Hi All:

I am regenerating my old PentiumPro board/computer which I used in 1996 thru 1998 for FAST floating point calculations. The Microsoft Compiler optimized code such that the program ran faster on my PPpro than the Purdue Mainframe or the Westinghouse Cray.
I want to use it as a general purpose computer for the Grandkids to use when they come to visit.

Motherboard Intel - PR440FX
Dual PPro 200 256
Four DIMM sockets for (up to 512 MB EDO memory)
Intel 82440FX PCIset
PCI and Memory Controller (PMC) and Data Bus Accelerator (DBX)
82371SB PCI/ISA IDE Xcelerator (PIIX3)
Adaptec 7880 SCSI controller
Crystal CS4236 audio
Intel EtherExpress™ PRO/100B PCI LAN
Radeon 7000/Radeon VE Family
USB 1.0

Win2K with all service packs as they become available.

The only test program I have is HD Tach and Task Manager

Mods made so far:

WinXP sp2 - (with sp3 I could not get the operating system to use both Cpus. Searching the internet, it appears a lot of people have the same issue and others!- sp3 is very buggy)

Upgraded bios to V9 (the last) This removed the disk drive size limit of 8 GB
Installed 256MB EDO ECC 50ns DIMMS - Micron modules made with 36 chips to a maximum of 256MB x 4 = 1GB of memory

256MB EDO ECC 50ns DIMMS that work on this board, they are genuine Micron modules made with 36 chips on them and will allow you to get a maximum of 256MB x 4 = 1GB of memory

Installed 1000 gb Hitachi SATA 2 Boot Drive using an IDE to SATA converter This gave me 15 MB/s sequential read.
Installed 128 GB Corsair SSD as Boot drive - same results as the Hitachi.
Gave up on IDE!
Installed a 2 Port SIIG SATA 3 PCI adapter: HD Tach gives me 75 MB/s read on the hard drive, and the SSD 90 MB/s. I am using the hard drive as the Boot drive for convenience. May change that later.

Performance.
I have not installed many programs as yet - I haven't decided on my final boot configuration.
Long boot time - most of it due to the 1 meg ram. the boot runs through a Kb by Kb check of the the entire ram, and there is no way (I don't think) to disable it even if I disable error checking.
Qualitatively, respectible response time (not like my main computer, of course)
Some programs (HD Tach for example) max out both CPU's while loading.

Sounds like a cool setup, but honestly I have no ideal why you are trying to pump all that in to a dual CPU 200Mhz, in the end you only have 200/400mhz and that won't keep up with the modern internet let alone YouTube. I think you would be better off finding a P4 system for free or dirt cheap and letting them use that. Restore the Ppro back to something back in it's hayday and let them play some vintage games on it. The SSD and 1tb drive are worth more then the PC.

The Ppro lacks MMX, so you are also very limited on the games you can run. Meaning most modern late 90's and newer 3d games will cripple it. The Pro is odd chip I think, I am keeping my two Ppro systems both dell optiplexs mostly because everyone is so scrap happy with the insane amount of gold they contain. They are going to be very rare very soon. And I need a good DOS system that will run titles from the 80's up to the mid 90's!

Just my option!

You are right except for one thing - I am restoring it for the same reason I have a 1947 Ford Convertible. And the kids get to ride in at now and again. So far it has not been expensive. I had the board and operating systems, the RAM memory cost $40. the SATA adapter about $40. The Hitachi and Corsair ssd drives I borrowed from my main computer. What is going to cost is the overdrive CPU's, (which have MMX) and maybe a better Video board.
With a little bit of luck I will be able to Dual or Triple boot into what ever op system I need. Right now the Boot drive is external.
It is all in the name of "Science"
Cheers
Warren
!

experience has taught me, the best OS for a pair of p-pro chips is NT4. 2000 is doable, but tends to bog down too easy.

NT4 - absolutely! Almost as if NT4 was hard coded for ithe PPro. That is what this board ran when I was Fortran programming and calculating. The old 16 bit applications ran, but not well. I went to win2K after I retired from needing all that 32 Bit speed. There were a some programs which just did not run on NT.
That may be one of the advantages (we shall see) of upgrading to the Overdrive - I understand tt added 16 bit support.

Cheers
Warren

the issue with pentium pro and 16 bit programs was because of the architecture change. They went to a RISC based chip and ran x86 instructions on top of it. The only significant difference between a pentium pro and the P2 is the addition of MMX and putting the L2 cache on a card, not bonding them in a single "chip". In fact, the P-pro overdrive is in reality just a 333mhz pentium 2, but with full speed cache. The pentium pro was just "early" on the whole 32-bit scene, and was designed from the ground up for 32bit. I've been told its 16bit performance was that of regular pentiums half its speed. 😜

If there is enough interest, I could test this. I have overdrive, and original pentiums. I dont ahve any socket 4 chips but i should be fine with socket 5's

whturner wrote:

NT4 - absolutely! Almost as if NT4 was hard coded for ithe PPro. That is what this board ran when I was Fortran programming a […]
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NT4 - absolutely! Almost as if NT4 was hard coded for ithe PPro. That is what this board ran when I was Fortran programming and calculating. The old 16 bit applications ran, but not well. I went to win2K after I retired from needing all that 32 Bit speed. There were a some programs which just did not run on NT.
That may be one of the advantages (we shall see) of upgrading to the Overdrive - I understand tt added 16 bit support.

Cheers
Warren

I hope you already have the Pentium II Overdrives as they are usually very expensive to buy these days.

Nah its 16bit performance isn't that bad. It is usually still faster than a P54C. The PII got something called a segment descriptor cache that fixes the sub-32bit problem.

ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/misc/x86.org/http/diges … /Feature01.html

Apparently Intel had assumed WinNT, *nix and OS2 platforms would have replaced DOS-based legacy apps and OSs by 1995. But really PPro was most commonly used with those OSs anyway.

Another thing to remember for games is the PCI quirk requiring Fastvid. I have a feeling that some of the really negative 16bit comments could be related instead to horrible PCI bandwidth bottlenecking everything. The Orion chipset was particularly bad AFAIK.

I never did any actual PPro Benchmarking of 16 vs. 32 bit performance for general purpose use. When the Pentium Pro came out, and the Microsoft Fortran compiler was able to generate 32 bit code, the results were almost too simple to discuss. The 32 bit code ran almost exactly twice as fast as the 16 bit on the same machine with a Pertium pro and NT. If I remember right that was NT 3.1 Server. Of course, the program being developed was math intensive using double precision floating point numbers, very single purpose.

Cheers
Warren

dirkmirk wrote:

I ran some benchmarks before I swapped the Pentium pro 200 for the overdrive 333.

I was expecting a bigger increase in Quake 2/3 scores with the cpu upgrade, I knew the CPU would bottleneck the graphics card but I was suprised at how well the old 200 scored.

Probably due to the fact that these are actually the results for an overclocked 200 running at 245.
I've compared your results to mine and they are higher than even my 200/1M stock blacktops score, being much closer to an OC 233/1M

What kind of software did you develop 'whturner'?
The 16 bit weakness seemed overblown and like a typical magazine "filler".