Picked up an AMI MegaPlex (quad Xeons) (56k warning)

  • Thread starter Thread starter Geeky1
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Geeky1

Geeky1

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Found one at the surplus store last weekend. Spent the rest of the weekend cleaning my room to make room for it, went and bought it today. Got the boards, 28 sticks of RAM (~1.7GB), 4 450MHz P2 Xeons, 4 VRMs, 1 SCSI drive and 2 hotswap PSes for $50, and it works perfectly :)

Took a bunch of pics... I'm under the impression that this board is rather rare, as I've never seen one in person or for sale on ebay or anywhere else, and I thought you guys might be interested in seeing this thing.

Pic 1 is the computer with my two highly qualified assistant technicians. They hung around after hours to give me a hand disassembling it for the pics ;)


Pic 2 is the top of the case:


Pics 3, 4, and 5 are of the CPU board and the memory riser. The board has a total of 32 memory slots and supports 8GB of RAM:




Pic 6 is of a board that's mounted in the bottom of the case under the CPU board. No idea what it's connected to or what it does. If anyone has any ideas I'd be interested in hearing them. :)


Pic 7 is of the back of the case with the empty hotswap PS enclosure removed:


Pic 8 is of one of the techs thoroughly examining the aforementioned enclosure for defects:


Pics 9 and 10 are of the inside of one of the enclosures; it has 2 300w power supplies and a circuit board of some kind that presumably serves to balance the load between the two:



Pic 11 is of the inside of the side of the case with the power supplies and the hotswap drive cages in it... that access panel is the only easy access to that side of the case. i haven't tried to disassemble the case further yet:


Pic 12 is of the front of the case with the hotswap cages removed:


And Pic 13 is of the machine in the downstairs computer room, running and in the BIOS. The case next to it is an Antec SX-635 midtower. That should give you an idea of how big the AMI case is (it's 27x27x17")
 
skip0110
Sweet 👍 :)

What are you going to do with it?
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Honestly? Pretty much the same thing I do with all my other desktops. Not much of anything. :yuck: My laptop is my primary computer, and it's been the only one i've used for the past few months because I killed both of my s604 P4 Xeon boards, I haven't RMAed them yet, and I don't feel like getting any of my other desktops hooked up again.

I'll probably take it apart, clean it all out, document the power supply pinouts so i can replace the PSes with ATX ones if/when they die, mod it some to quiet it down and either use it as a file/print server or just let it sit until I get an urge to use it (which would mean being turned on around once a month, if that). I'm a collector of computer hardware of sorts... Most of what I buy because I want it, not because I have any use for it. :)

Raghavan
Awesome! Is it a good gaming system? How old is it?
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No, it's not. At all. It was designed to be a server, and what makes a good server is very different from what makes a good gaming machine. Sometimes it's possible to wrestle a workstation into gaming duties (which is what I do with my other Xeon system) but servers are another kind of animal entirely. It was built in 1998 or so, so it's old and slow by today's standards. When it was new it had far more power than anything else you could get in one box (except for the 8 processor Xeon systems), but even then it was no good as a gaming system, and it's not gotten any better. It'll handle solitaire. Maybe. And I mean the maybe in all seriousness... It has a 3D Rage LT Pro video chipset. I'm not even sure it'll do 1024x768 in 32 bit color.
 
I totally understand collecting hardware for hardware's sake, and it's quite an interesting find.

But it would be nice to give it a workout. I bet it would fairly fly with a stage 1 Gentoo compile (although the compile itself would take ages).

