I have an old pentium 3 motherboard with completely corroded traces, but perfectly fine otherwise. Is there a way I could design a new mother board, and use that instead of something on eBay.
It’s absolutely possible but most certainly not practical or cost effective. If your old P3 is worth saving, just spend the money on an existing board.
-Bill
The only reason I bring it up is just for a fun project. But if I want to where would I get started, like are there some schematics or something?
Motherboard schematics of commercial designs aren’t typically shared. You could start by getting the part numbers off of every IC on your existing board and start looking at all the signals that need to be connected together and how they work. Start with a pencil drawing of all the interconnects just between the processor and Northbridge IC and you’ll start to see why this isn’t practical for an individual that doesn’t do this for a living.
If your intent is to recycle parts from your original board, you will also have to consider how you will remove, re-ball, reinstall, and inspect all the BGA components on the board. This generally requires specialized equipment.
Obviously there’s more to it but that’s just a peek into how large of an undertaking motherboard design is.
-Bill
Oh, I see now. I didn’t realize how challenging this would be. Thank you
You can find refurbished computers for a $100-$200 that can run Linux. You could get a Raspberry Pi 8GB for $100 and put Ubuntu 20.04.2 on it. It isn’t worth messing with anything older than 5 years old in hardware. I picked up a HP DL360e Gen8 server for $1000 with dual Intel 6 core Xeons. I put VMWare 6 standalone which is free on the SD card and used the drives for data stores to run my Linux servers at home. I have 8 Ubuntu and a Kali server on it.