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Retro-clocking corner: Dual Pentium Pro, Black Edition (lol)

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3line

Member
Joined
Jun 4, 2004
A few of you may remember my earlier retro-computing project, in which I resurrected and upgraded my old Pentium 75 to a K6-III 400. You can find that old thread here:

http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=616289

This is a project that has been in the making for a couple of years now. I've been been collecting bits and pieces of it from ebay and from surplus, and now I can finally put it all together.

Pentium Pros. A lot of younger folks here don't remember them. They were introduced in 1995 clocked at 150mhz with a massive (for the time) L2 of 256k full-speed cache. By the end of the processor's production cycle, they were up to 200mhz and 1mb. Unfortunately, the processor was ahead of the market, being optimized for 32-bit applications when the industry was just beginning to transition out of 16-bit. Since it ran 16-bit applications slower than its Pentium predecessor, it never caught on as a desktop chip. It was never quite popular with the workstation crowd either, though its unique capabilities found a niche with servers. Furthermore, the Pentium Pro was a very complex chip, which led to high production costs and low yields.

A bit of trivia: The Pentium Pro has more gold in it than any microprocessor ever made, which makes it particularly attractive for scrap metal recovery. Many, if not most of the PPros you see on ebay are defunct chips for scrap.

However, the Pentium Pro is a significant piece of computing history, with its massive cache and 4-way SMP capabilities. Its architecture led directly to the PII/III series, which subsequently influenced all of Intel's later designs. As noted in wikipedia, "The Pentium Pro microarchitecture was used in one form or another by Intel for more than a decade. The pipeline would scale from its initial 150 MHz start, all the way up to 1.4 GHz with the "Tualatin" Pentium III. The design's various traits would continue after that in the derivative core called "Banias" in Pentium M and Intel Core (Yonah), which itself would evolve into the Core architecture (Core 2 processor) in 2006 and onward."

For this project, I am building the "ultimate" Pentium Pro. What would have easily cost $10k back in the day, a patient junk shopper can build for 100 bucks today. Let's see what this old platform can do.


HARDWARE

1. Due to the fact that quad PPro boards have been as rare as hens' teeth, I have opted for a dual cpu motherboard. I selected the Intel Providence (PR440FX), considered by many to be the ultimate dual PPro board, with onboard SCSI, sound, USB, and support for up to 1024mb of EDO memory (yeah, that's right, EDO). It comes in an L-shaped EATX form factor.

pr440fx.jpg


2. For the best in Pentium Pro CPU performance, there is only one choice: the 200mhz 1mb chips. These are easily distinguished by their black heatspreader. The 256k and 512k chips have the standard gold heatspreader.

2168718830_27dde40b01.jpg

Important: For Pentium Pros to run in SMP, you need a voltage regulator module. They look like this.

pprovrm.jpg

3. The coolers that came with the CPUs are impressively large for the time when they were made, and they are intended to cool passively. However, the PPros are very hot chips, and the 1mb ones especially so. I used a Zalman adjustable fan bracket attachment with a 120mm antec tri-cool set on medium. This bracket screws into your expansion slots.

zalman.jpg

4. EDO memory, 4x256mb double-stacked DIMMs to max out the chipset's memory controller. These sticks are MASSIVE.

doubleEDO.jpg

5. 3.5" & 5.25" floppies and DVD-ROM scavenged from various old builds.

6. 200gb Seagate Barracuda 8. I contemplated putting a RAID card in there to compensate for the 33mb/s ATA, but I eventually decided against it, since it would complicate matters if I ever wanted to try out Linux.

7. Geforce 6200 PCI, 64-bit. I figure that the 64-bit memory interface won't hurt on a platform this old.

8. 4+1 port PCI USB card w/NEC chipset. A must with any retro build.

9. 400w Seasonic Super Tornado. This should be more than enough.

10. Finding a case for this build was something of a challenge. Because of its EATX form factor, standard cases have a hard time fitting it. However, I was lucky enough to get my dad's old antec mid-tower, which fits the PR440FX's L-shape perfectly. The top of the L ends right where the hard disk cage begins.


PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

provfront.jpg
provside.jpg

Not real pretty, but it works for me!


BIOS & SOFTWARE

1. I would describe installing an OS on this thing as one of the most frustrating computing experiences I've had. First off, I spent hours trying to figure out why the computer wouldn't boot off a CD. It kept giving me "Cannot boot from CD/DVD Error -4." I was beginning to think that this board was defective, when I realized that my old 98SE disc would boot. However, since 98SE has no support for SMP, that was not a viable option. But that pointed me towards the answer to my problem.

The BIOS that my used board came with was a very early version, 1.00.02. It apparently did not support the boot ROM emulation on most newer OS cds. I managed to download and flash to the 1.00.09 BIOS, which fixed this.

