VOGONS


First post, by Soyburger

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Back in the late 90’s I purchased a NeTpower Symetra 2 Dual Pentium II 266 for video production. I know when it ultimately failed I opened it up and I’m pretty sure it used a Tyan or Supermicro motherboard. If anyone knows what they used I’d be super grateful. I’m trying to rebuild that old system and I think outside of their proprietary graphics cards - I had the NeTpower TrueFX Pro - everything else was off the shelf parts (the case may have been custom, but it was pretty plain)

Reply 1 of 3, by PC Hoarder Patrol

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Surprised I've never heard of them, given they seemed to be in close competition with Intergraph & SGI workstations, which I used extensively during that period.

You can still access their website on Wayback (looks as if they only lasted to the late 90s)

https://web.archive.org/web/19971210171300/ht … w.netpower.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.netpower.com/*
https://web.archive.org/web/19971108135737/ht … /pdfArchive.zip

though there isn't much on the Symetra 2

The attachment symetra2sm.jpg is no longer available

I did read one independant review claiming it was a quad-capable system (4 x PII 266) so that'd limit board vendor / choice.

All their TRUEfx graphics products seem to have been 3DLabs GLINT-based

https://web.archive.org/web/19980202084554/ht … truefxspec.html

Reviews / Info

https://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/news/ne … irepower-372201
https://www.cnet.com/news/workstations-get-do … entium-ii-dose/

Reply 2 of 3, by Soyburger

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Thanks for all the research. I know I really wanted an Intergraph, but for some unknown reason I went with this system. Mine definitely only had slots for 2 processors, so maybe if I had purchased one of the more expensive systems it would have had two more slots. Thanks for the picture too. You can see that the case design is super simple. It really feels like an off the shelf case, but maybe that little bit of molding below the drive bays made it custom.

Reply 3 of 3, by martinot

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I remember the name from the time (maybe read a review or seen some ads), but never used any of them myself. Thanks for the update!