lol yeah who needs 2d acceleration. I just was surfing around that link from froggle and I came across this $25 ISA videocard. Western Digital Was really before their time. Check out the SLI ( lol ) connector at the top of the card! Lol yeah, get some sweet 16 color 2d action!!! Check out this pic (dont worry, im not stealing the bandwith, i hosted it) Just thought I could share.
I tried following some advice on the Dell forums about getting the onboard gfx to work but still no joy I think my best bet is to find an EISA network card, although they seem to be rarer than rocking horse poo here in the UK. I have my eye on one on ebay, but that will have to be sent from the USA. Still its a 10/100mbs card so it should suit my needs fine. I also found a 330w Dell-compatible PSU on ebay so that might help with my power issues. Hopefully the SATA card will turn up next week along with this: There is a lot of room below the existing drive rack so it wont hurt to have room for future expansion Few pic updates for today: Revmoved the grille in front of the existing 3.5" drive rack for better airflow. Before. And after - needs tidying. Also removed the chunky rear 120mm fan grille. Before. Bit rough round the edges. And after some smoothing. Some rubber edging will smarten that up further. I dont really see the need for a fan grille as I dont plan to stick my fingers into the fan at any point The front pieces are looking nice and shiny too. A rub down and a few coats of laquer and that should be done. Just need a few more cans of VW metallic black now....
A file server is going to be my next project, gonna have to keep an eye on this one for some more insparation, cant wait to see how it turns out.
Looking good. An good and stable fileserver is always nice. I am also setting up a File server. I have found these RAID5 boards from HighPoint RocketRAID They have 4-16 disk ATA and SATA RAID5 controllers They sell for £103 for an 8 disk ATA controller You may even be able to find them cheaper in Germany. I used Google, and I payed €89 for an 8 disk ATA controller. With two of these controllers (ATA and SATA), you should still have room for a PCI network card. Keep up the good work.
Why do you need a VGA card anyway? That motherboard has an onboard video card; why not just use the onboard video to free up the PCI slot and avoid the horros of Non-plug and play devices all together?
With regards to getting the onboard vga heres a couple of things I remmeber from similar systems: I had a dual P200 that was EISA. I downloaded the EISA setup which is key to the system. It was like a second BIOS config, which booted from a floppy and was completly separate from the BIOS you would go into from the startup screen. I remmeber having problems with all sorts of bits including adding memory, nothing would configure unless you went in and added the hardware in the EISA config regardless. Is there anything like this for your server? the server I had was made by Acer but it was an Intel motherboard The second machine I remmeber that is relevant was a dual 400Mhz. This had onboard VGA that refused to come on. After battling hard I removed everything. Hovered it all down (just to make sure there was no shrapnel lying about shorting something), put it on the desk. I had downloaded the last BIOS release (which I think was the same one that was already on there), and there was also firmware for one of the controller chips. I ran both utilities and rebooted. Hey presto! it worked! The trouble with older systems is that they are not as user friendly. Im sure the onboard vga works it just being a pig... Lock horns and google lots Im sure you will get it working... As far as the effort and board go if it becomes too much of a pain in the arse you could always go the Duron/mATX route.. My server systems are athlons which are underclocked, saves power and noise But I understand that the modding part of it is great fun +we live in too much of a throw away society and its always good to use-up old hardware (thats free)! Good luck !
Damn must bookmark my own thread - couldnt find it Thanks for the offer smoguzbenjamin, but I really needed a 100m/bit card due to the amount of data that will be pushed around this thing - see my solution below. Nothing doing over the weekend due to car hunting! Thanks for all the BIOS advice but nothing works - I have a nasty suspicion the onboard card is toast, which is why someone fitted a PCI VGA card. Not to worry on the card front anymore though, as I have just won this on ebay: Mmm 100 m/bit EISA networking goodness. Now I just need to wait for it to get here from the USA! Also bidding on this thing: An EISA VGA card with a whopping 4mb onboard! wait till I post the 3dmark scores on this baby hehe. If all goes to plan this will mean I can add my IDE card, my SATA card, and still have a PCI slot free for the future. Quick painting update today too: Casing all primed ready for a rub down tomorrow, and front panel given last coat of black: That just needs a spot of t-cut then a laquer and its done. No more dremelling today as its only a small shed and I didnt want bits of metal dust stuck in my fresh paint! My SATA card, 2nd drive, and Coolermaster drive bay should turn up tomorrow too. Now all I need to worry about is the boot drive.....
So you're going to boot straight from SATA? In all honesty, I'd recommend digging up a 20-30 GB IDE drive and an ATA66/100/133 controler card (PCI now that you have room). Perhaps that would introduce more boot-related bugs, but should save you some of the headache of loading Win onto SATA. props on finding that 3Com NIC! 3Com makes good stuff, and something old school like that should be pretty robust. You're lucky that VGA card is so small: I had an old #9 2D accelerator (2MB VRAM) that was a FULL SIZE PCI! You could serve dinner on it, and not spill a drop.
More bits aquired today (although not all purchased ) Thats the 2nd of the 4 250gb drives. I now have all 4 of those - just need the 5th SATA one. As luck would have it i found a solution for my boot drive problem, a 17gb IBM SCSI drive that I "found" at work 17 gb is more than enough for the system partition, I just hope its not too noisy. See above - should be no problems booting from SCSI as that is what the server was originally designed to work with. Here is the EISA card in all its glory: Gotta love the large bling gold connectors I forsee some fun tomorrow with the Dell EISA config program... More painting tomorrow too when I have the time.
My friend brought this to me the other day, so it looks like i have you beat by about 4 inches now... hahaha.... (sorry, crappy phone camera) I'm so glad we have all this useless crap. -Brad
That connector doesn't look like any ISA/EISA cards I remember. Looks like an EISA/AGP hybrid with those two "layers".
mmm... old pc goodness! keep up the good work we should all resycle our ould gear. I have 10 486's doing nothing