However, that was not the end of my troubles. I had the idea to go for bragging rights and install Windows 7 on it, but that was a no-go. The instant I selected boot from the Win7 DVD, the screen would blank and the computer would restart. I tried this many times before I could just gave up on it. I was going back to XP.

XP installation was not without problems. Several times, when installation was "installing devices," the computer simply froze for hours. I had to remove my Audigy sound card and my Netgear wireless PCI card to get install to proceed further. The board has onboard LAN and sound, so I wasn't too worried about that, but there is definitely some kind of weird compatibility issue going on here. Subsequent attempts to install the Audigy card and its drivers in Windows met with failure.

2. The BIOS has no frills whatsoever, which I'm somewhat used to. I'd be lying, though, if it weren't frustrating. There is no option for fast boot, so the bootup memory check takes 2 minutes and just as long if you try to Esc out of it. You can't disable SCSI to speed up the boot, nor can you adjust memory timings and IRQs.

sparse...
provboot.jpg
provbios.jpg

3. I wouldn't be on this forum if I didn't figure out a way to overclock this rig. Although Intel's manual has nothing on this topic, one user kindly put up this guide to the undocumented jumper settings for overclocking the PR440FX.

http://home.icequake.net/~nemesis/pc/support/pr440fx2.html

Using this info, I started off setting the FSB to 70mhz and the multiplier to 3.5 for 245mhz. The motherboard never passed POST before freezing.

Next, keeping the multiplier at 3.5, I lowered the FSB to 66mhz for 233mhz. This seemed fine for a while, but using windows for a while showed instability, which was confirmed with prime.

I finally had to retreat to 3x70 or 210mhz. It's not much of an overclock, especially since I've heard more than one story of people successfully running their PPros at 233mhz+, but I guess that full-speed 1mb L2 makes it difficult to overclock.

The final configuration is as follows:

Intel Providence PR440FX
2 x 200mhz 1mb Pentium Pro @ 210mhz
4 x 256mb 50ns Micron EDO @ 70mhz
256mb Geforce 6200 PCI 64-bit
200gb Seagate Barracuda 7200.8
16x LG DVD-ROM
5.25" Floppy
3.5" Floppy
400W Seasonic Super Tornado


And here is the CPU-Z validation:

cpuzpr440fx.jpg
 
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Some preliminary benches:


Sandra CPU Arithmetic

sandracpuar.jpg

Sandra CPU Multimedia

sandracpumm.jpg

Sandra Memory Bandwidth

sandramemory.jpg

SuperPi1m

superpi1m.jpg

Some remarks: I think this has made me appreciate just how far we have come with memory technology. Those are quite possibly the worst memory scores I have ever seen in Sandra. In fact, the SuperPi scores seem somewhat lower than the scores I've seen from other Pentium Pros, but I guess that's just the performance hit from buffered ECC DIMMs.
 
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That's awesome!
Back in the late 90's when i was running a computer business an guy came and said he wanted the fastest we could make. We said "Ok, it's Pentium Pro time. $500 cpu!".
It was a 512k cache 200mhz flavor, that thing was fast.
He used it for a looooong time, five or six years i think.

Please keep us updated, it's fun seeing ancient hardware actually working.
 
Cool stuff. I've been kinda wanting to put together a PPro myself, but I always end up talking myself out of it.

I contemplated putting a RAID card in there to compensate for the 33mb/s ATA

I dunno if it makes a difference to you, but I don't think the 440FX even has ATA/33, IIRC that didn't come until the LX.
 
Cool stuff. I've been kinda wanting to put together a PPro myself, but I always end up talking myself out of it.



I dunno if it makes a difference to you, but I don't think the 440FX even has ATA/33, IIRC that didn't come until the LX.
Oh really. Good to know. In that event I'll definitely be looking for something else. The SCSI is always an option. I should check the prices of old scsi drives on ebay.
 
The SCSI is always an option. I should check the prices of old scsi drives on ebay.

A 36GB 15K RPM drive should do the trick. :D

Old SCSI drives go pretty cheap nowadays, but most of the drives on eBay seem to be ones with 80-pin SCA connectors. Not really a problem, adapters can be had for around $4 apiece. Use a standard 68-pin flat cable, no need for the newer (and expensive) twisted-pair LVD cable on an old UW controller.
 
Wow cool flashback... I remember the Pentium Pros. It really is amazing now to see just how far comp. tech. has advanced.
 
Nice! I've got an IBM in my barn... 2x 400W power supplies, 4x Pentium Pro 200s with 1M cache and lots of other goodies, hehe. Glad to see someone playing with this stuff.
 
A 36GB 15K RPM drive should do the trick. :D

Old SCSI drives go pretty cheap nowadays, but most of the drives on eBay seem to be ones with 80-pin SCA connectors. Not really a problem, adapters can be had for around $4 apiece. Use a standard 68-pin flat cable, no need for the newer (and expensive) twisted-pair LVD cable on an old UW controller.
Those are a bit expensive, but I did find a Cheetah 10k 36ES for about 20 bucks. I should be here and installed in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I'll see if I can get 3Dmark installed.
 
