Nice! I love the OR840!

But if you want to use "Dual Tualatin on OR840" and you are not an ABSOULUTE pro, forget about it 🤣
Many, many of the best have tried!
[Yoda]Only frustration you will find...[/Yoda]

Despite that, I wish you good luck and success!

Thanks for the wishes!

The OR840 is awesome once you sort of "tame" it, I am glad I got it!

About the Tualatins, I just want to try it myself. The thing is, I find posts about failure to run the dual setup, but no one seems to have documented what they tried or didn't try. If you have any resources or links I would love to see them to decide if I pull the plug on that project or keep going. And hey, even if I fail, it'll keep me occupied for a while 😜

Welcome to the SMP club, few of us here.
Also Welcome to the RAMBUS club, a lot less here (I'm not)
SMP RAMBUS club, that's gotta be a pretty exclusive club! well done!

You do know you don't have to pull the duel CPU's out to run WinME right? It'll just ignore the 2nd CPU.

Cant wait for pics when its closer to being finished

The OR840 is a nice board. It was the reference i840 implementation. In the benchmarks I've seen it could beat every other P3 chipset in Quake III. I own a i840 based computer, but with dual Slot 2: an SGi Visual Workstation 550 (based on Acer's M29A motherboard). The only problem is how to tame its power and saturate the two RDRAM channels. The CPUs share the bus, so they can only saturate half of it, you need some heavy I/O (AGP included) to push it to the limits.

have the same board laying around with 2x 550's PIII.
but still had no time to play with it. 😀

chinny22 wrote:

Welcome to the SMP club, few of us here. Also Welcome to the RAMBUS club, a lot less here (I'm not) SMP RAMBUS club, that's gott […]
Show full quote

Welcome to the SMP club, few of us here.
Also Welcome to the RAMBUS club, a lot less here (I'm not)
SMP RAMBUS club, that's gotta be a pretty exclusive club! well done!

You do know you don't have to pull the duel CPU's out to run WinME right? It'll just ignore the 2nd CPU.

Cant wait for pics when its closer to being finished

Thanks for the warm welcome!

I do know that I can boot up ME with 2 CPUs in there, that's actually how I installed it. I just like plugging in that 300a every now and then 😀

I have added some old pictures to the post. You can see a few details there:
-I could only run 1GB of RAM at the moment because the retention bracket from the Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer would hit the lower stick. I had to trim the plastic from the bracket to be able to install RAM again, and even then its a tight fit;
-I printed a few parts! The funky green ssd caddies, a couple of 92 to 120 fan adapters, and for the top fan a "turbine" that cools down those sweet CuMines. All parts I found online for free;
-The mess of cables at the bottom are the front panel usb2 coming into the usb card, front panel audio and firewire coming into the audigy2. For the front panel audio I ordered an ebay adaper, works ok so far but I had to move some cables around according to this post
-I like cable managing 😜

Nice to see another user out there with one of these beastly builds, got two systems like this myself. Consider getting a 2GB rdram kit while you can before the investment vampires just up the prices like it is real estate.

I've always been curious to see if the 1gb rimms work. http://www.ebay.com/itm/152328288860

I cant justify tossing $100 out the window if it doesn't. 😜

I personally wouldn't go the 300a route with this. modding 1.4 tualatins to work would be my choice. Then agai, i don't think i've seen a dual 300a, so go for it!

nforce4max wrote:

Nice to see another user out there with one of these beastly builds, got two systems like this myself. Consider getting a 2GB rdram kit while you can before the investment vampires just up the prices like it is real estate.

I am actually sitting on a lot of rdram at the moment: ~3.5 GB of it.

The bulk of it has timing of 40ns and it makes the machine unstable, switching to 800-45ns made everything rock solid. That lone black stick you see there is actually a 512MB stick with the proper frequency timings I need, but I need its partner to hook it up in the machine. Still looking for it or for another suitable pair.

luckybob wrote:

I've always been curious to see if the 1gb rimms work. http://www.ebay.com/itm/152328288860

I cant justify tossing $100 out the window if it doesn't. 😜

I personally wouldn't go the 300a route with this. modding 1.4 tualatins to work would be my choice. Then agai, i don't think i've seen a dual 300a, so go for it!

I am also very curious, but not $100 curious 😜 Considering the machine wouldnt recognize 512MB sticks without a bios flash, and the fact that these 1GB sticks are rated at 40ns—which the mobo has trouble with—I doubt I will try it unless I come upon them for free.

The journey has started!

