Recent Posts

• Cracking HP SmartMemory: Unlocking Old HP Server’s True RAM Speed with an SPD Hack

  Sep 15, 2025 in Reverse Engineering

  For home lab enthusiasts, squeezing every last drop of performance out of affordable, second-hand enterprise gear is the name of the game. If you’ve ever built out a server with HP ProLiant Gen8 hardware, you’ve likely encountered a frustrating performance wall with your memory. You can populate one DIMM per channel (1DPC) and enjoy speedy DDR3-1866 ECC RAM. But the moment you add a second DIMM to a channel (2DPC) to expand your capacity, the system mysteriously downclocks all of it to 1600MT/s, add a third and you’re noodling along at DDR3-1066 or even 800MT/s.

• Deconstructing the Kunpeng 916: A Community-Driven Deep Dive

  Jul 10, 2025 in Hardware
  Some of the best stories in hardware start not in a corporate lab, but in a corner of the internet where enthusiasts gather. This is the story of how a Huawei/HiSilicon ARM server CPU was deconstructed, starting with a single message on Discord.

• coreboot on the MSI MS-6117 (Intel 440LX)

  Dec 25, 2023 in Firmware
  A project to port modern, open‑source firmware to the classic Intel 440LX chipset, focusing on the quirky MSI MS‑6117 Slot 1 motherboard.

• Coreboot-Retro

  May 25, 2023 in Software
  Coreboot-Retro is a personal project that revitalizes old hardware systems by adding support for them in the Coreboot mainline while modernizing their capabilities. By focusing on boards like the Shuttle AB61 (440BX) and the MS-5128 (430HX), Coreboot-Retro aims to reintegrate these historically significant boards with modern computing functions. With the goal of unlocking the potential of vintage systems, the project welcomes contributions from developers, hardware hackers, and retro computing enthusiasts. Visit the GitHub repository at https://github.com/rigred/coreboot-retro to explore the progress and get involved.

• Decoding the Mystery: Uncovering Missing Jumpers on a SiI0649 IDE Card Clone

  May 4, 2023 in Hardware
  Reverse engineering missing jumpers on a generic CMD-649 PCI IDE controller card.

• ATI FireGL 2 and 4 Drivers/BIOS

  Jul 5, 2022 in Software
  This documents the latest drivers for the ATI Fir GL2, aka SonicBlue as well as the installation procedures for them.

• Creating SoCat-57 Part 1

  Mar 31, 2022 in Hardware
  In this first article I will tell you how I came to creating a new printed circuit board for some old hardware, specifically a Socket 5-to-7 CPU power interposer and what that looks like.

• Overclock your Ryzen CPU from linux

  Mar 28, 2018 in Software
  Overclock your Ryzen CPU without the UEFI while running Linux, no proprietary tools needed.