Overall it's a very cool looking system - I like the "slot down" mounting for the expansion cards, and how the optical drives are mounted. Very cool case!

It's tough with a machine like this with NT vs 9x because it probably won't do so hot with Windows 2000; I'd say DOS or 9x and then put NT or *nix on another partition for when you want to play around with SMP (if you end up adding another CPU that is). If you never touch SMP, just go 9x or keep it with DOS and let it ride. If it supports the "black chips" I'd go with a pair of those just for grins, I don't recall them being too expensive any more, just not very common (Pentium Pros have fallen victim to gold salvaging over recent years). Like this combo lot: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Pentium-Pro-200Mhz-1M … =item27e37d1b0e

As far as similar machines, I've worked on a few ProLiants over the years, never a Pentium Pro though. The best I remember was a dual Pentium III (it only had one CPU mounted), and it was fairly similar looking pedestal to this one, and an absolute darling to deal with. Everything just worked the way it was supposed, and it was easy to take apart and put back together. The worst was a QP Xeon II rackmount that had four CPUs on cards, two RAM expansion cards, PCI riser cards, multiple PSU mounts (and a card for that), etc etc - everything was setup with interlock sensors and if it wasn't fitted "just so" it would throw up a ton of errors and refuse to boot. It also had this awful management/instrumentation controller that was spidered into everything, the idea behind it was that it could "phone home" (to its owner/operator) if something bad happened to it in the datacenter/rack while nobody was around, but it ended up just being more grief than it was worth (the thing had its own dedicated modem, among other things). I also know that system wasn't very well cared for - it was a workhorse and it was treated as such. I'm guessing if it had been better cared for, it wouldnt've been as finicky, but I honestly don't know.

As far as graphics goes, I'm guessing anything beyond the Voodoo SLI is going to be limited by the Pentium Pro (either the lack of MMX or the fact that it's "only" a 200MHz CPU) - you could probably stick a PCI Rage or TNT2 or what-have-you in there as a quick'n'dirty all-in-one solution that'd provide good performance. If you really wanted to go nuts, and don't mind spending a reasonable amount of time (and potentially money), something like a Symmetric GLyder/MP would probably be "era accurate" for a monster PPro workstation.

That'd be this card:
https://web.archive.org/web/19980615014402/ht … roducts/mp.html

No idea what it'd be like for games, but it'd certainly be cool. 😎

Thanks once again for some great info....I think that I may just go the pure dos route for the most part...I may just keep the s3 and the voodoo1 in there for now...you're right...anything faster than V2 sli would probably just be under utilized with the pro 200 mhz cpu. I may also try win 98 to see how well some games perform...I have a feeling that some early flight sims I like may run nicely on a pentium pro. I do have a faster pII 400 system but I think this ppro will hold up to be more compatible with a lot of later dos games.

Also...along the lines of reliability that you touch upon...I think this system is solid with chips everywhere saying made in Japan and USA instead of just China and Taiwan. ..There's plenty in this system from chassis to motherboard and even the power supply to suggest a very solidly built piece of hardware. I'm looking forward to doing some benchmarking as soon as I set it all up to see what it can really do....I know there are limitations with ppro systems but I think it will fly in dos for the most part...I'm just concerned about compatibility...but we'll see.

Something else I remembered/thought of - there's a Pentium II Overdrive module for Socket 8. I doubt they support SMP, but if you're just keeping it with DOS or 9x, that might be a better consideration as an upgrade for the CPU than going with fancier Pentium Pro models.

obobskivich wrote:

Something else I remembered/thought of - there's a Pentium II Overdrive module for Socket 8. I doubt they support SMP, but if you're just keeping it with DOS or 9x, that might be a better consideration as an upgrade for the CPU than going with fancier Pentium Pro models.

Yes the owner manual does mention the overdrive being compatible and I think SMP is supported, but it is hard to find those overdrive cpu's and they are quite expensive when I do see them come up for sale. I think the PPRO 200 will be fast enough for now, but I think I will be keeping an eye out for the overdrive just in case I find one at a good price.

Should've mentioned that: I have absolutely no idea what pricing/availability is like, I just remembered the chips existed. 😊 Did not know that SMP was possible - that's neat. I wonder if one could stack six of them in one of those ALR monsters... 🤣

PPro Overdives support 2 CPUs in SMP.

Oh my....
This is a beautiful system. I would love to have something like this.

You should probably go with Windows NT 4 Workstation. DOS and 9x won't take full advantage of the hardware you have.
Sure, you won't have much in terms of Direct3D acceleration (forget about the unofficial DX5 patch, it doesn't really work), but you will still have full OpenGL and Glide at your disposal.
Another downside to NT is shoddy 16-bit (Win3x application) and DOS support. Suppose you could have a seperate partition or drive with 9x on it, though.
But the stability and performance in the applications and games that take advantage of this hardware would be worth it.

Lets say you were going to use this for actual server tasks. NT 4 is good, but you might consider a UNIX-like system, such as Solaris, GNU/Linux, or a BSD distribution.
As a server these days, although neat, consumes waaayyy more power than even the earliest Xeon systems, and a long uptime will drive your electricity bill up like crazy. So probably not a good idea, at least not full-time. Perhaps just for a bit for fun.

Unknown_K wrote:

PPro Overdives support 2 CPUs in SMP.

Learn something new everyday. Thanks for the info! 😀

swampfox wrote:

Oh my.... This is a beautiful system. I would love to have something like this. […]
Show full quote

Oh my....
This is a beautiful system. I would love to have something like this.

You should probably go with Windows NT 4 Workstation. DOS and 9x won't take full advantage of the hardware you have.
Sure, you won't have much in terms of Direct3D acceleration (forget about the unofficial DX5 patch, it doesn't really work), but you will still have full OpenGL and Glide at your disposal.
Another downside to NT is shoddy 16-bit (Win3x application) and DOS support. Suppose you could have a seperate partition or drive with 9x on it, though.
But the stability and performance in the applications and games that take advantage of this hardware would be worth it.

Lets say you were going to use this for actual server tasks. NT 4 is good, but you might consider a UNIX-like system, such as Solaris, GNU/Linux, or a BSD distribution.
As a server these days, although neat, consumes waaayyy more power than even the earliest Xeon systems, and a long uptime will drive your electricity bill up like crazy. So probably not a good idea, at least not full-time. Perhaps just for a bit for fun.

ya it will be more for using only once in a while...I won't have it running too long for the most part so power consumption won't be an issue. I am leaning toward using windows NT more and more especially if I do end up using this system in smp. ..no matter what I do I will for sure keep a separate partition with dos and maybe win9x.

Thanks for the advice on DX5. ..I most likely will not try to run anything that uses anything above DX5 anyways...I prefer to run the oldest compatible games as fast a possible but without sacrificing compatibility.

obobskivich wrote:

Unknown_K wrote:

PPro Overdives support 2 CPUs in SMP.

Learn something new everyday. Thanks for the info! 😀

I have a pair on a PR440FX Intel board, they are a nice speed improvement over the stock 200Mhz 256K cache PPRo's. For 4/6 way servers you are stuck.