A couple of years back, someone posted a deal Fry's online store had for a PCI MX4000 video card - $20.00 with a $20.00 rebate. That inspired me to find an Asus P55T2P4 on Ebay. I picked it up, four sticks of 128 megabyte EDO SIMMs, and put it together with a K6-III+ 400 @500 (6x83). This was similar to the first semi decent computer I ever put together in the summer of 2001, only that one had less memory, and a K6-2+ 475 @ 500 MHz.

It ran Windows 2000 pretty well. I also had an Asus TXP4 lying around. The TX chipset could use SDRAM, but the chipset is limited to 256 megs of memory, where the EDO only HX chipset can handle 512 megs. Interestingly enough, using the same WD 120 gigabyte drive on a Promise IDE controller card on both boards, the TX chipset board had much better drive speed. I guess the SDRAM really has much better bandwidth.

They could handle most normal tasks pretty well, but I found out that YouTube videos are too much for any Socket 7 CPU to handle.
 
It ran Windows 2000 pretty well. I also had an Asus TXP4 lying around. The TX chipset could use SDRAM, but the chipset is limited to 256 megs of memory, where the EDO only HX chipset can handle 512 megs. Interestingly enough, using the same WD 120 gigabyte drive on a Promise IDE controller card on both boards, the TX chipset board had much better drive speed. I guess the SDRAM really has much better bandwidth.

Yeah, SDRAM really does. Even EDO tops out at about 100mb/s in practical bandwidth, but my 440GX server board (3rd in my sig) was getting nearly 1gb/s in single processor Sandra memory.

The transition to SDRAM was a huge leap, and it's doubly impressive in that early ddr1/2/3 didn't have that much of an advantage over their immediate predecessors.

They could handle most normal tasks pretty well, but I found out that YouTube videos are too much for any Socket 7 CPU to handle.

You know, I have my old socket 7. I might just test that out. :D
 
Nice. THe pentium Pro was technically my first PC. It was a compaq deskpro 6000.

It had the 200mhz 512k chip.

First PC I ever gamed on. It's specs were:

128mb EDO RAM
4gig SCSI
PCI Adaptec SCSI card
(updgraded) 32mb TNT2 PCI card
ISA Sound Blaster 16 card (long version)
33.6kbps modem


It BARELy played Diablo2 at a playable rate.

I remember installing XP Pro on it when it first came out and took about 5 minutes for it load up lol.

I also overclocked it. The heatsink on this CPU was just a heatsink. NO fan.

I did OC it up to 233mhz, but the heatsink would get smoking hot, however, PC would not lock up!

I would drop some water on the heatsink (very small) and it would sizzle to a boil rapidly!

I went from t hat PC to an Athlon XP 2500+ with 9600Pro Radeon, and 512mb RAM. HUGE leap forward.
 
I was always curious how a 386 or 486 DX would handle todays websurfing. I know that the programs we used today would probably kick its butt, but web pages? When I had my 386 we were using dial up at I think 16.66kbps? It was sooooo slow. This was back in the early 90s.

Even my G1 which has a 528mhz processor, 256mb ram and uses a 1Mbps download moves faster. I think my 386 was what... 16mhz?
 
Nice. THe pentium Pro was technically my first PC. It was a compaq deskpro 6000.

It had the 200mhz 512k chip.

First PC I ever gamed on. It's specs were:

128mb EDO RAM
4gig SCSI
PCI Adaptec SCSI card
(updgraded) 32mb TNT2 PCI card
ISA Sound Blaster 16 card (long version)
33.6kbps modem


It BARELy played Diablo2 at a playable rate.

I remember installing XP Pro on it when it first came out and took about 5 minutes for it load up lol.

I also overclocked it. The heatsink on this CPU was just a heatsink. NO fan.

I did OC it up to 233mhz, but the heatsink would get smoking hot, however, PC would not lock up!

I would drop some water on the heatsink (very small) and it would sizzle to a boil rapidly!

I went from t hat PC to an Athlon XP 2500+ with 9600Pro Radeon, and 512mb RAM. HUGE leap forward.

Yeah, I think these things were meant to run hot. Even with a 120mm fan blowing on it, the edges of the heatsink are still uncomfortably hot.

Really takes you back, huh. Over the next few months, I'll be trying to do rebuilds on a number of the old motherboards I've got lying around, and I'm going to post them here.

It only takes about a minute for xp to load up, but I think once the new hard disk arrives I'll be trying out some linux distros. Linux seems to run a bit more efficiently on older machines.
 
You know, I have my old socket 7. I might just test that out. :D

Since I have lots of old junk, I pulled out my DFI P5VB3+, and ran it with a Ti4200, and the K6-III+ at 600 (6x100). It still couldn't play back YouTube video smoothly. I then gave up, and went back to playing with my main computer.
 
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