VOGONS


First post, by chinny22

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So here is my little part of the Great PPro Haul of 2018
The great Pentium Pro haul of 2018

The Motherboard, CPU’s, Ram were all NIB from the haul. 2 200Mhz 1MB CPU’s and 4 sticks of 64MB EDO RAM. That was the motherboard maxed out. Also got the VRM and heat sinks off liqmat as well.
Usually I get hardware 2nd hand so this was the first time in 20 years I’ve gotten new, boxed hardware and it’s still from the same decade 🤣!

Sound was easy, I have a spare ISA Yamaha card doing nothing, may as well use that.
Same as the network card, a Netgear FA310TX C which is based off Dec 21140-AF

Video I decided I wanted on a Matrox Mystique so I can try out the MSI API in Screamer and even when I’m done doing that it’s supported in the OS’s I have in mind. I ended up getting the 220 with the Rainbow Runner add on board, I may never use it but it was the same price.

Case I was going to use an existing midi case but the motherboard is full width so won’t fit a lot of midi cases and I didn’t want a full tower case. I tried and it JUST fit in my Antec 300 case but that was been used for my Duel Slot1 build. Fine I’ll buy another. I do like the cases they are cheap, easy to find and good cooling.
For a bit of bling I replaced the front and top fans with corsair purple fans. Now it’s Purple Pentium Pro although gotta say compared to the Airocool Dead Silence fans I’ve used in the past the Corsair fans feel cheap.

Gotek Floppy standard on all my builds now.

Storage was a real pain it did not like any of my CF cards or even any period correct IDE drives. In the end it due to 80 pin IDE cables, swap it for 40 pin and even the CF cards get auto detected fine now.
The DVD drive I’ve had to borrow from another build as the one I originally found was dead. On the same cable is an 8GB Western Digital HDD
I can JUST stretch the longest of my 40 pin IDE cable’s to the top 2 back brackets for the CF cards. Does mean the video card has to be in the 2nd PCI slot but doesn’t seem to cause any problems.

All in all it’s come together quite well. The VRM’s are keeping nice and cool now, as these things get real hot real quick even on the test bench

This weekend I’m hoping to install at least one of the OS’s I have planned but for now some pic's

It lives! the Purple Pentium Pro
Front.jpg

Fairly tidy even without the rounded IDE cables I got especially for it.
Inside.jpg

Back, just becasue
Back.jpg

Its a tight squeeze but the motherboard just fits
MB.jpg

Reply 1 of 14, by MrSmiley381

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What's the best use case for a PC like this? I've got a similar box that I'd like to use for some sort of unique gaming experience. Or are these machines destined to be office devices that can also play Starcraft?

I spend my days fighting with clunky software so I can afford to spend my evenings fighting with clunky hardware.

Reply 2 of 14, by liqmat

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Looks great man, although either the camera lens is dirty or just a lot of glare. I believe that mobo can take 512MB max BTW. Always like Antec cases for daily drivers. I am actually in the middle of a couple of builds, but it's my new daily driver that has me going in the vintage looks direction. I will post about that l8r.

Maybe someone with more technical knowledge than myself can explain it, but on those VRMs that come with the FIC PN-6210 board I have noticed they do run rather warm. I have different model VRMs and some run much cooler and don't have those heat plates on the top like in your photo. Any ideas why these run so hot yet others don't? Maybe just different designs in how they pipe heat? Either way, always a good idea to blow air across VRMs regardless.

Reply 3 of 14, by ph4nt0m

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liqmat wrote:

Maybe someone with more technical knowledge than myself can explain it, but on those VRMs that come with the FIC PN-6210 board I have noticed they do run rather warm. I have different model VRMs and some run much cooler and don't have those heat plates on the top like in your photo. Any ideas why these run so hot yet others don't? Maybe just different designs in how they pipe heat? Either way, always a good idea to blow air across VRMs regardless.

Some VRMs make use of cheaper MOSFETs with higher Rds(on). There are many decent alternatives nowadays which can improve VRM power efficiency by a factor of two at least. It doesn't take a great soldering skill for this job.

My Active Sales on CPU-World

Reply 4 of 14, by liqmat

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ph4nt0m wrote:
liqmat wrote:

Maybe someone with more technical knowledge than myself can explain it, but on those VRMs that come with the FIC PN-6210 board I have noticed they do run rather warm. I have different model VRMs and some run much cooler and don't have those heat plates on the top like in your photo. Any ideas why these run so hot yet others don't? Maybe just different designs in how they pipe heat? Either way, always a good idea to blow air across VRMs regardless.

Some VRMs make use of cheaper MOSFETs with higher Rds(on). There are many decent alternatives nowadays which can improve VRM power efficiency by a factor of two at least. It doesn't take a great soldering skill for this job.

Well, at least these just plug in, although as long as it's not tiny surface mount components I can be pretty handy with the iron.

Last edited by liqmat on 2019-05-03, 15:49. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 5 of 14, by FFXIhealer

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What made you want to have two Pentium processors fight each other? Is it going to be Mortal Kombat rules or Street Fighter rules?

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Reply 6 of 14, by chinny22

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FFXIhealer wrote:

What made you want to have two Pentium processors fight each other? Is it going to be Mortal Kombat rules or Street Fighter rules?

