sparcie

Tag: Mainboard

  • Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-BX2000

    It has been quite a while since my last post, I can only apologise, time just skipped by so fast! Last month I did have a chance to go and visit my parents, it was quite lucky timing in a way, as there was less risk and concern surrounding the…

  • Mainboard: AOpen MX3W

    Today I’m looking at a Socket 370 made by AOpen around mid 1999. It’s a clearly budget board as we will see when taking a closer look. I referenced this contemporary Anandtech article whilst writing this. I’m trying out a different device for taking the overview photos today as my…

  • Motherboard: MSI 970A-G43

    I had almost ran out of old motherboards for this section when my brother gave me this particular board. He gave it to me as he had upgraded to a Ryzen based system and this one had failed. Unlike the others so far this one is actually relatively modern, although…

  • Motherboard: EPoX EP-8K3A

    Today’s motherboard is a Socket 462 board (also known as Socket A) it is an EPoX EP-8K3A made in early 2002. The CPUs that fit this socket type have an exposed die that makes direct contact with the heat sink, this is generally good for heat dissipation, but makes installing…

  • Motherboard: Another unknown Socket 3

    Today I’m looking at another 486 socket 3 motherboard that unfortunately I can’t identify. Unlike the last one, this one actually had it’s model number on the silk screen, but the OEM who put it into a machine has covered the silkscreen label with either white paint or white out…

  • Motherboard: Aopen AX34-U

    I’ve been rather busy of late, and it’s been raining here in buckets, so finding the time for photographing a board has been tricky. In any case I had some time today and have found a socket 370 board made by Aopen. I wasn’t able to decipher the date of…

  • Motherboard: ASUS P4S800 MX SE

    Today is another of my more modern mother boards, the ASUS P4S800. It was made late 2003, roughly half way through the life of the Pentium 4, which was starting to look old compared to the new AMD Athlon 64 processors that were released that year. This board is clearly…

  • Motherboard: MS-6153VA

    Today I’m looking at a Socket 370 board that would have been made roughly in 1999-2000. It was an interesting period as much of the early legacy technology such as the ISA bus was fading out, marking the beginning of the end for complete backwards compatibility. It is also close…

  • Motherboard: ASUS CUV4X-DLS

    Today’s motherboard is one of the more unusual in my small collection, it’s a server/workstation board that takes two Pentium III class CPUs. Boards like this one were (and still are) quite unusual for the PC architecture, most only have one CPU socket to keep costs low and the complexity…

  • On-Board graphics

    Most computer enthusiasts instinctively know that on-board graphics doesn’t perform as well as a discrete graphics card, but why isn’t common knowledge. Today I’d like to shed a little light on why this is. However don’t take this as a criticism of on-board graphics, as they have their place within…