Bet it sounds like a Hoover, though, :lol:.
 
skip0110
Bet it sounds like a Hoover, though, :lol:.
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Well, let me put it to you this way:

If my assistants hadn't been in another room when I turned it on, the machine probably would've tried to inhale them. :p
 
Nice. Should of tagged the thread title with a Broadband warning instead. Imageshack was reeeally slow on my end even with a 7 mb cable connection.
 
lol. That's not your connection or the images, i'm afraid. That's imageshack. imageshack has been really slow and just generally flaky for the past few weeks for me. But there was no way I was making thumbnails, uploading 26 images to photobucket, and copy/pasting then editing 13 lines of vbcode. I'm too lazy to do that. :p
 
hey geeky mind telling me where you bought such a rig? (im from peninsula part of the bay)
im looking for a great deal myself, probably wont be using the puter much in the future because of my job, but either way im looking to purchase 1 for the holidays.
thanks
 
Trust me, it isn't just Imageshack.

700 KB on some of those pictures at 2000x1500. It is going to take a while to load on any connection.
 
svtsnake
hey geeky mind telling me where you bought such a rig? (im from peninsula part of the bay)
im looking for a great deal myself, probably wont be using the puter much in the future because of my job, but either way im looking to purchase 1 for the holidays.
thanks
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I hope you realize that Geeky's new rig is not really suitable as a desktop workstation or a gaming machine ;)
 
skip0110
I hope you realize that Geeky's new rig is not really suitable as a desktop workstation or a gaming machine ;)
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I'm sure he does...I hope.

That is one hell of a server though...I would love to have it if somebody would just give it to me, I wouldn't buy it for more than $20 though since I have no use for it. Can you imagine hosting a Counter-Strike: Source server on a OC43 conection on that beast? 👍
 
MachOne
I'm sure he does...I hope.

That is one hell of a server though...I would love to have it if somebody would just give it to me, I wouldn't buy it for more than $20 though since I have no use for it. Can you imagine hosting a Counter-Strike: Source server on a OC43 conection on that beast? 👍
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They're only 450MHz processors...

At one time, yeah, that thing was a "holy crap" machine, and would still probably do pretty well as a server, but it's more of a novelty now.
 
Burnout
They're only 450MHz processors...

At one time, yeah, that thing was a "holy crap" machine, and would still probably do pretty well as a server, but it's more of a novelty now.
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I agree - as a server that doesn't have to run the graphical part of the game, I'm fairy sure it'll do ok... But considering what kinda power these diansaur Xeons use - I highly doubt it would be worth it :)

Sweet box though - Nice find Geeky1 !....
 
MachOne, Raghavan: The computer might be worth $400-$500 at most. There are very, very few computers that become collectors items. :p

svtsnake: I bought it at Weirdstuff (www.weirdstuff.com) though you probably won't find what you want there. They have no desktops in the as-is section right now, and the ones they have that are tested are for the most part fairly exepensive for what they are. What would it be used for and what kind of budget do you have? I might be able to make a better recommendation.

Burnout, Flerbizky: You're basically right. It's not all that impressive compared to what you can get now. In an application that could use all 4 CPUs, it would probably be equivalent to around a 2.2GHz P4, maybe a 2.4. Of course that's just in terms of raw CPU power... there are all sorts of other potential bottlenecks (memory bandwidth comes to mind...).

Oh, I do have to point out though that the Xeon CPUs themselves don't use very much power...

Two of the Xeons are SL33T stepping, the other two are SL36W ; both steppings have a TDP of 34.5w; the whole CPU + memory subsystem might draw 200w.

However, the total power draw would depend on what you have in it. If you stacked it up with NICs and SCSI cards and loaded all 12 hotswap bays with 1.6" full height 10,000rpm drives (which use more power than newer drives) I could see getting to 400-500w total, which would indeed be half again to twice as much power as most newer single cpu systems.
 
Somebody would end up spending 50 grand on it. Seen the Xbox 360 auctions? People will think "Hey, bigger, better! *Bid 10,000$*."
 
rofl :lol: that auction was almost enough to make me go and buy 4 or 5 xbox 360s and take dremels to them. I understand the mods done to that one were done by the guys at llamma.com, but still... $10k? pfft. I'm in the wrong line of work. :lol:
 

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