E800 Modding

[Tormod Hall]

A few months back I obtained an E800 netserver from my place of work after it had been scrapped, and took it home as a project. I was delighted when the only reason for it's failure had been a suicide PSU. I ripped a spare out of an old PC box and it worked fine.

Recently I tried upping my CPU from one 933 to two 1gb coppermines and I suffered blank screen instead of start page. I had used a suspect heatsink on CPU2 and believed this to be the problem. After replacing this with a pukka one it now recognised the additional CPU but it froze after symbios check, during OS startup.

I thought I'd try a different tack in my search for improved performance and added another 512mb RAM to the miserly 256mb that was on board. Same problem, freezing on OS startup.

After exhaustive seaching for workarounds with regard to the CPU and RAM problems I took the liberty of taking out the PSU and checking the specs. It was 100W with tiny amp ratings.
Upon replacing this with a 350W unit both CPU's work fine and the RAM does what it's supposed to do.

I'm now looking at 3 more 512s to bring it up to max with a probable high end graphics card to complete the equation.

One of the biggest draws of the E800 as a personal computer is the access speeds to the hard drives. I find it outperforms much more modern and powerful home computers with ease.
I'm very pleased with it and if anyone can recommend further mods to enhance my pleasure I would be extremely grateful.

Would it not be possible for someone to customise the BIOS to allow for greater CPU capabilities? I only ask because this model is now considered to be "legacy" and such tweaks would not be treading on any copyright/guarantee toes. At least I think not..?
Anyone?

[Tormod Hall]

Update from yesterday, although I thought the RAM was being utilised, it was not pushed home and I still only had the 256mb showing on BIOS and within XP (pro). After putting it in place I still had the freeze, but this time directly after RAM test which scored ok for all MBs on board. I had used slot 0 for the 512mb and the other 2 128mbs were in 1 and 2 (As instructed by the E800 Manual, ie largest stick in lowest slot). After swapping them around to 0 and 1 for the 128s and 2 for the 512 I can now get to the OS startup point but just get blackscreen. I read somewhere that the hard drive may have a problem with new RAM. Is this possible? And if so is there a workaround/solution? I am using 2 18.2GB HP scsi drives. MAN3184MP and C 68-F512 being the identifiers.
Much thanks in anticipation of assistance..
Oh, I just bought a new 147GB Ultra320 SCSI Maxtor hard drive on the net, so I'll try to get it work this way.