Fight? They are best buddies 😉 I checked the serial numbers almost consecutive! L7513157-0189 and L7513157-0191

liqmat wrote:

Looks great man, although either the camera lens is dirty or just a lot of glare.
I believe that mobo can take 512MB max BTW.

Bit of both, Mrs is the photographer, I'm just a point and click kind of guy. Man why did you tell me that! You really don't like my bank account do you, I'm looking at Ram again now!
And yeh Antec are just the right balance between decent but cheep. Love the looks of retro cases but airflow and cost stop me going down that path now.

So I've successfully installed NT3.51 for first time ever.
After reading about other people's problems I was expecting a fight, but it installed absolutely fine! Setup detected it was a Duel CPU system automatically and booted off the 8GB CF card fine.
Sound drivers I had didn't work and would complain about not detecting the card. Using the Yamaha Audician iso off vogons drivers fixed that and installs just fine now.
graphics and network cards installed fine first go, so my tip is do the research and find hardware the NT3.5 drivers.

I've also Installed:
IE5
Office 97

BackOffice 2.0 which includes:
Exchange 4.0
SQL 6.5
SMS 1.1

Earliest version Exchange I ever dealt with was Exchange 5.5 when I first started, for a small 5 user company and even then it was upgraded by end of the year.
SMS is used to deploy applications to Win95 or NT3x Thats on my long term todo list.
SQL is a requirement of SMS
Using Outlook 97 to connect to Exchange is interesting just to remember how basic Email was back in the mid 90's

Had to think about my partitions as well and ended up with

CF1
c:\ 1GB is Fat16 and Win98 "dos drive" Has to be Fat16 to allow NT to duel boot
The rest of the 8GB CF card is Fat32 for Dos games which fits in nicely able to play those few games that are to slow on my 486's but too fast on the P3. Not accessible from NT3

CF2,
4GB, The max NT Setup can handle without alot of messing around
The rest of the 8GB is NTFS Data drive where all the Backoffice stuff is installed

HDD 3
2GB Fat16, "scratch drive" This is where I have saved drivers and used as dump drive between OS's
The rest of this physical HDD is unused for now, as havent looked into it but seems like NT3 cant access extended partitions created by fdisk? maybe need to use dos6 rather then Win98's?

For now I am happy with this build, I do intend getting more CF cards to play around with Netware 3.12 and OS2 with SMP support as well, but prob not till next year

Reply 7 of 14, by FFXIhealer

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chinny22 wrote:
FFXIhealer wrote:

What made you want to have two Pentium processors fight each other? Is it going to be Mortal Kombat rules or Street Fighter rules?

Fight? They are best buddies 😉

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Reply 8 of 14, by mmx23

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superb build Chinny, luck you for that NIB motherboards. I'm fan of Pentium Pro's too. But why Nt 3.5 and not NT 4.0 with SP6 instead? Pentium PRO's will work little better on NT 4.0 in my opinion.

Reply 10 of 14, by chinny22

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mmx23 wrote:

superb build Chinny, luck you for that NIB motherboards. I'm fan of Pentium Pro's too. But why Nt 3.5 and not NT 4.0 with SP6 instead? Pentium PRO's will work little better on NT 4.0 in my opinion.

Few reasons,
I've already got NT4 on my Compaq Proliant 1600 with duel P3 600's running NT4, and to answer your next question 😉 yes Win 2000 or even 2003 would run fine on that but with its lack of ATX and USB NT4 just "felt" like a better match.

For my servers I like the hardware to be overkill for the OS, Once you start installing things like exchange boot times slow right down and as I'm just "playing" they tend to get rebooted fairly often.

I've been looking forward to playing with OS's I've never even seen used like Netware 3x, OS2, and me being me it had to be on a duel socket system but even I'll admit Duel P3 is stupid for those OS's. I stuck with the most familiar and went for a MS OS first.

But I agree NT4 would work fine for anyone else building a Duel PPro.

@ FFXIhealer, Nope, I'm trying to think but this is going straight over my head 🙁

Reply 11 of 14, by FFXIhealer

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Ok, so I think I may have to EXPLAIN my joke.

DUAL (with an A)
120GB-External-Hard-Drive-USB-Hard-Disk-2-0-HDD-for-Desktop-and-Laptop-hd-externo.jpg
"Dual" literally means two of something.

DUEL (with an E)
1200px-FrzDuellImBoisDeBoulogneDurand1874.jpg
"Duel" literally means fighting someone else.

Do you get the joke now? Duelling Pentiums.... fighting each other? Of course you don't think it's funny. I had to explain it. Every time you have to explain a joke, it's no longer funny.

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Reply 12 of 14, by liqmat

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Personally, my money is on the one meg.

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Last edited by liqmat on 2019-05-22, 14:44. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 13 of 14, by chinny22

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FFXIhealer wrote:

Ok, so I think I may have to EXPLAIN my joke.
Do you get the joke now? Duelling Pentiums.... fighting each other? Of course you don't think it's funny. I had to explain it. Every time you have to explain a joke, it's no longer funny.

You got a 1/2 laugh 1/2 groan (at myself) out of me, does that count?

Didn't realise my dual/duel mistake despite the rather obvious hints now it's pointed out.
As soon as I saw the picture I caught on... finally

Was worth it for that pic though