Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

[Topcat]

This build was spawned off of another one I'm working on, and it left me this motherboard.....but I have a collection of enough old ass hardware, more than enough to make a pretty good retro rig anyway. If any of you old 90's gamers think back, you always got kidded and teased if you showed up at a LANfest with a case containing empty bays....and if you ran with the 'elites' of the 90's gamers, you got teased if your system contained any IDE optical or HDD's. You old 90's gamers also knew better than to show up with a 'store brand' system (gateway, dell, packard bell, etc)....and you REALLY knew better than to show up with a dual CPU board with only one processor installed!!! ...anyway, for all you youngins' that missed this glorious time, this one's for you!! In its day, people would have been creaming their jeans over this!

System specs:

Asus P2B-D w/ 2x 650MHz P3 CPU's
1gb SDRAM
Hercules 4000XT 64mb
Adaptec 2940U2W SCSI controller
SB16 audio
Plextor 40x CDROM, Plextor 8x2x20 CDRW, and Plextor 12x4x32 CDRW
Iomega Zip250
73gb 15,000RPM U160 SCSI HDD <-- Even today, I love listening to 15K drives spin up!

I know you are drooling!!



I dont know why the flash made the plastic look so yellow....it really isn't...



So far so good!!



Installing everyone's favorite OS!!



Up & running!



YAY for the resurrection of a pretty useless but very cool old system!

[SteveNielsen]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

That is pretty cool.

[diif]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

Plextors the best drives ever.

[goontron]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

73gb 15,000RPM U160 SCSI HDD <-- Even today, I love listening to 15K drives spin up!

I know you are drooling!!

I got two 6gbps 15k SAS disks on my desktop....

[kaboom]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

OC that bad boy- 700MHz should be easy!

"Let 'er rip, potato chip!"

[Topcat]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

I got two 6gbps 15k SAS disks on my desktop....

Never as cool as scsi....nice try though!

[goontron]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

Never as cool as scsi....nice try though!

*snickers*

[Topcat]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

^
The 146gb 15K cheetah SAS drives can be had pretty cheap. Never tried using them, dont know if they'd fit into my supermicro trays and line up with the backplane, and don't know if my LSI controller would like them either.

[stj]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

i'll take a 15k or even 10k scsi drive over an ssd any day.
i can write a sustained stream to the scsi much faster than ssd regardless of the marketing bullshit.

[Compgeke]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

You'd be surprised at how compatible those SCA drives are. I've used 10k 146 gig Seagates fine on old Macs (like my IIcx), just need to make sure it's terminated properly on older buses (all 16 bits terminated, not just lower 8).

i'll take a 15k or even 10k scsi drive over an ssd any day.
i can write a sustained stream to the scsi much faster than ssd regardless of the marketing bullshit.

It's the seek that makes a difference. There's a reason my laptop will still startup faster than the 7x 10k 146 gig SAS array I had. For pure read\write on large files the HDDs murder a SSD but for a bunch of small files the SSD is faster.

[TELVM]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

Nice retrocomp there Topcat.

... i can write a sustained stream to the scsi much faster than ssd regardless of the marketing bullshit.

... For pure read\write on large files the HDDs murder a SSD ...

With all due respect, do you really think any spinner can come even close to these sequential speeds?:

[CapLeaker]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

I remember those days... Sigh
I also remember running SCSI Ultra Wide on my computer. the bay's were full with drives and the scanner on SCSI too. The laser printer tha5 could do 12 pages per minute etc.
nice build topcat!

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

Installing everyone's favorite OS!!

eeeks i thought that would be win98 or win95 for a p3 machine but i guess winxp would do as well since its a dual proc machine and win9x dont work with multiple cpus or cores. mmm once again seeing good ol' stuff working again brings warm feelings to my heart!

[Topcat]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

eeeks i thought that would be win98 or win95 for a p3 machine but i guess winxp would do as well since its a dual proc machine and win9x dont work with multiple cpus or cores. mmm once again seeing good ol' stuff working again brings warm feelings to my heart!

I still havea copy of NT4 or win2k... Those would have been the choices for SMP systems in the 90's. XP is atleast still usable.... I thought about NT4, but drivers would probably be an issue even for old hardware like that.

