That model is less overclockable but runs a bit faster than a base 256k pro

Single cpu ppro motherboards aren’t as difficult to find as multiprocessor machines,
Long ago I had bought a pallet of them from a tech college. Sold them off cheap, wish I would have kept a few

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-04-18, 21:05:

I obtained an intel pentium pro from a random assorted box of cpus i bought a while back and ever since i got the processor it has just been sitting on my shelf as a shelf piece. i was wondering if anyone here has had any experience using these processors, is it worth spending the money on a socket 8 motherboard for this chip? i believe this processor has two die's and contains 1 gram of gold.

The discussion of rendering a Pentium Pro processor for scrap gold is heresy against doctrine.

it is 110% worth keeping around. But to answer your question, if you already have a p-166 system, then building a ppro setup if going to be practically identical in performance. So unless you have a fetish for these chips, like I do, then the answer is going to be "not worth spending the money"

I have a Pentium Pro 200 (512kb) build.

In comparison to other Pentiums of the era, it's a bit of novelty build in my experience. For DOS gaming, a Pentium Pro will be comparable or even slower (e.g. Build-engine games) than a regular Pentium or Pentium MMX. I've done some bench marks in this thread: Pentium 200 vs Pentium MMX 200 vs Pentium Pro 200 (256kb & 512kb) DOS Benchmarks

On the other hand, for Quake or general Win 9x gaming, a Pentium Pro will run faster than an equivalent Pentium or Pentium MMX. But for Win 9x gaming there are better options (e.g. Pentium II / III).

Socket 8 boards are also rarer and command a higher price, so whether it's worth it depends on how much you value the novelty of a Pentium Pro build.

luckybob wrote on 2024-04-18, 22:14:

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winuser3162 wrote on 2024-04-18, 21:05:

I obtained an intel pentium pro from a random assorted box of cpus i bought a while back and ever since i got the processor it has just been sitting on my shelf as a shelf piece. i was wondering if anyone here has had any experience using these processors, is it worth spending the money on a socket 8 motherboard for this chip? i believe this processor has two die's and contains 1 gram of gold.

The discussion of rendering a Pentium Pro processor for scrap gold is heresy against doctrine.

it is 110% worth keeping around. But to answer your question, if you already have a p-166 system, then building a ppro setup if going to be practically identical in performance. So unless you have a fetish for these chips, like I do, then the answer is going to be "not worth spending the money"

Scrapping any CPU for gold is heresy in itself.

Except maybe mobile removable AMD E2 and Prescott Celerons IMO.

Like everyone else has said. Think of it as a fancy socket 7 and the Pentium Pro as the first Xeon chip.

Just as Slot 2 is comparable to Slot 1 or socket 775 to 771
Do these "enterprise" level systems offer any real benefit in a reto PC? not really.
Are they fun to play with and give a certain bragging rights to a subset of the reto community? you bet!

I'm in the same boat - I've had a Pentium Pro since 2019 and I've been keeping an eye out for a motherboard, but only if I can find a good deal on one.

Agree with all the answers. There is something special about a P.Pro even though it is not optimized for 16bit OS it is superb in full 32bit OS compared to Pentium.
As for boards have a Asus P6NP5 (my orig board) and added a Intel Venus and DFI G686IPA during the last 3-4 years.
This will most likely never happen again: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
Unfortunately the day of good deals on boards is now long past.....

Horun wrote on 2024-04-19, 02:23:

Agree with all the answers. There is something special about a P.Pro even though it is not optimized for 16bit OS it is superb in full 32bit OS compared to Pentium.

Exactly. Intel never intended DOS / Win95 as target audience when they designed the Pentium Pro. The Pentium Pro was meant as "serious workstation / server" processor, running operating systems like Unix (not specifically Linux, as that system was not popular yet when the Pentium Pro was designed) or Windows NT. Spending effort and money on getting a Pentium Pro system up and running just to use it for DOS and Windows 95 is quite pointless, unless you do it for "having a Pentium Pro system". Parts for a 300MHz Pentium II system should be easier and cheaper to get than parts for a 200MHz Pentium Pro system, and the Pentium II system should outperform the Pentium Pro system in most serious applications due to the higher clock frequency. Also I doubt you can get AGP-equipped mainboard for the Pentium Pro, which also is a point for building a Pentium II system as gaming rig. I don't know of a single selling point of the Pentium Pro that is relevant for retro gaming machines, and I also don't know any Windows 95 software specifically targetting the Pentium Pro and being dependent on the very fast (for the time) L2 cache you can use to show off the "full-speed L2 cache", and which will be considerably slower per MHz on a Pentium II system.

