QBiN wrote:

I built my PR440FX back in '06 and it's already long gone, unfortunately. I recall the Crystal audio being completely adequate for all standard audio playback. It had no issues or excessive noise with WinAMP or GLQuake (two of the things I did most on my PR440FX) and the audio quality was fine. I can't recall what it did for MIDI audio... I'm thinking it was wavetable in 100% software.

That being said, I'm sure it can't compete with the EMU8k from an AWE32 or AWE64. For that reason, I'd recommend getting a CT-1920 goldfinch AWE32 "Upgrade" card and plugging it into the Wavetable header on the PR440FX. Or just disable the Crystal audio and replace it wholesale with your favorite AWE32/64. Either way, you're only down one ISA slot.

If you're worried about the number of PCI... maybe a Voodoo Banshee would work out nicely. 2D/3D (+good OpenGL/Glide) in one slot, RAID in another and you still have one PCI slot to spare.

Thanks for the feedback QBin. I've just ordered a SoundBlaster tonight. Tricky choice, I was considering AWE32 or SB32, but in the end I've ordered an AWE64, which should be here in a few days. I went for the AWE64 mainly out of nostalgia, I used them in my late 90's gaming machines. Graphics wise, I've considered a Banshee, (they're reasonably cheap!) but the lack of one Texture Mapping Unit compared to a Voodoo 2 has always worried me. So therefore I've decided to stick to my original plan of a Matrox of some description as the primary card, and a single Diamond Monster II Voodoo 2 for Quake 2 etc.

We used to stock the Diamond Monster II and Creative Blaster 2. We found the Diamond cards would almost always clock slightly higher than the Creative cards, (I'm talking by about 2Mhz). Might not seem very much, but those 2Mhz can mean the difference between life and death in a heated FragFest 😀

So, I'm looking for a Diamond Monster II 12Mb. Back in the late 90's when the Voodoo 3 came out, I sold my SLI Voodoo 2 Diamond Monsters to fund an upgrade to a Voodoo 3 3500. Back then, I would never have thought that 17 years later I would be buying a Diamond Monster II once again...

Just thought I would upload a few pictures of the processors I'll be using. Apparently a lot of these can be overclocked to 233Mhz. And the PR440FX also has undocumented jumper settings to support 266Mhz, (though I think that would be stretching things a bit for one of these chips!) I'll probably end up running them at default clocks, as 90% of the time this machine will be running as an online Quake 2 server, and I think a small clock speed bump isn't really worth it, once the extra heat and the risk of killing a component is taken into consideration.

I still think a 1Mb integrated cache was a fantastic technical achievement by Intel back in 1997. I remember these CPUs cost a fortune back then, like several thousand each. Even our most well-off customers would have flinched at the time....

I bought these on Ebay 13 years ago. I can't remember whether I bought them as a pair, or individually. Judging by the stickers on the back, they're out of a Compaq, probably some sort of Proliant server I should think. It seems they probably came from different Ebay sellers, given that the "Compaq" labeling on the back is different on each, suggesting different batches and a different origin.

Here's a photo of them next to my P55C Pentium 233 MMX. They still seem huge in comparison to most socketed processors, even against the modern stuff.

My one is better; 😜
\

Funny, I was just on about it in another thread. Nah, that's a lovely looking machine, my only words of advice would be to watch out as the 1MB processors draw silly amounts of power and many motherboards had problems running them properly. Overclocking them probably isn't a good idea.

I've had 2 Tyan S1662D boards lying around here Ive been dying to try. I ended up getting a 200mhz 512k cache PPro chip last week and finally got to test the boards. fortunately they both work though I had one the VRM unit smoke and almost burst into flames. I had a few extras though so I just swapped them out.

Running Pentium Pro @ 266 MHz is very unlikely. I have plenty of them in my collection and not a single one even posts at 266 MHz. On the other hand - all of them work just fine at 233 MHz.