[Compgeke]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

With all due respect, do you really think any spinner can come even close to these sequential speeds?

If I could get my hands on 12 or so 15k 6 Gb/s SAS drives it'd not be much of an issue. It'd draw more power but unlike your SSD I could lay them flat on a table with some extension cables and place a griddle on 'em and cook breakfast.

[goontron]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

If I could get my hands on 12 or so 15k 6 Gb/s SAS drives it'd not be much of an issue. It'd draw more power but unlike your SSD I could lay them flat on a table with some extension cables and place a griddle on 'em and cook breakfast.

You would go deaf... I know, mine are 1.3ft from my right ear!

[ddscentral]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

Good old times...
My first system had a 300 Mhz Celeron, 32 MB of RAM (later upgraded 64 MB), S3 Trio3D 4MB AGP video card and (IIRC) a Seagate 3.2 GB HDD.
Still have the CPU somewhere.

I still use an old 1 Ghz P3 desktop as my home server (with PCI USB 2.0 and Intel Gigabit LAN cards to make it slightly more modern).

[eccerr0r]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

I had a dual 300MHz Celeron-A machine, one was a slot-1 and the other was PPGA in a slotket. Both overclocked to 464MHz, alas I only had one stick or possibly two sticks of 128MB SDRAM in the 4 slot 440BX board. I forgot what video card I had at the time, probably the Matrox PCI board.

At the time I made my record Linux kernel compile, somewhere over a minute IIRC. Came a long way since my first 5 hour kernel compile.

I was running that for a while until one of the processors fried (it was overvolted to make it overclock) and I was back down to one CPU. I then stuck in a 1200MHz celeron to swap out that remaining celeron (could not get the 300MHz celeron to run with the 1200MHz celeron...).

Now the whole machine is parted and on the shelf.

And my i7 struggles to hit 2 minute kernel compiles after immense Linux kernel bloat...

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

I still havea copy of NT4 or win2k... Those would have been the choices for SMP systems in the 90's. XP is atleast still usable.... I thought about NT4, but drivers would probably be an issue even for old hardware like that.

but nt4 and win2k only came out in the mid and late 90s respectively. nt4 came out in 1996. win2k in the year 1999-2000. prior to that, did earlier versions of nt like 3.1, 3.5 and 3.51 support multiple cores/cpus? or did u have to go unix/linux for multi-cpu support?

cuz i dont imagine mocking someone with a dual cpu board that had only one cpu installed is valid if mainstream operating systems of the time had only single cpu support and games would only work with mainstream oses and not server grade oses. tho u could always dual boot...

Good old times... My first system had a 300 Mhz Celeron

I had a dual 300MHz Celeron-A machine, one was a slot-1 and the other was PPGA in a slotket. Both overclocked to 464MHz

ah yes, the good ol' 300 mhz celeron-a. one of the best and most overclockable processors ever made. ezy-peazy 50% overclock to at least 450mhz guaranteed. that cpu along with the core 2 duo e4300 will live on as some of the best overclockable cpus ever made!

I was running that for a while until one of the processors fried (it was overvolted to make it overclock) and I was back down to one CPU.

oh no! hate it when good ol' stuff kicks the bucket like that. didnt u try to use a better (and possibly oversized) cooler? that is essential when overclocking esp. if u overvolt. or did the thermal paste dry up or the cpu fan seize without u knowing? i had a video card fan seize without me knowing it for a while until i realised it and fixed it. but it was too late. card only lasted a few months thereafter. bye bye aiw radeon 9800 pro...

[Topcat]

Re: Some "Vintage Iron" for you older PC guys

but nt4 and win2k only came out in the mid and late 90s respectively. nt4 came out in 1996.

I know....when I originally built this, it was 1998~1999 or so. NT4 was its original OS. I twas later changed to win2k. By the time XP came out, it was long since upgraded. This was my first dual CPU board. That aside, I ran NT4 since its birth, I skipped the whole Win9x/ME era on my personal stuff.

On a side note....I love quality!! See the country of origin & date, bearing in mind that all these drives are still operational!