I haven't seen a lot high-res photos of this board so I'm posting them here before it's gone. I believe it officially supports dual pentiums up to 166mhz although I've heard a single 200mhz overdrive will also work.
Gorgeous board! Appreciate the high-res photo.
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.
Looks like a DELL server board. I have a very similar one, just for one PPro instead of dual P1.
It's actually from a DOLCH portable PC. That's what surprised me, opening it up and seeing it wasn't two pentium pros when i got it.
feipoa- I always mention that because I like to document my interesting or uncommon finds on here rather than just letting them vanish without a trace on the web. Also, saying that gives people time to ask questions quickly before it's in someone else's hands, in this case possibly a non-collector who might be using it as an industrial replacement part.
Dolch rings a bell - I remember hearing the name for the first time when reading a .plan file by Carmack. Years later I saw a short review on ComputerChronicles about this top notch company.
Sweet board.
Heh, no IDE, but SCSI. Neat!
While intel might have knobbled dual CPU capability in fast Pentiums to protect P-Pro market, I hear it was theoretically possible with AMD K6 and Cyrix 686... so that board would be interesting to play with.
Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.
Yeah, scsi only. I'm not exactly sure what DOLCH's motive was with using this board for the network sniffing market tbh. Stability i guess. It only came stock with one pentium 100 and 32mb ram but i guess there was enough room for upgrading it if need be. It didn't have a traditional PAC number in the model tag (like pac 61, 62,63, 64 etc.) It was an "Intel PRO SHARE" i'm guessing for use w/ video conferencing.
one cool feature with this model of dolch pac is that it came with a separate fpga controller for driving the lcd so any pci video card can be used w/ a vga ribbon cable connected to the fpga card (opposed to a lot of other models that require a specific video card/connector for the lcd)
Has anyone tried dual K6 or dual Cyrix 6x86?
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.
i've not tried a k6 or cyrix and I only have a k6-2 atm so i can't try it BUT this board uses the neptune chipset and I'm thinking k6's were pretty compatible with socket 7 non-split voltage pentiums. It might register in the bios as a pentium though. I was reading where someone else with this board got a single pentium 200 mmx overdrive to work but it wouldn't work with two which seemed odd to me but I'm guessing it's because a pentium 200 mmx uses a few more watts compared to the p100.
(i could be wrong but...)
I believe the transistors/regulators for vcore on this board are:
EZ1084CT-3.3T which max out at 3.3v and 5a (16.5w) or so which would be close to the p200 mmx's usage
replacing the vcore circuit might allow more wattage to be delivered
so if the k6 or cyrix is of a similar wattage I can't see why they wouldn't work.. I'm not aware of any mobo manufacturer locking out non intel cpus
Okay, I did some digging, it's a complex and convoluted story. It appears Intel S7 CPU up to 233MMX are known to work in SMP though.
What's up with the K6 and 686 is that they support SMP, but due to intels patent on the APIC method of interCPU communication, don't support APIC SMP as implemented by intel and intel chipsets. A consortium including AMD, Cyrix, compaq and IBM defined an openPIC standard, BUT all the "usual suspect" dual motherboard manufacturers appear to have not bothered or wanted to keep Intel happy and not picked up the torch of building AMD/Cyrix openPIC compatible boards...
... for all that there are rumours and hints that a board or custom implementation lurks out there somewhere, such as...
https://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-current@ … /msg117390.html
and
https://hardforum.com/threads/amd-k6-duallie- … rboard.1045542/
Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.
yea, dual amd doesn't exist. I chased that goose a long time ago.
Love that motherboard though, thanks for posting browncorn!
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
Any truth to what this guy says?
May 2, 2006 #5 Mackintire 2[H]4U […]
May 2, 2006 #5
Mackintire
2[H]4UJoined:
Jun 28, 2004There was a motherboard produced that could SMP K6 processors @ 300mhz Infact the same company made a quad motherboard. However unless you have one of these beasties and the required drivers. Your completely out of luck.
Lemmie put it this way... you have as much of a chance finding and purchasing a 128Meg Obsidian Voodoo octal video card PCI, as finding that motherboard.
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.
well, i never seen any other mention of it. So I'm inclined to believe he was talking out of his ass.
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
I guess this isn't the magic K6 dual socket 7 mobo after all. 😵
I do think a single k6 would still register though... but no big deal
wrote:i've not tried a k6 or cyrix and I only have a k6-2 atm so i can't try it BUT this board uses the neptune chipset and I'm thinking k6's were pretty compatible with socket 7 non-split voltage pentiums. It might register in the bios as a pentium though. I was reading where someone else with this board got a single pentium 200 mmx overdrive to work but it wouldn't work with two which seemed odd to me but I'm guessing it's because a pentium 200 mmx uses a few more watts compared to the p100.
Intel MMX Overdrives don't support SMP by design (refer to pinout tables) :
http://download.intel.com/support/processors/ … sb/24318504.pdf
I doubt other socket 5/7 CPU upgrades will support SMP but you could dig further.
k6's and overdrives not supporting intel's standard SMP makes sense now. I was very blindly thinking the NX (neptune) chipset itself was actually allowing socket 7 pentiums to work in tandem as I had never seen this before. I always assumed dual processing was reserved mostly for server type cpus (ppro, opteron, etc) but after reading more it appears I was way off as most intel consumer cpus support smp, the boards just aren't as common i suppose.