Technically, the Pentium Pro is very similar to a Pentium II, so I wouldn't think of it as a "Pentium Xeon" from that point of view, but more as a "Pentium II precursor". Yet, the original Pentium II had the on-processor-PCB L2 cache at half the clock rate, while the Pentium Pro had it operate at full clock rate, so as the Pentium II was introduced, it was more like the Pentium II is the "Pentium Pro cost-reduced" (and with MMX added, and possibly with some optimizations for 16-bit software).

On the other hand, looking at target audience instead of technology, it is sensible to consider the Pentium Pro as "Pentium Xeon": It was sold at the same time as the Pentium (especially the Pentium MMX), but while the Pentium MMX had desktop users with Windows 95 and/or DOS as target, the Pentium Pro targeted "heavy machines", which is exactly how the market is still divided into "Xeon" and "Pentium" branded processors.

Pentium Pro and Socket 8 were short lived technologies that are pretty valuable to collectors and enthusiasts, keep them. As for whether buying a board for that CPU is worth it depends on what you mean to get out of it. It will give you a big E-Penis. It will be slower and more expensive than a Pentium II for no real benefit. We like big E-Penises here so I would say go for it. I am still looking for a dual socket 8 board to get my build going though, and these boards are neither cheap nor plentiful.

PcBytes wrote on 2024-04-18, 22:54:

luckybob wrote on 2024-04-18, 22:14:

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winuser3162 wrote on 2024-04-18, 21:05:

I obtained an intel pentium pro from a random assorted box of cpus i bought a while back and ever since i got the processor it has just been sitting on my shelf as a shelf piece. i was wondering if anyone here has had any experience using these processors, is it worth spending the money on a socket 8 motherboard for this chip? i believe this processor has two die's and contains 1 gram of gold.

The discussion of rendering a Pentium Pro processor for scrap gold is heresy against doctrine.

it is 110% worth keeping around. But to answer your question, if you already have a p-166 system, then building a ppro setup if going to be practically identical in performance. So unless you have a fetish for these chips, like I do, then the answer is going to be "not worth spending the money"

Scrapping any CPU for gold is heresy in itself.

Except maybe mobile removable AMD E2 and Prescott Celerons IMO.

I once saw a seller on eBay scrapping around 50 INMOS Transputer processors (really soc's in current nomenclature), all gold topped variants, not the later plcc chips... I begged them to reconsider and sell them off individually, but was ignored.

It is painful to think that a reasonable proportion of the remaining Transputer chips in the world ended up melted in a bucket of acid....

Repo Man11 wrote on 2024-04-19, 00:55:

I'm in the same boat - I've had a Pentium Pro since 2019 and I've been keeping an eye out for a motherboard, but only if I can find a good deal on one.

You will have to discuss that with Luckybob and the hundred other people all wanting that good deal along with all the people who collect socket 8 stuff just because. Its a far bigger market than most assume and the collectors of socket 8 stuff seem to have super deep pockets, a lot of the good working socket 8 stuff seems to go for crazy amounts.

I only mention Luckybob because he seems to be the resident socket 8 fiend 🤣, that ASUS dual socket 8 setup he got recently with dual Pentium II Pros was a beast setup for socket 8, I wish I had the capital to have joined in on that series of auctions as they were all Australian based.

luckybob wrote on 2024-04-18, 22:14:

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winuser3162 wrote on 2024-04-18, 21:05:

I obtained an intel pentium pro from a random assorted box of cpus i bought a while back and ever since i got the processor it has just been sitting on my shelf as a shelf piece. i was wondering if anyone here has had any experience using these processors, is it worth spending the money on a socket 8 motherboard for this chip? i believe this processor has two die's and contains 1 gram of gold.

The discussion of rendering a Pentium Pro processor for scrap gold is heresy against doctrine.

it is 110% worth keeping around. But to answer your question, if you already have a p-166 system, then building a ppro setup if going to be practically identical in performance. So unless you have a fetish for these chips, like I do, then the answer is going to be "not worth spending the money"

Identical till you try running 16bit DOS applications on that PPro at which point the P166 should be much faster, 32bit stuff though they should be neck and neck.

PPros were meant to be NT workstations or servers, why people want to game on them I don't know.

