[EdLUG] Clearout continues: huge old EATX tower case with some ancient bits

Edinburgh Linux Users Group edlug at lists.edlug.org.uk
Tue Aug 22 09:50:50 UTC 2017


Another one bites the dust:

A huge old metal EATX "full tower" case; 62cm high, but no fatter than
it needs to be.  Beige.  5 free 5.25" bays, 3 free 3.5" bays (on top of
what's occupied by the floppy and CD-ROM).  Not easy-opening or with
fancy hot-swap drive bays or anything worth mentioning.

In the box:

* ATX PSU (~425W) "hec" brand. ("Pentium4 ready" which I think means it
has some extra 12V mobo power line).  Seem to remember its fan being
unusually noisy.

* Ancient AMD AthlonXP (a "1600+" from memory) CPU, CPU fan and mobo
("Chaintech").  5 PCI slots + AGP.  A notable quirk was that it was
thoroughly unstable in AGPx4 mode and you had to degrade to AGPx2 in the
BIOS.

* A fanless AGP Nvidia card of some sort (VGA and DVI out).

* 2 80mm case fans (and case has portal for another one).  Very noisy
but I don't think they've ever been connected to a mobo smart enough to
do anything but run them at full speed.

* CD-ROM (PATA) and floppy drive and cabling.

No HDDs.  No NIC (and no network on mobo).

Something's not right with at least one of the above bits: the machine
used to work great until some years ago when it suddenly started
spontaneously freezing or shutting down or rebooting (forget exact
failure mode) shortly after it got to the GDM login screen.  I seem to
remember doing some experiments which made me think it was probably the
graphics card overheating was the problem; it's not one of those dinky
little NVS cards but something pretty meaty from the end of the AGP era
with a big heat-pipe cooler on it (which used to get *really* hot).  My
theory is whatever magic juice is in the heat pipe has dried up or
leaked away or something and now the card can't cope with anything more
intensive than console text for very long.  Of course it could be the
mobo or the PSU is the problem... I've never had mobos/CPUs/PSUs do
anything else than just die completely though.  Never got around to
trying to resurrect the machine (beyond double-checking the AGPx2 BIOS
thing mentioned above) as VirtualBox had become a better platform for
the stuff I'd been doing with this machine.

Be amazed if this is destined to go anywhere but the dump; any value
remaining is probably in the case, although you can get much nicer ones
these days.

The list will strip my email: contact me at

  timday at bottlenose.demon.co.uk 

if interested.

The thin-client mentioned in my previous email is still available.
(I expect to also be getting rid of assorted PCI cards, a Pentium4
motherboard+CPU, another one of these cases and a bunch of assorted PATA
drives 30GByte-500GByte over the next few weeks).

Tim





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