IBM Netfinity 3000
When I was about the purchase this machine there was little or no information to
be found on the web about this particular machine. With this page I intend to fill
that void.
Front:
Back:
Inside:
1. Hardware
The IBM Netfinity 3000 was built upon one the most rock solid chipsets ever built.
The legendary Intel i440BX, which provides AGP/PCI/ISA/IDE/USB support.
1.1. Processor
An Intel Pentium III provides a strong CPU. It's a normal Pentium III with 256KB
cache. It's cooled by a reasonably large heatsink. It's rated PR776 (estimate).
- Dhrystone ALU = 2215 MIPS
- Whetstone FPU = 0858 MFLOPS
1.2. Memory
The box I bought has 256MB of Toshiba pc100 ECC SDRAM. Which ofcourse was IBM branded.
1.3. VGA
Being a server, allows the Netfinity to do just fine with a mediocre display
adapter. It has a S3 Trio 64 3D onboard. Along with a whoping 4MB of Video RAM.
1.4. SCSI
SCSI facilities are present in this IBM machine. They are provided by a popular
Adaptec PCI card (which ofcourse is IBM branded). IBM included a Adaptec 2490U2B
scsi card. Providing a 80MB/sec transfer rate. With both one external and one
internal SCSI3 connector of the 68 pins variety.
1.5. Ethernet
The Netfinity has a Intel PRO 10/100 interface onboard. Powered by the Intel i82557
chip. It's a fine ethernet card, with great support on almost any operating system.
1.6. Sound
IBM provides sound still through it's ISA bus. On which you can find a
Crystal Sound 4248 card. Nothing fancy, but it's Windows Sound System compatible.
1.7. Harddisk
IBM used one of it's own harddisk drives. It has an IBM UltraStar 18ES (LVD). It
spins at 7200rpm and along with it's 2MB cache, it provides the user with
a 18MB/sec sustained throughput. The drive has an accesstime of 7ms.
1.8. CD-ROM
The Netfinity is equiped with a very silent CD-ROM drive supplied by LG. The
CRD-8400B is a 40X drive. Sadly it might be one of those drives with buggy
firmware. I haven't been able to determine this for certain.
errata.
1.9. Power Supply
It's literally powered by a 330W AcBel power supply.
2. Software
2.1 PC Doctor
IBM has licensed a great diagnostic utility called PC Doctor. It can be downloaded
from the IBM website
here.
3. Operating Systems
OpenBSD 3.5 dmesg
ToaLinux 3.0 (u2) dmesg
Solaris 9 x86 (04/04) dmesg
Gentoo Linux 2004.1 dmesg
SuSE Linux 9.1 Personal dmesg
Gentoo Hardened Linux 2004.2 dmesg