Good deals on motherboards ran out a long time ago.

Unknown_K wrote on 2024-04-19, 08:42:

PPros were meant to be NT workstations or servers, why people want to game on them I don't know.

Good deals on motherboards ran out a long time ago.

because very few if anyone wants to use these as a server anymore and honestly NT4 is as boring as plain white paper so naturally gaming becomes a fun entertaining thing you tend to do with old hardware .. yes even server hardware.

That said throw a Pentium II Pro in there and they are perfectly good gaming setups.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-04-19, 08:37:

luckybob wrote on 2024-04-18, 22:14:

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winuser3162 wrote on 2024-04-18, 21:05:

I obtained an intel pentium pro from a random assorted box of cpus i bought a while back and ever since i got the processor it has just been sitting on my shelf as a shelf piece. i was wondering if anyone here has had any experience using these processors, is it worth spending the money on a socket 8 motherboard for this chip? i believe this processor has two die's and contains 1 gram of gold.

The discussion of rendering a Pentium Pro processor for scrap gold is heresy against doctrine.

it is 110% worth keeping around. But to answer your question, if you already have a p-166 system, then building a ppro setup if going to be practically identical in performance. So unless you have a fetish for these chips, like I do, then the answer is going to be "not worth spending the money"

Identical till you try running 16bit DOS applications on that PPro at which point the P166 should be much faster, 32bit stuff though they should be neck and neck.

The regular Pentium should not be neck and neck with the similar clocked Pentium Pro at 32bit code; the PPro has a much more advanced pipeline, out of order and speculative execution, better branch prediction etc, faster and larger cache. There's a reason that the PII is largely based on the design of the PPro.

Yes there is a penalty for mixed code... but I'm fairly sure that noone was buying PPro machines to use on Dos and Win3.1/95 at the time, they were very much positioned as high end workstation equipment in all of the period reviews.

megatron-uk wrote on 2024-04-19, 09:12:

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-04-19, 08:37:

luckybob wrote on 2024-04-18, 22:14:

https://y.yarn.co/13ab7690-cbe1-459e-a54f-fc0f7d4f802c_text.gif […]
Show full quote

The discussion of rendering a Pentium Pro processor for scrap gold is heresy against doctrine.

it is 110% worth keeping around. But to answer your question, if you already have a p-166 system, then building a ppro setup if going to be practically identical in performance. So unless you have a fetish for these chips, like I do, then the answer is going to be "not worth spending the money"

Identical till you try running 16bit DOS applications on that PPro at which point the P166 should be much faster, 32bit stuff though they should be neck and neck.

The regular Pentium should not be neck and neck with the similar clocked Pentium Pro at 32bit code; the PPro has a much more advanced pipeline, out of order and speculative execution, better branch prediction etc, faster and larger cache. There's a reason that the PII is largely based on the design of the PPro.

Yes there is a penalty for mixed code... but I'm fairly sure that noone was buying PPro machines to use on Dos and Win3.1/95 at the time, they were very much positioned as high end workstation equipment in all of the period reviews.

Not sure why people are getting hung up on the past and talking about it as if its at all relevant to building a Pentium Pro system now.

So in theory it should be faster at pure 32bit code, but that doesn't really apply to using it now for a DOS retro games machine where it will most certainly be running 16bit and mixed code and taking a performance hit because of that. So in practise that Pentium 166 should be faster for DOS retro gaming and be head to head in mixed code, that said its trivial to overclock that 166 or swap it out for something with MMX or more grunt, not so much with a Pentium Pro.

The very real drawback for Pentium Pro system is lack of MMX unless you shell out for a Pentium II Overdrive. (Really just a PII Xeon processor)

On a side note, are there any available heatsinks for the Pentium Pros still available or is it even more painful to find than mainboards/CPUs?
I still have 2 black PPro 1MB around....had a dual-socket Iwill DP6NS system for years.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-04-19, 10:46:

The very real drawback for Pentium Pro system is lack of MMX unless you shell out for a Pentium II Overdrive. (Really just a PII Xeon processor)

MMX is basically useless for these processors.

Minutemanqvs wrote on 2024-04-19, 10:53:

On a side note, are there any available heatsinks for the Pentium Pros still available or is it even more painful to find than mainboards/CPUs?
I still have 2 black PPro 1MB around....had a dual-socket Iwill DP6NS system for years.

You mean this?

PS: no affiliation with the seller.