Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

Geforce fx5500 256mb PCI cards are a dime a dozen....can be had all day long for under 30 bucks shipped...

The Matrox Millennium does keep it period-specific though....

Those could choke, even with just browsing, sadly. Even though I don't expect it to hurl chunks like the Matrox Millennium does. No guarantee that they are much better. They are just higher-clocked FX5200s, IIRC. I was thinking 6-series or 7-series. If they can come in old-PCI form.

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

Geforce fx5500 256mb PCI cards are a dime a dozen....can be had all day long for under 30 bucks shipped...

The Matrox Millennium does keep it period-specific though....

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

Gee, at that point, even a Radeon HD 5450 or any from near that period with a legacy-PCI variant, could be a star! Wouldn't be surprised if Windows 2000 was still supported at the time of that GPU model.

Actually, I would try to see if there's a legacy-PCI GeForce 9 series or get one from before that generation and of course, check for shit caps...

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

I still have an old dual ppro board but its RTC battery died (one of those silly Dallas Semiconductor crap that are forced obsolescence because it was soldered; "was" is a key word...) The VRMs are on-board. Alas the board has 8 72-pin SIMM slots which makes it useless for me as there's no way for me to get to that 1GB sweet spot...
4PCI 3ISA (1 shared). It even has headers for USB-1 which is surprising...

Oh well.

Send it to me.....I'll make something of it.

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

First post from it. I originally inteded to install NT4, but for some reason the SCSI HDD on the Adaptec 2940U2W wasn't being seen when loading the driver, but it was fine in win2k... I remember vaguely having these issues with newer (at the time) SCSI controllers from installs done from the original media (pre SP1). I'll have to do a slipstream of SP6 and try again.

Win2k runs decent, but this system would shine with NT4...but the upside of W2K is working USB! The GPU kills it more than anything, but it is stable. Running FF12, which really makes that GPU hurl chunks!!

Anyway, a few more pics:







I may have to hunt down a better GPU, because this is just the beginning & testing phase for what will probably end up coming of this board/build!

[CapLeaker]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

I remember building a dual CPU Pentium Pro machine for a friend of mine back in the 90's. Cool stuff. Nice to see one again!

[eccerr0r]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

I still have an old dual ppro board but its RTC battery died (one of those silly Dallas Semiconductor crap that are forced obsolescence because it was soldered; "was" is a key word...) The VRMs are on-board. Alas the board has 8 72-pin SIMM slots which makes it useless for me as there's no way for me to get to that 1GB sweet spot...
4PCI 3ISA (1 shared). It even has headers for USB-1 which is surprising...

Oh well.

[ratdude747]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

THANK YOU RATDUDE!!! VRM saved the day! These are nearly impossible to find nowadays!

You are very welcome.

[Topcat]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

aaaand what are you possibly going to use these for?

Like most vintage builds......nostalgia, retro games, and/or just for the fun of the build!

[Uranium-235]

Re: Topcat's Weird Pentium Pro Builds

aaaand what are you possibly going to use these for?

[Topcat]

No vintage pentium classic era collection is complete without a Pentium Pro system, well this thread is a 2-fer build....

Both builds are keeping true to my form, they are nothing less than dual CPU's. I picked up motherboard one (Intel PR440FX) from a local junk pile. This find was completely inadvertent....I wasn't even remotely looking for anything like this, it just happen to be there...'new old stock', and untested. I bought a pair of 200MHz 512k CPU's & 512mb parity/buffered ECC EDO DIMM's to test it....the board was good...but there was a problem.... A VRM was needed in order to run a second CPU.....and this is where it gets good!! Remember that unrepairable Intel dual P2 board Ratdude gave me? Well, I bilked the voltage regulator chip off one of the VRM's for THIS BUILD...but there was one left....this unrepairable board has now saved 2 other boards through the repurposing of its parts!! The VRM's are built by Delta, and I spec'd them out.....and hot damn, they're the right ones!

Build 2's P-Pro board was found cheap on ebay when scouting out CPU's. This one is a MSI MS-6107, dual socket8. I haven't received it yet....but it was shown working. The Dallas realtime clock is said to be bad, typical of old hardware of this era.

This will serve as an ongoing build thread, as these are low priority builds.....but Houston, we have liftoff!!

The board with its 2x new old stock coolers, still in the packages.



THANK YOU RATDUDE!!! VRM saved the day! These are nearly impossible to find nowadays!



YAY, it post's! 200MHz? hmmm....we'll see about that....back to this in a minute....



GPU is a Matrox Millennium that I bought new back in 1996 or so... 2mb with the 6mb upgrade, or maybe 4mb with 4mb upgrade....I'm not real sure, but its 8mb total.



Now we're cookin', mega overclock @ 233!!



Updated the BIOS, Intel still had it on their site. Tested everything, no problems!


That's as far as I got with this today....