Rich's Random Retro Reviews

Yeah, so I kinda bought another motherboard and CPU, which is almost identical to the ones I pulled from the Elonex server mentioned in another post.  The one on the right in the image above is the original mother board with its 100MHz CPU (and fancy new old stock heatsink and fan) and the one on the left is the new one. They're very similar except the new one has a DIMM socket for RAM along side the four 72 pin SIMM sockets. The CPU is also 200MHz and it came with 32MB of RAM and a graphics card - all for about £25. I couldn't say no really. I have no clue what I'm going to do with it but YAY for cheap retro hardware. 

I'm in a Pentium PC craze and I'm trying to build myself a test bench for a socket 5/7 motherboard. Why? Well - the computer/case that I'm using is HUGE, dirty, yellowed and is missing the side panels and doors. A test bench would allow me to quickly swap out hardware for different operating systems or swap CPUs or RAM for testing performance. I blame RMC was playing with a Packard Bell Multimedia Executive PC on his channel recently and I got mine out of the attic, however, the machine is special to me, so I didn't want rip it to pieces.  So whilst up there, I decided to get my old Elonex server/PC out to use this as a basis for my test bench. This PC was the Novell NetWare 3.12, then later 4.11 server for the office of the construction company I used to work at. When we upgraded to NT 4 this machine was defunct and I was allowed to bring it home.  I took it to pieces and laid it out on a piece of cardboard but it was a mess and stuff everywhere, so I decided to try a...