A little story about my first x86_64 Foresight test box. We have been in the need for some test hardware and a very generous Foresight team member offered to donate almost an entire box, CPU, motherboard, RAM, Hard drive, and a video card. Just missing a case and power supply. He even shipped it to me (Thanks Paul).
After receiving the hardware, I rushed out to purchase the cheapest case and power supply combo I could fine and get started. After installing all the components, and getting it powered up, I ran into a problem getting it to boot. Upon further inspection, there was a bit of damage on the edge of the board… I assume shipping injury.
This damage was enough that it couldn’t detect the fan attached which was telling it to shutdown. Not desirable. The CPU was a socket 754, as I started to hunt for a cheap motherboard for the CPU, Michael Johnson piped up and offered a socket 939 motherboard he had laying around and Michael Tharp offerred a socket 939 CPU and compatible memory… oh the generousity…
We got it all assembled using the video card and disk that came with the board Paul donated. Seemed to work well… even got the first Foresight x86_64 install on it and left it to run over the weekend. Monday morning I can in and started to dive into testing things on it…. and got quite a surprise.
Let me start by explaining a little about the case I bought, it had a clear plastic side with a fan mounted in the middle of it. This both gave me a great view of the internals as well as venting right next to my chair.
Now for the surprise… I was suddenly surrounded with smoke, looked down and it was being blown right at me from that fan mounted on the side of the case. Behind that fancy clear plastic I saw flames! Yes… Foresight was so hot… it went up in smoke 🙂
Turns out the video card shorted which caused a small fire… below are some pictures.
For more good news… Michael Tharp might be donating a replacement socket 939 board… and someone else gave me a socket 754 board… so I almost have the makings for 2 x86_64 test boxes…. and even more great news… Brett Adam has ordered a brand new dell x86_64 test box as a donation to the Foresight Project… Thanks Brett!
