when Ritsuko times out

Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

WARNING: THIS POST MAY CAUSE PREMATURE EJACULATION (this is for you rollchan)


030-1467-001: newer motherboard for Octane, supports up to 8GBs of RAM and VPro Odyssey graphics. Despite what the Octane owner’s guide said, this is the new motherboard, and I saw some double-sided DIMMs so it must be capable of up to 8GB.

Guess which one’s the CPU The white thing just below the heatsink is the CPU connector… yeah, a connector for the CPU. That’s cool enough. You can also see the CPU connector on the other side of the MB. If you’re wondering, there are no electrical traces on any of the boards I saw. I guess they’re sandwiched inside the PCB, because the PCB is seriously fucking thick. And not just for the motherboard. EDIT: Also, I just realized while looking at PC motherboard reviews: there are no solid cap capacitors. No electrolyte capacitors either. Monolithic ceramic capacitors (the tiny square things) are the rule here, which are said to be even better than solid caps. Remember, this is way before every motherboard manufacturer even thought of using solid caps on their high end products.

The infamous IBM compression connectors (for their flakiness when touched by humans), plus the little things beside them for the goldfingers on the XIO boards. Up to four XIO boards can be fitted into an Octane. You want more? Get an Origin 200 and GIGACHANNEL.

On the motherboard’s side.

ESI/SE graphics board with 13W3 and stereo output. An SSI/MXI or ESSI/EMXI would occupy both A and D.

Some dusty chips, and the texture module connectors (the black bars). The texture modules have their own heatsink, are 2x the price of this SE board, and use Rambus DRAM. That’s right, before Intel even heard of RDRAM. But I don’t have any texture modules.

Cheap camera fails at artistic angles.

The hardest part about disassembling the Octane was putting it back together. I’m never going to do it again, I spent an hour pulling out the modules and jamming them back in. Then I had to worry about whether I did touch those compression connectors, and on top of that, they never seemed to go in the right way until after at least 50 tries. It’s seriously hard to put together. That’s probably one drawback compared to PCs.

Not only does my camera suck at close distance, the monitor also sucks. Yeah, I’m still stuck with that blurry CRT. Here’s what it’s supposed to say:

And I got it from here.

Sirens. You know what that means. Time for me to get eccentric. Catch you all again, sometime, somewhere.