First things first: I finally received my Voodoo3 2000, and it works beautifully. I also finally got a partner to the black module that was lonely, and have now 2GB of rock-stable RDRAM in the system 😀

Now the interesting part: I ordered a couple of AOpen slotkets from a local retailer. I found a "Tualatin Success Story" at The Lunchbox which used this slotket, so I basically copied it to start: insulate 3 pins, bridge 2 pairs of pins, done. Mind you, I had read a lot first and knew what was going on. I am documenting the process in an old blog I had, if anyone is interested in reading, you can find it here. I also bought 2 new in box Tualerons 1000—I don't have hopes for SMP Tualerons, I just didn't have heatsinks since I recently moved, and the Tualerons were €5 each, including heatsink—which will allow me to test any mod I do to the slotket;

That is a single Tualeron, with a terminator card on the other slot. I fired up the machine and it posted, which was awesome. The BIOS does not recognize the CPU or its correct speed, though. I tried booting Windows 2000, unfortunately its a no go. The system hangs in the loading screen. I was puzzled, so I grabbed a Xubuntu LiveCD and popped it in. Trying to load Xubuntu produced the message "MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC"

I rebooted and in the options menu when loading Xubuntu I selected the option "noapic", the machine booted up fine and went into the desktop. Here you can see the cpu info;

Note that the CPU is already overclocked 😉 It turns out this AOpen slotket has an undocumented jumper, JP6, which is usually connected to BSEL1 on both the socket and the slot. Removing this jumper forces 133 MHz fsb and voilá, Tualeron 1333 😉

I also tried an asymmetric configuration: the Tualeron with a Cumine 1000EB. Still same error, but when booting into linux with the noapic option I realized only the Tualeron was recognized, not the CuMine. I'll have to look around the datasheet a bit more to figure out what's going on, but if any of you have ideas, I'm would like to hear them.

Really cool! Thanks for this thread.
I am crossing my fingers for you! 😎

I also have 2x OR840 boards and all kinds of adapters, I wonder how far I will get...
If you have any questions regarding different adapters I might be able to help 😀
But first I have to finish my dual socket 370 and my dual slot 2

I love to read this kind of stuff although I'm not smart enough to understand even half of it. Keep it up !

Thanks for the support, guys!

A quickie before sleeping: after studying the slotket in some detail I changed a few things to try añd make it boot into Windows. Long story short, I installed an extra voltage clamp and rerouted signals used for APIC (PICD0, PICD1, LINT0, LINT1, and a few others while I was at it). It took a while because I read a lot, and well, installation was a little involved. The effort paid off, though;

Good old WCPUID—this one's for you, H.Oda!! I'll post a lengthier explanation later if someone wants to read up a bit, but probably until the weekend. I still need to work a few(lot of) kinks.

That celeron is crying for mercy!

luckybob wrote:

That celeron is crying for mercy!

You think that Celeron is having a rough day? Check this absolute champion;

If someone wants to read a bit, I finally got around to updating the blog. I blame the abnormally good weather this weekend for my tardiness. In a nutshell, I modded one of the AOpen slotkets to be able to boot Windows 2000. Its not a conceptually difficult mod, but it took some time to install properly and the result is not very physically sturdy. I will pull the plug on using these slotkets for the dual Tualatin attempt and order a couple of MSI slotkets from ebay to play with.

In the meantime, I fulfilled one of my wishes for this build: find a couple of good overclockers to play with. I have the original Tualeron 1000A and a Tualeron 1200 to play with, and ran some benchmarks

Fun times overall!

Hey people. I have been stupid busy the past days, hence the lack of updates. Here's a quick update on the status of this;

1. the MS-6905 Master MSI slotkets arrived! I have studied them a bit and done a couple of mods. According to the datasheet (and a couple sources I am using) I still have to take care of a few things, but the Celerons I was playing with work very well.
2. reading up on the new slotkets, I unearthed N-yagi's experiments page, which uses them to run dual Tualatins on an i840-based Supermicro board. They are a fun read, but only half of them are translated to english, the rest are in japanese. Still, a very valuable resource! He lists the exact mod he did to get the slotkets to work with the board, too.
3. if someone is interested in the korean sold Tualatins and how the adapter works, I sort of mapped out the image available in the ebay listing;

   

   Since I don't have one I can't confirm the vias go to the pins I listed, but it seems kind of obvious. If anyone has one of these CPUs and a multimeter, and feels like wasting some time, (s)he may check them and hopefully report back here. It is very interesting that the adapter doesnt do a whole lot: a couple of pins are removed from the CPU, a lot of pins are bridged, and 3 resistors are added to pull up to VTT. Anyways, maybe it'll be helpful or interesting to someone.
4. I ordered a set of dual 1133 P3-S that was for sale on ebay. They were cheap and allow me to conduct dual Tualatin experiments, which is the whole purpose of this post…

---

I have had some moderate success with the mods I did on the slotkets, and have gotten the machine to boot recognizing 2 unknown CPUs. Unfortunately booting up Windows is a no go, even booting up linux is impossible—I got a nice kernel panic when I tried. Given the amount of work I have to do for real life, this will probably have to wait, but I wanted to make this small update before too long goes on without one.

omg amazing!
I think you need a patched BIOS with the required microcodes!
But I think this could actually work!

Color me impressed.

Arctic wrote:

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/004/553/5b0.gif omg amazing! I think you need a patched BIOS with the required […]
Show full quote

omg amazing!
I think you need a patched BIOS with the required microcodes!
But I think this could actually work!

luckybob wrote:

Color me impressed.

Thanks for the support, guys!

I am not sure its a BIOS issue. The computer is already booting up and detecting both CPUs at POST. I think it doesn't matter that they are set up as Unknown, once the machine posts I can have the OS load the uCodes when its starting up—Linux does this and I am getting a kernel panic when booting, so I think it's still a hardware problem.

From next weekend (July 1st) on I'll have more free time to play with this again, I'll be sure to keep you updated!