Intel Xeon 3.2Ghz (Nocona) delid

Time for something that I have not seen yet. This is a socket 604 chip that has been a paperweight for quite some time now.
Before:

After:

Just like the 775 chips of the day, this one was soldered together.

Celeron D 775 delid

I figured I would destroy the chip in this case but just for kicks...

Pentium 4 S478 delid

In my scrap chips I found an old 2.6ghz 800fsb Northwood P4 that looked like it could do without the lid...

Athlon 64 3200+ delid

This has been done plenty of times before, but I thought I'd put my example on here.

Intel Xeon 1.8Ghz (Prestonia) Disassembled

Since these CPU's have been obsolete for quite some time now I don't feel bad about sending one to its grave a tad faster. This one in particular was already damaged so I would not consider using it again anyway...

Here is the specimen. As you can see one of the resistors broke off from the bottom of the PCB. After baking in the oven for about 12 min. and a gentle love tap, this is what you get:

Now I was curious how the top portion compared to a regular S478 Pentium 4, so I put the Xeon top next to a 2.6Ghz (Northwood, 800fsb) P4. This is how they match up:

So there you have it. The Xeon tops are close but are actually more like a mobile S479 from the bottom. So this is completely useless in the present day, but if anyone ever wondered about this about a decade ago, there you have it!

Helpful site for bios issues

http://www.rom.by/

Sunfire X2100 1u server bios...

Since Oracle took over Sun Microsystems (RIP) they have locked down support for the older hardware. I was just looking for updated bios firmware for my X2100 server, but sadly I could not get anything. Since the server was having dreaded usb issues (look up issues with bios 1.0 on x2100...) the system was of no use to me unless I could fix the firmware. I found this: http://www.tyan.com/product_board_detail.aspx?pid=85 -it looks like it's the same mainboard so I decided to force flash the bios with one for this tyan board. I used http://www.rom.by/UniflashRE/uniflash2.0b05.zip to force the new bios onto the board. I was surprised by how well it worked actually. There are a couple of issues: sound shows up under bios along with a couple other things that should not be there and the #1 lan port is dead. But other than that it seems to work just fine. The system boots faster now as well. I experimented with CentOS 6.5 x64, and the latest version of openmediavault (as of 24JAN14). So if anyone reading this has an old useless X2100 laying around, there might be hope for it. Good luck!