Thank goodness for eBay. I’m still rocking Socket 939-era hardware on both my desktop and Kate’s desktop, which unfortunately means that new motherboards are simply not available at reasonable prices anymore – so my only option for a replacement motherboard was eBay. Under $30 shipped for a decent AsRock board, the 939SLI32 or whatever they call it, it’s some strange ‘bridge’ board which can have an optional daughtercard installed to use a Socket AM2 / DDR2 setup instead of Socket 939 / DDR. It’s also ULi’s last chipset prior to being bought out by nVidia, and it apparently features some ‘unofficial’ SLi implementation that’s probably not very well supported these days.
Amusingly enough, though, it’s a solid overclocker, even moreso than the board it replaced (DFI Lanparty NF4 Ultra-D) was. With no other changes I now have the CPU running on a 280MHz FSB – 2.5GHz clock, putting it roughly on par with an Athlon64 5000+. It would only do 270MHz on the DFI. Not bad for an old server chip.
The old motherboard was definitely the problem, but by no fault of its own. I had to replace the chipset fan once a few years ago because the factory one got noisy – apparently I didn’t make sure the pins were still secure since one failed and the heatsink lifted clear of the chipset with no warning. It’s toast.
Now, if I could only figure out why Folding@Home stopped running on my webserver for no good reason…