Scored what I hope is an awesome motherboard for $30

I saw this great board online carousell, on some local seller board. Although eBay may be the defacto site for buying old garbage, keep an eye out for local stuff too. There is craigslist in the USA & Kijiji in Canada.

Intel l440gx+

Yes, it’s an Intel l440gx+, a dual processor motherboard, with an ISA slot! I’m pretty sure it’s all 5v PCI slots, but who knows. And at $250 HKD, much cheaper than the ones on eBay. Although condition is pretty much unknown.

Pentium III 750Mhz

And it has two Pentium III’s clocked in at an amazing 750Mhz. It’ll make a great MS-DOS box for sure, with plenty of punch. Along with being great for Windows NT 4.0

I think it may have 128MB of RAM as well. Not great, but it’s still pretty good.

Being this old also means it most certainly is MP 1.1 compatible, as I just found this mp_v1_1.c lurking in the OSFMK used in the ancient/abandonded mach kernel for MkLinux. Of course half the fun will come in trying to build the kernel from source (can’t find any intel binaries), and seeing if this old board works.

Of course getting the board was a mission in itself, as I had to cross through one of the big protests last night to get it. I took some video of it on my way back, and walked up to where the front line was going to be.

4 thoughts on “Scored what I hope is an awesome motherboard for $30

  1. 128Mb RAM? Doesn’t the picture show 2x256Mb sticks with an extra 2 unlabelled (so presumably either 768Mb or 1024Mb?)

    It’ll be interesting to see what MPS compatibility it has. PIII would normally be far newer than MPS 1.1, although it looks like many boards let you choose which version to support. The good thing about older versions is being able to use older systems; eg. NT 3.51 should support MP with MPS 1.1. I still don’t have a multiproc 3.51 under virtualization, because they emulate a newer version that it doesn’t understand.

    Fwiw, I have a single proc 850Mhz PIII with 768Mb RAM running NT4. It’s fantastic, but my advice is to get a good GPU to go with it. I have a 5500FX PCI card, which is old enough to have NT 4 drivers but new enough to do 1080p and play any game that has NT 4 support. If you want to run older systems though you might want something older.

    • It may be that much RAM, I haven’t been able to test it, as the trains and many roads were shut down today. And I live out in the villages so it’s not like there is any real alternative short of going be sea… Although I have been thinking about getting a boat, but the kids are just too young right now.

      I’m hoping it’ll throttle down to 1.1, although there is only one way to find out, much like the actual memory. That is assuming it’ll work.

      Shame it only has a single ISA slot though. I may try to see if I can find some industrial expander, although that’ll make this large thing into something of a monstrosity. I think Matrox or someone made an XGA/SVGA card. It’s funny how that 8514 thing kind of got skipped over in history and enthusiast spaces. I used to do work for someone who had one of those setups, and OS/2 2.0 was so incredible with all that realestate.

      • In terms of 8514, have you seen http://www.os2museum.com/wp/the-8514a-graphics-accelerator/ ? I only ran into this the other day and didn’t really understand what made it unique until now. It’s a shame that it’s not better supported by virtualization products, since it offers high resolution capabilities and limited acceleration capabilities with supported drivers in older systems. The only reason I was looking into it is after successfully installing OS/2 1.3 (yay!) but it’d be really nice to have it in 1024x768x256 …

        • Yeah, the 8514/A is supported by a bunch of older products. If I recall the real ‘issue’ is that it’s an incredibly low refresh rate, which LCD’s may not enjoy.

          I just remembered the ATI Mach 32 is compatible! That’s the card to get.

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