Compaq Professional Workstation AP550

This must have been quite a machine when it was new in 2000. It's got a dual slot 1 motherboard (which I've upgraded from a single Pentium 3 866 to dual 1GHz Pentium 3 CPUs (with 133MHz FSB)), four RDRAM slots (upgraded from 256MB to the full 2GB) and two 10,000 RPM Ultra 160 SCSI 36GB hard drives (upgraded from a single 9GB HDD). The graphics card is the original dual head Matrox G400 16MB AGP card. Mostly my 2000-era dream spec. :-)

I was unable to find CPUs with the correct heatsinks, or the heatsinks on their own, for a sane price. Almost noone has them, one company in the States offered me some for a "special" price of $230 each, and there are some on ebay for an even higher price. I ended up buying kits for the Proliant DL380 G1 rackmount servers and modifying the heatsinks to fit the PC, with 3 CPUs (one as a spare) and 3 voltage regulators (part of the bundle), and transatlantic shipping, costing less than the unit price of a single CPU with the correct heatsink. Details of the modifications to the heatsinks can be found here.

Inside the workstation before the upgrades.

Just look at the heatsink on that Slot 1 Pentium 3. This is the original CPU and heatsink.

And now with more CPUs and RAM :-D

A close up with the new CPUs and the additional VRM needed for the second CPU. Part 329267-001 is the original option part, but I couldn't get one. Part 327563-001 didn't work, but 155681-001 works fine.

Showing both CPUs working

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