A PPro for mere gaming, that's sacrilege!
I'm kidding of course part of me quite enjoys using these enterprise level systems to simply play games and with your choice of a ISA sound card you can even drop back to dos gaming if you wanted (always a bonus in my book)

chinny22 wrote on 2022-09-29, 10:05:

A PPro for mere gaming, that's sacrilege!
I'm kidding of course part of me quite enjoys using these enterprise level systems to simply play games and with your choice of a ISA sound card you can even drop back to dos gaming if you wanted (always a bonus in my book)

I have a Pentium II Overdrive build ...for gaming!, though its not running windows right now so its a pure DOS gaming rig, threw a nice 128bit MX4000 PCI in it with a AWE64 + Simmconn and a Voodoo 1 and it so far has run every dos game I have thrown at it. I dont play old obscure DOS games that throw fits at Vesa 2.0+ cards 🤣 as I have an even older decrepit P50 machine for that purpose with some Cirrus Logic card in it.

Not sure if I will upgrade it to have Win95 OSR1 on it but it might be fun to do a Floppy disk install of 95, not sure how the MX4000 will like 95 though, there are drivers for it but no clue if they will play nice with OSR1.

Might have to drop it back to a MX400 PCI or TnT2 M64 PCI to get some compatible drivers...I have a lot of PCI based cards to swap to 🤣 so I will eventually hit one that works well if the MX4000 doesnt.

(That 128bit MX4000 was a lucky buy .. I never knew that a 128bit version was ever made but it for sure is and with 128meg of Vram its honestly a little gem of a card, has quickly become one of my favourite cards)

I cant wait to see the OPs performance with a Voodoo5 PCI and the PII OD, it should make for a pretty sweet rig.

chinny22 wrote on 2022-09-29, 10:05:

A PPro for mere gaming, that's sacrilege!
I'm kidding of course part of me quite enjoys using these enterprise level systems to simply play games and with your choice of a ISA sound card you can even drop back to dos gaming if you wanted (always a bonus in my book)

This ones'a pure experiment, as I'm well aware that a dual Pentium Pro system has no benefit as far as gaming is concerned! Besides the U160 Raid card running a RAID 0 system drive, this system will also receive a Pentium II Overdrive, its full complement (768MB) of RAM and a Voodoo5 PCI graphics card.

So it should be pretty interesting once it's complete!

Buy the way, I also have this ASUS Dual Pentium Pro board, which will be built up next, but I plan to use more period specific hardware in this next build!

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-09-29, 12:56:

I cant wait to see the OPs performance with a Voodoo5 PCI and the PII OD, it should make for a pretty sweet rig.

It should definitely be interesting!

Irinikus wrote on 2022-09-29, 13:20:

This ones'a pure experiment, as I'm well aware that a dual Pentium Pro system has no benefit as far as gaming is concerned! Besi […]
Show full quote

chinny22 wrote on 2022-09-29, 10:05:

A PPro for mere gaming, that's sacrilege!
I'm kidding of course part of me quite enjoys using these enterprise level systems to simply play games and with your choice of a ISA sound card you can even drop back to dos gaming if you wanted (always a bonus in my book)

This ones'a pure experiment, as I'm well aware that a dual Pentium Pro system has no benefit as far as gaming is concerned! Besides the U160 Raid card running a RAID 0 system drive, this system will also receive a Pentium II Overdrive, its full complement (768MB) of RAM and a Voodoo5 PCI graphics card.

So it should be pretty interesting once it's complete!

Buy the way, I also have this ASUS Dual Pentium Pro board, which will be built up next, but I plan to use more period specific hardware in this next build!

Oh my, that Dual Socket 8 board is beautiful, cant wait to see the thread about this lovely bit of kit being built up!

It has one of those proprietary ASUS expansion cards.

It does indeed!

It's a MediaBus card consisting of an ADAPTEC 2940UW SCSI Card and a CREATIVE Sound Card.

Irinikus wrote on 2022-09-29, 13:51:

It does indeed! […]
Show full quote

It does indeed!

It's a MediaBus card consisting of an ADAPTEC 2940UW SCSI Card and a CREATIVE Sound Card.

you better OPL mod that sucker

Irinikus wrote on 2022-09-29, 13:51:

It does indeed! […]
Show full quote

It does indeed!

It's a MediaBus card consisting of an ADAPTEC 2940UW SCSI Card and a CREATIVE Sound Card.

IIRC there is two other dual socket boards for this motherboard .. dual socket 7 is one I cant remember the other but I want to say dual slot 1.

Just looked it up and yup its Dual Slot 1 supporting dual Pentium II.

Such an awesome board, but I suspect the Dual socket 7 and Slot 1 boards would be exceptionally hard to find.

The seller that I bought this board from had the Dual Socket-7 board available as well, but I didn't take it, as I was only interested in the Pentium Pro. The Socket-1 didn't really interest me either, as the Pentium II is pretty similar to the Pentium III, and I already have a Silicon Graphics 320 Visual Workstation equipped with dual Pentium III's @ 1.2GHz.

Still, I may look at getting them in the future! 😀

https://m.hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/125-powerleap-pl-proii/

Technically it is possible to put a higher chip than a pentium II overdrive in that 😀

It certainly looks interesting, but it also appears to be much less common than the Pentium II Overdrive.

They do mention that it does suffer from compatibility issues with Award BIOS though! And both of the boards that I have run Award BIOS!

Irinikus wrote on 2022-09-29, 21:25:

It certainly looks interesting, but it also appears to be much less common than the Pentium II Overdrive.

They do mention that it does suffer from compatibility issues with Award BIOS though! And both of the boards that I have run Award BIOS!

oh well your sig really hurts my eyes.

otherwise, nice hardware!

Excellent SGI stuff in your signature link. Flipping the pics over and over again.
+1

Bonus points awarded for Blender, Maya and Catia on Irix.
Warm Motiff memories.

pshipkov wrote on 2022-09-30, 03:46:

Excellent SGI stuff in your signature link. Flipping the pics over and over again. +1 […]
Show full quote

Excellent SGI stuff in your signature link. Flipping the pics over and over again.
+1

Bonus points awarded for Blender, Maya and Catia on Irix.
Warm Motiff memories.

Thanks Man! 😀

Here's a comparison between the drive performance of an IDE drive (on the left-hand side) and a 10K RPM SCSI drive (on the right-hand side) in this system:

what's interesting to note is that the IDE drive outperforms the SCSI drive slightly in some cases, when dealing with smaller files (the first three rows), but the SCSI drive then dominates from there!

Another interesting thing to note is that the IDE drives's read speeds seem to be much faster than it's write speeds and in the SCSI drive's case, its write speeds are slightly better than its read speeds!

I can't wait to see how the U160 SCSI RAID card performs with two 15K RPM drives in a RAID 0 configuration!!!

Your SCSI drive is 2-3 times faster (compare the numbers, not the lines) than your IDE drive. And it is limited by UW SCSI bus.

PC-Engineer wrote on 2022-10-02, 22:00:

(compare the numbers, not the lines)

if you reread his post carefully, you will see he is doing exactly that

Yes, you are right - my mistake