Make sure your coolers are strong enough, these things run very hot. 1M PPro takes 50W each at 200 MHz and even more when overclocked.

JohnnySL25A wrote:

http://i58.tinypic.com/2sb4m7t.jpg […]
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... I remember these CPUs cost a fortune back then, like several thousand each. Even our most well-off customers would have flinched at the time....

That pic was worth $5350 back in the day according to CPU-World. 😲

TELVM wrote:

That pic was worth $5350 back in the day according to CPU-World. 😲

Given what I paid for them in 2002, ....they had lost 99% of their value in just 5 years 😢

havli wrote:

Running Pentium Pro @ 266 MHz is very unlikely. I have plenty of them in my collection and not a single one even posts at 266 MHz. On the other hand - all of them work just fine at 233 MHz.

Make sure your coolers are strong enough, these things run very hot. 1M PPro takes 50W each at 200 MHz and even more when overclocked.

Thanks havli, good advice I think. I've not made a final decision yet on my coolers. I bought some decent heatsinks for them in '02, now I'm thinking I may need bigger! But good socket-8 heatsinks are so hard to find these days. I may just stick with what I bought, but find a way to mount some oversize fans onto them.

HighTreason wrote:

My one is better; :P http://cdn.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium-II/L_Intel-GJ80521EX200%20%281M%20ES%29.jpg\ […]
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My one is better; 😜
\

Funny, I was just on about it in another thread. Nah, that's a lovely looking machine, my only words of advice would be to watch out as the 1MB processors draw silly amounts of power and many motherboards had problems running them properly. Overclocking them probably isn't a good idea.

Nice CPU! 😎

I think the PR440FX will be OK with the 1Mb cache CPUs. But I am concerned about the old Astec 200W PSU that was with the case originally. I'm also concerned about my 2nd-hand VRM! There' so much that can go wrong with this old hardware... if something goes pop it could be tricky/expensive to source replacement components.

Some more parts for the build arrived today...

There's 3 PCI slots and 1 ISA slot on this board, and I've now almost decided on what will be going in each...

PCI 1 : Some kind of Matrox PCI graphics card
PCI 2 : 3DFX Voodoo 2 12Mb
PCI 3 : RAID controller card
ISA : SoundBlaster AWE 64

The RAID controller card has arrived. I was originally thinking about using the built-in Adaptec SCSI, but the only SCSI drive I've got is a 4.3Gb Quantum Viking. But I want this PC to be a useable everyday system, and 4.3Gb would probably be just too small. I'm therefore intending to run a couple of IDE drives in RAID 0. Preferably Maxtor Maxline III's, (my favourite IDE drive).

And the SoundBlaster AWE64 has turned up (CT4380). TBH I'm not really interested so much in music, SoundFonts and the like, but there is an element of nostalgia for me with this, and I also wanted something that might be a little better than the built-in Crystal CS4236 audio. The Crystal audio apparently sounds pretty good, but I wonder about how many CPU cycles it would be using. So SoundBlaster it has to be...

I think I mentioned somewhere on the first page that the PC internal speaker was missing. I've had a look through my boxes of spares in the attic tonight, and have found one. I've tried it in the case and it fits the brackets perfectly 😀

That AWE card is likely to use even more CPU cycles if you use the EMU8K, but you probably won't notice and it's a good choice. I am still using an SB128 in mine which is horribly inefficient and it still didn't slow down, I only have a single CPU and my board uses EDO RAM so it was probably a lot more likely to slow down than yours.

Remember with the IDE RAID0 to connect the drives to separate IDE channels for best performance - such as both set to master with one on IDE1 and the other on IDE2. I forgot about this a few days back on a P2 and it took me a while to figure out why my drives weren't really going any faster. On the other hand, your RAID card is better than mine, my one is some old Silicon Image one with odd capacitors and badly retro-fitted LEDs, so you'll probably get better performance anyway.

CPU cycles? meh you have 2 CPU'S! 😀
Decided on an OS yet?

