IBM ThinkCentre M51-8143 inquiry

[Marin85]

Hi there,

Looking for an old rig to make a small home server/universal PC, I got a deal at the local resellers for a second hand IBM ThinkCenter M51-8143 (desktop only) for about 130$. So, before purchasing, I decided to make a small inquiry about that old beast to see if it has the features to fit my needs.

1) What is the reputation of these machines? Can I have reasonable expectations that it will be well reliable provided the machine had not been abused in the past (e.g. no overclocking or overvolting)? Are these machines known for any particular type of specific failures (e.g. failure of the on-board gpu, cpu overheating, bad RAM slots etc.)?

2) The specs given by the reseller say 4 SATA, which, after some research of the official specs of the machine, I understand as 4 SATA (-150) connectors. Does that mean that there is space for 4 HDDs in there? (That would be really great as it will solve all my storage problems without needing an external storage solution.)

3) The model has 4 RAM slots. However, specs state that its max amount of memory is 4 GB. Does that mean that even if I put 4 x 2 GB modules, only the half of them will be recognized by the system (even with 4+ GB -capable OS)?

4) Again according to the specs, the beast has full-height PCI-E x16 slot, which sounds really promising as I´d like to put one of the more recent, not necessarily the most powerful, nVidia cards in there, mostly for CUDA stuff. However, I am slightly concerned about power consumption, voltage and heat dissipation. Also, would there be any other limitations for the video card like BIOS whitelist? Any insights/advices/suggestions here are highly appreciated!

5) The System has a Pentium 4 HT 3.2 GHz Socket 775 Prescott. Unfortunately, I don´t know anything more about the cpu. I am curious, though, if it supports x64. The Pentium 4 generation is quite messy regarding x64 support: wiki lists some Prescotts as having x64 support, others not. Does anyone know if the machines in question ever came in configuration with a x64-capable cpu?

BTW, the idea behind this project is actually to bring the most out of the cheapest possible rig (which by definition does not make any sense anyway)

Thanks in advance,
Marin

[lead_org]

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-58505

according to the Lenovo website your system supports the pentium 4 640, which is 64 bit OS compatible as per intel spec.

http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=27480

[Marin85]

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-58505

according to the Lenovo website your system supports the pentium 4 640, which is 64 bit OS compatible as per intel spec.

http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=27480

Thanks for the info! I had already seen the Lenovo specs website, but I could not figure out the 64bit support from wiki