I have to say thanks to mickrussom because he gave me the heads up/answer as to WHY our Supermicro PDSMI+ system wasn’t working. Turns out the Intel 3000 north bridge ONLY supports up to 1066MHZ FSB speeds, despite the specifications on Supermicro‘s site clearly claiming “Supports a Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® 3000 Series processor” — Their emphasis, not mine, without any caveats or mentions of “with FSB Speeds of up to 1066MHZ.” That’s pretty silly in and of itself to me, yes i should’ve read it closer, but seriously, whatever happened to underclocking in the face of this sort of a failure? I know it’s more difficult to engineer, and since it’s not working, clearly the CPU controls the clock on the FSB, or, someone is incredibly lazy and when it sees an unknown CPU Identification info just doesn’t come up at all instead of pinning the bus to the lowest possible speed (which in theory should be safe for any CPU) and maybe letting the user figure it out.

Thanks again mickrussom for the heads up. Ordered a CPU that will stand a much better chance of working now.

[Editing note: 20231030 Migration to Hugo means the all old comments section are gone, mickrussom above refers to a DotBlag Wordpress user]