There are threads about using ATX psu with AT boards. Or you could order a new AT psu from an online retailer. Make sure the ATX psu you use has plenty of power on the +3.3 and +5 and also the -5 rail if you go that route
Edit: I bought one of these and it works great http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16817338010

ODwilly wrote:

There are threads about using ATX psu with AT boards. Or you could order a new AT psu from an online retailer. Make sure the ATX psu you use has plenty of power on the +3.3 and +5 and also the -5 rail if you go that route
Edit: I bought one of these and it works great http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16817338010

This board is ATX 😉

chinny22 wrote:

CPU cycles? meh you have 2 CPU'S! 😀
Decided on an OS yet?

I'm curious about your final OS choice as well. I have a very similar build getting put together and I cant decide between NT 4 or W2k. I'm guessing nt would be less of a resource drain but 2k look a lot more user friendly at least driver wise.

is mid 90's windows/DOS compatibility any worse on w2k vs NT?

I used to have a Micronics W6Li board with dual PPro 200 1MBs and it had either 128MB or 256MB in EDO DIMMs (can't remember). I had it overclocked to 233 MHz as well. Anyway, I agree that NT4 is the way to go. Or perhaps something not from MS at all. NT5 is pretty heavy for a ~200MHz P6.

JohnnySL25A wrote:

... I am concerned about the old Astec 200W PSU that was with the case originally ...

Take pics of its guts and we'll assess quality and current state. There are Astecs 200W that were well built and still healthy after many years:

swaaye wrote:

I used to have a Micronics W6Li board with dual PPro 200 1MBs and it had either 128MB or 256MB in EDO DIMMs (can't remember). I had it overclocked to 233 MHz as well. Anyway, I agree that NT4 is the way to go. Or perhaps something not from MS at all. NT5 is pretty heavy for a ~200MHz P6.

When I looked into this the issues was there arnt really many pre 2k duel CPU choices other then MS. At least if your running a gaming machine and I don't know to many hobbyists that build retro PC's for anything other then games. There's BeOS I guess or Linux but I don't know how there compatibility with Windows/DOS games is. I assume not great. there's also some version of OS/2 server out there that supposedly supports SMP but I've never seen it. I assume it would be a decent choice as I always found games to run ok in OS/2..then again I didn't play around with it to extensively.

that again is if you want to play games. I suppose if you just want to run spreadsheets any OS would do.

I always had a hell of a time figuring out how to install drivers in OS/2 Warp. maybe I just wasn't that familiar with the process but its whats making me shy away from NT 4

lubuntu, it is lightweight ubuntu and should allow wine with older games just fine.

soviet conscript wrote:

When I looked into this the issues was there arnt really many pre 2k duel CPU choices other then MS. At least if your running a gaming machine and I don't know to many hobbyists that build retro PC's for anything other then games. There's BeOS I guess or Linux but I don't know how there compatibility with Windows/DOS games is. I assume not great. there's also some version of OS/2 server out there that supposedly supports SMP but I've never seen it. I assume it would be a decent choice as I always found games to run ok in OS/2..then again I didn't play around with it to extensively.

that again is if you want to play games. I suppose if you just want to run spreadsheets any OS would do.

I always had a hell of a time figuring out how to install drivers in OS/2 Warp. maybe I just wasn't that familiar with the process but its whats making me shy away from NT 4

😁

I just see a dual PPro as not so much a game box as an exploration of a old school 1995-1997 workstation/server powerhouse. It's not a great game machine. The second CPU won't be of much use. It consumes a lot of power. It doesn't have MMX and this is a disadvantage with some games starting in 1997. 8/16-bit code kills its performance advantages over a Pentium. Win2K doesn't run very well, NT4 isn't great for games, and you certainly don't want to run Win9x on it.

It's a beastly WinNT 3.x-4/OS2/contemporary *nix machine though.

This is why I don't have that board anymore. I couldn't figure out what else to do beyond some little experiments.