Gateway DX4870 Where can I find a motherboard manual for Acer IPIMB-AR?

AMRoberts

Hello,

I have been given a Gateway DX4870, and I'm trying to evaluate whether to build a DIY home NAS/server from the machine. Booting from a Linux liveUSB distro I was able to determine the motherboard is currently populated with a Core I3 2120 (Sandy Bridge), and 6GB of DRAM. With the cover removed I see an Acer IPIMB-AR, Rev 1.02A motherboard.

Can anyone point me to the location for a motherboard manual and any firmware support (drivers)? If I use the motherboard I'll consider upgrading to an Ivy Bridge CPU (available used at low cost, better performance and lower power consumption are possible), and would like to know limits on DRAM, whether there is a BIOS upgrade available, etc. From the color-coding on the SATA ports I speculate that most of them are the older speed (SATAII?), I could address that with a PCI SATA adapter but that might (likely?) bring me back into BIOS support issues.

Thanks,
Alan

[Edited the thread to add model name to the title]

billsey

Service manuals aren't publicly available for Acer products. Very likely it will only support Ivy Bridge CPUs, not Sandy Bridge. All drivers and BIOS updates are kept on the Gateway support site, but if the model is old enough they do remove them. In that case you have to look for third party downloads.

AMRoberts

Thanks billsey. FWIW the machine was sold with a Sandy Bridge P3, I was contemplating changing out for an Ivy Bridge P3 to drop the power consumption, but from some further digging in the older Intel docs I'm not convinced that it would make a big difference.

I checked the Gateway support site as you suggested, only a BIOS update that might have applied only for machines shipped with Win8 (sticker on my gift says Win7). Without any user manual/motherboard docs about supported parts it would be flying blind to try for memory or CPU upgrades.

I think a better use of my time would be one of the modern mATX or ITX motherboards with a bunch of SATA ports on the board and documented specs for memory parts, PCIe slots and such. Might keep the case and try the power supply.

Cheers,
Alan

billsey

Yeah, some Google searches trend toward those only shipping with Ivy Bridge and likely DDR3 1600 memory. The BIOS updates were right in the move from legacy boot environments to UEFI, so just dealt with that. UEFI was supported in Windows 7 sp1 and required by Windows 8. If I were building using a modern mATX motherboard, I'd look for an M.2 slot for NVMe SSD and only secondarily for SATA.