SGI: Hardware

I bought a dual R12k 300mhz octane processor about 10 years ago, it was stupidly cheap. It's been sat on the shelf ever since. About 6 months ago it got damaged when it got dropped, my own stupid fault. There is a small region on the corner of the main PCB which is damaged as shown in the picture.

I recently aquired an octane with a dual R10k 195MHz processor and wondered if it was worth trying the damaged one, or is there a strong chance I would damage the rest of the system.

Do I just cut my losses and bin the damaged item?

Cheers, Adam

remove that chipped edge or bend it right and try it out.
these modules are ridiculously robust. the worst thing that could happen is octane not starting at all.

Geoman wrote: remove that chipped edge or bend it right and try it out.
these modules are ridiculously robust. the worst thing that could happen is octane not starting at all.

Thanks for the advice. Wasn't really able to clean it up, even bent PCB is pretty hard. Plugged it in and all powered up and reported in hinv. So looks like it is working. Thanks once again.

Regards, Adam

As long as none of the surface mount components or traces are damaged it should work fine. Your Octane will thank you for giving it more CPU power. I know mine does.

it could be a source of long term unreliability, since PCBs have internal power and ground planes. if the bent piece shifts it could short them together.

robespierre wrote: it could be a source of long term unreliability, since PCBs have internal power and ground planes. if the bent piece shifts it could short them together.

Do you know the pinout for these modules? Checking for shorts across all the bypass caps as a last resort would be a good test as well. Or throw it in a junk machine first to see what happens. I would think there would be polyfuses / PTC breakers if not on the IP30 at least on the frontplane I would normally suggest you are a worry-wart but the smashed piece is dangerously close to that (probably for power) connector.

A clean snip using a dremel with a cut-off wheel is probably the safest fix.

It's been a long time since I did the overclocking thing, but as I remember the cpu boards from the 195 through the 300 were the same. 175 was different and 360 was different but in between, I think the boards were all the same. I believe you can put the 300 mhz chips into a 195 mhz module and just change a few resistors.*

Visual inspection time ....

* Unfortunately all those photos are gone from Nekochan because they were hosted off-site Shoulda caught that error in the first place

hamei wrote: It's been a long time since I did the overclocking thing, but as I remember the cpu boards from the 195 through the 300 were the same. 175 was different and 360 was different but in between, I think the boards were all the same. I believe you can put the 300 mhz chips into a 195 mhz module and just change a few resistors.*

Visual inspection time ....

* Unfortunately all those photos are gone from Nekochan because they were hosted off-site Shoulda caught that error in the first place

Excluding the cache chips (different speeds/sizes) and the SEPROM with the setup code. Also you need to keep track of different voltage requirements - 195 was first-gen, 300 used lower voltage core.

But they do use the same socket.