Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 10
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Kernel (uname -r):
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2.6.25-2-686
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Distribution:
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Debian Lenny (5.0)
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This motherboard was in a computer that was being discarded. I picked it up so I could use it and a Celeron 900 (Coppermine) found in another dead motherboard to make a MythTV frontend. The motherboard originally had a PPGA Celeron 533 Mendocino in it but handled the Celeron 900 fine after flashing to the latest (6/22/2001) BIOS. You will need to use an FC-PGA heatsink to use FC-PGA processors as PPGA Celeron heatsinks do not seat properly on FC-PGA processors. There are five capacitors and an inductor right next to the socket in this board, so you need to get a heatsink that does not stick out beyond the edges of the socket. I used an Antec 60 mm 370/A heatsink and it was just small enough to work. There is *no* fan speed control on the MX3W, so the heatsink fan runs at 4500-5500 rpm unless you use an external fan speed controller like I did to reduce the fan RPM down to reasonable levels. There is no onboard NIC nor TV-out ports, so I added a PCI NIC and a PCI GPU and both work well. You will need to tell the BIOS to init the PCI GPU before the onboard graphics to make the PCI GPU work, though. The board does overclock a little bit and my Celeron 900 is running at 990 MHz, being limited by the fact that the PC100 SDRAM doesn't like to run over about 112 MHz speed and there is no PC66 memory strap in the BIOS.
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