s to a lot of people.
Specs:
» P6 microarchitecture
» 0.18 micron
» Desktop CPU
» Up to 1.13 GHz
» 100 and 133 MHz FSB
» 256 KB L2 cache
» 32-bit
» MMX, SSE instructions
» GTL+ system bus
» 2-way processing
The Intel 815EP/ICH2 chipset was introduced in 2000 with 16-bit color only.
The current 60GB drive has Linux Mint 32bit installed, and it does as well as you might expect it to with 300mb DDR RAM.
The whole thing is powered by a rather generic HIPRO power plant at 240W.
I’ve decided to start looking for an original tower for this particular set up (if any of you guys know where I might find one, let me know). Finding the cream colored generic towers that were so prevalent back in the day might be a bit difficult, but I’ll keep pressing on. This particular set up isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so I’ve got the time.
I’ll be trying to keep this thing as close to original as possible, and I just might find a working CRT monitor for it as well.
With any luck, I might stumble upon a tower that’s in relatively mint condition.
The motherboard has 5 PCI slots available, so I might install a 54mbps AirCruiser G Desktop Adapter wireless card. Since the HD has Linux Mint installed on it, I don’t suppose that it would have any trouble writing to the wireless card.
Thanks for the read
Happy Trails
