I’ve always wanted an L1N64. With GPGPU computing finally coming of age with the ubiquitization of OpenCL, now would be a brilliant time to happen upon a deal on such a board, with support for upto 4 graphics cards, wouldn’t it?
Well, I guess I’m very fortunate! For a little over £30 (inc. P&P), a lovely eBayer has handed me an ‘untested’ L1N64 SLI-WS complete with 2 Athlon 64 FX-70s and a smattering of accessories. Worst case scenario, I thought, would be if everything was broken, in which case I could at the very least use one of the CPU backplates on my Arima board.
Seeing as the L1N64 was mainly an overclocking platform, I was a little afraid I’d find overvolted-to-death CPUs and numerous burned MOSFETs – basically, a complete lack of magic smoke. Imagine my glee when I found no visible defects on the board, apart from plenty of dust. I apologize in advance for the terrible-quality photos:
As you can (perhaps not) see, the board is revision 1.01G, with a soldered BIOS chip, which may need rectifying with my planned move to quad-cores… Apart from that, all seems well, until we remove the CPUs…
Ah. Bent pins. Bent pins galore. And a cat hair. Believe it or not, this actually made me happy. Not because I love cats, but because none of the pins are actually broken, and with a bit of scalpel-aided provocation, they should fall neatly back into line. This also suggests that the system in which the board and CPUs were used probably did not suffer instant, inexplicable stop-working-ness, but rather simply wasn’t put together well in the first place.
In conclusion, then, I have in my hands a board I’ve always wanted, but never thought I could actually afford, and it might even work! On the other hand, I don’t have the time to repair it. Nor do I have a spare case, or power supply, except back at home in another city. I guess this project will have to wait until the summer, then. In the meantime, I’ve removed one of the CPU backplates and mounted it onto the Arima board – that’s a project which shouldn’t take too long to complete at all, and hopefully is going to end up being pretty awesome in its own right.
The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that this means I now have 3 Socket F systems in various stages of completion. That’s a potential 20 cores and 7 graphics cards of number-crunching power. Since joining WCG, I haven’t really been devoting any machines to the effort. I hope that will change soon as soon as these systems are up and running.
