Wednesday, March 23rd, 2022

How I got my holy grail
=======================

...twice...
	...sort of...

It's been almost two years since I wrote the post about searching for
my holy grail - the dual-CPU board Asus P/I-P65UP5[1], which I had
between 2003 and 2012 when it burned out.

For years the board was nowhere to be found. Then it appeared twice
in a period of two weeks: one on eBay, one on a local auction portal.
There was a huge amount of bidders on both and the price skyrocketed.
It wasn't that high, to be honest, but as I was saving pennies to buy
the Blackbird[2], it was too high for me.

Then another year passed and nothing, not a single piece of P65UP5.
Then one appeared on eBay but located in Prague, in fact, several
hundreds of meters from my office. And it was cheap (kind of, $200)
because it was without the CPU card. Without the very CPU card,
which was the only thing I got left from my original setup. 
The seller declared it as tested and working, so I bought it on the
spot. One of my friends flashed for me the correct BIOS (each of the
existing CPU cards - Socket 7, Socket 8, Slot 1 - needs different
BIOS) and...

...the board was dead. I and several my retro-computing friends tried
everything possible, the best we got were some errors on the POST
card when we applied pressure on various points of the board.
Otherwise it didn't even have all the necessary signals on the bus.
I'm sure that there are some broken paths on one or more of the board
layers. You probably won't be surprised when I mention, that I didn't
ever hear about the seller since, never got any response to any of my
e-mails.

Another year passed.

I was googling the board like I did it every couple of months since
2012 and found one on some hardware portal in Belarus. I asked the
seller only to get the info, that he does not sell abroad. But I was
pointed by him to another seller, who had the board. The problem with
this one was similar - he was not exactly happy with selling to the
Czech Republic, because he would get much more money when selling in
western Europe. Yeah, the rich West...

...but he pointed me to another seller. It is almost fascinating, how
many people have this board, isn't it? This time, I was successful.
The seller indeed sold me the board with a fully populated dual
Pentium Pro card for some $500 including postage. Finally!

So now I have two P/I-P65UP5 - one fully operational[3], one mostly
dead[4]. I also have one C-P6ND[5] (a dual-socket 8 card with two
200MHz Pentium Pro CPUs[6]) and one C-P55T2D[7] (a dual-socket 7 card
with two 200MHz Pentium MMX CPUs). The only thing I do not have is
the third type of CPU module - C-PKND - for two Slot 1 CPUs.
I don't mind that because I didn't buy it as a collectible item,
but because I want to make a full working system around it.

As I mentioned in my first post about the board, I learned on it many
things about Linux and SMP in times, when multithreaded desktop
applications didn't almost exist and neither did multi-core CPUs, so
having multiple sockets with multiple chips was the only solution.

There will be several obstacles on the way to a fully working system
for example, the power supply - I certainly don't want to use a
25-year-old AT-style PSU, because I already saw this board dead too
many times for one lifetime, but when using AT-ATX converter, there
will be a problem with modern PSUs having quite a weak 3.3V and 5V
power branches. But I'm looking forward to it - the old big-tower
box that hosted my first P/I-P65UP5 is still waiting...

[1] /0/phlog/posts/2020-06-21_quest_for_the_holy_grail.txt
[2] /0/phlog/posts/2020-09-26_my_new_desktop.txt
[3] /I/phlog/posts/2022-03-23_p65up5-2.jpg
[4] /I/phlog/posts/2022-03-23_p65up5.jpg
[5] /I/phlog/posts/2022-03-23_cp6nd-nocpu.jpg
[6] /I/phlog/posts/2022-03-23_cp6nd.jpg
[7] /I/phlog/posts/2022-03-23_cp55t2d.jpg