Seems like I haven't wrote about the Raspberry Pi 3 and the unused motherboard that I picked up from work. Well, I knew I haven't written about the latter, but definitely didn't know about the former.
The Raspberry Pi 3 (which I'll probably call "Pi3") will be replacing the Pi2 in the 2(DrivePi), but I haven't done all the testing that I need to do... I've only done a bit of light testing before I set it aside and kind of forgot about it. (I was reminded of it again with an article that there's better Bluetooth drivers in an updated Raspbian, but I still forgot soon after that.)
I found a couple unused boards at work and after moving building, I was able to take a better look at them, one of them being an ATX (before the +12, and 24-pin ATX connector) AMD board, and the other being an LGA 775 board. I left the AMD board, since two pre-64 bit machines (Ziggy and the Vaio) is more than enough, and procured the LGA 775 board.
I kinda played around with it, but I don't really remember doing much besides trying to figure out if a graphics card worked or not... Which made things a bit screwy, causing me to set it all aside until recently.
My work computer died (also LGA 775 btw), and so I salvaged parts from it, since it seemed like replacing the bad power supply with a 3rd party wasn't doable. With the tinkering I did yesterday, I eventually tried the Pentium 4 530 and it was just dead, so whatever killed the power supply also killed the CPU.
I found out that the CPU that came with the board is a Pentium D 820 (and that I didn't kill it with trying that video card), and left it in there. While I can upgrade the motherboard with the last of the Pentium D line (965), it probably wouldn't be worth the money. I might grab another Pentium D 945 for it, but I think it's already bad enough that I've a Pentium 4 630 floating around. I will more than likely upgrade the ram from the 2 GB that I had in the Dell before the upgrade to the maximum of 4GB.
I also procured an unused case, which isn't really well built, but it will do for the motherboard and some spare components for now.
The other thing I did yesterday was upgrade the BIOS for that motherboard, since it had a custom splash screen (not sure if the BIOS options were any different), and that the reason for the updated BIOS was a problem that I was having. While the BIOS has it's own upgrade utility, it required a floppy drive, and while I did have one free from my work computer that died, it was really more of a matter of formatting a floppy disk properly and transferring the files onto it.
I did a lot of stuff and eventually gave into just using the Intel that I built for my parents to do what I needed to do, finding the floppy I was trying to use was bad. I was successful with another floppy disk (there's a lot...) and didn't have any problems updating the BIOS, though every time the writing progress paused for a second, my heart also stopped for a second.
So now the mobo has the latest BIOS without that custom splash screen. I'm not sure what I'm going to call it, but for now I'll just refer to it as "Pentium D 820". I'll eventually write it to the machine reference page, but probably not until I give it a name of some sort. I'll also get it a better heatsink/fan unit, but that'll be later as well.
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