bloodem wrote on 2024-04-19, 11:02:

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.

Well...yes. Last time I looked nothing was available or prices stupidly high.

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.

In another thread I theorized that the flower style Socket AM2/3 coolers should in theory fit Socket 8 and I have 3 such specimens. I never got around to test them on a board though.

I miss the Intel Pentium Pro 200Mhz (1mb) black one from my cpu collection. I had one Socket 8 board, but i do not have it anymore.

https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium- ... 201M).html

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-04-19, 08:30:

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.

There are no good deals left on 3DFX video cards, but in late 2022 I bought one (Voodoo 3) as an item of a lot of old computer parts for $50.00 that also included a 6800 Ultra AGP. I'm playing the long game on this, but it is true that I may never find an acceptable deal and my CPU will continue to do nothing but collect dust. So it goes.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2024-04-19, 12:47:

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-04-19, 08:30:

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.

There are no good deals left on 3DFX video cards, but in late 2022 I bought one (Voodoo 3) as an item of a lot of old computer parts for $50.00 that also included a 6800 Ultra AGP. I'm playing the long game on this, but it is true that I may never find an acceptable deal and my CPU will continue to do nothing but collect dust. So it goes.

I bought an old NEC server box on the cheap .. it was socket 8 with on board scsi, I say cheap but it was still 250 AUD which is cheap for a complete working socket 8 system, had a nice 1Mb PPro 200 in it, eventually swapped it out for a Pentium II Overdrive 333 when I managed to snag one for half what they normally sell for. I framed that PPro, its one of the lovely black models and still looked in mint condition, I didn't want to sell it on so it got a place up on the display shelf with my other unique parts.

I say keep your eye on old server boxes that are known to be socket 8, they are another option here.

appiah4 wrote on 2024-04-19, 10:58:

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.

Useless in what way ?

Yes I know that back in the day they were only HEDT machines ...but every single CPU after these all had MMX including every single server CPU so its not useless, there was no reason to omit it from the Pentium Pro as cost saving with these CPUs was hardly a consideration for Intel or the consumer.

Thankfully Intel did correct their mistake and add it when they used the Pentium Pro as the basis for the PII core.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-04-19, 13:08:

Useless in what way ? […]
Show full quote

appiah4 wrote on 2024-04-19, 10:58:

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.

Useless in what way ?

Yes I know that back in the day they were only HEDT machines ...but every single CPU after these all had MMX including every single server CPU so its not useless, there was no reason to omit it from the Pentium Pro as cost saving with these CPUs was hardly a consideration for Intel or the consumer.

Thankfully Intel did correct their mistake and add it when they used the Pentium Pro as the basis for the PII core.

It is useless in the sense that it is not required for and does not bring any substantial performance improvements to any contemporary application.

appiah4 wrote on 2024-04-19, 11:04:

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.

In another thread I theorized that the flower style Socket AM2/3 coolers should in theory fit Socket 8 and I have 3 such specimens. I never got around to test them on a board though.

Ah yes I remember now! The issue was (if I remember) to cover the CPU die and the cache chips, as they are quite far away from each other.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-04-19, 13:08:

appiah4 wrote on 2024-04-19, 10:58:

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.

Useless in what way ?

Yes I know that back in the day they were only HEDT machines ...but every single CPU after these all had MMX including every single server CPU so its not useless, there was no reason to omit it from the Pentium Pro as cost saving with these CPUs was hardly a consideration for Intel or the consumer.

Why do you think MMX is an advantage for server processors? Having that die space taken up by microcode decoding and mmx to fpu register liasing logic sitting there and no server workload compiled to make use of MMX instructions is absolutely the definition of useless! MMX is not so great in terms of its implementation, with the FPU being blocked from execution by the fact that MMX is implemented within the fpu registers, so you lost the ability to simultaneously execute an integer and fpu instruction. SSE which came afterwards was a far better implementation.

The reason every server processor after that had MMX built in was because Intel did not have the product segmentation that they do now - they didn't have a different core arrangement for desktop vs workstation vs server vs scientific computing. Yes, they invented some artificial segmentation with the introduction of the early Xeon designs, but that was largely to restrict the use of the cheaper Pentium brand to the consumer devices, and charge a premium for a not-so-very-different-implementation for those who could afford more than 2-way SMP.

Wanting the PPro to have access to the instruction set when it was first released a year later is a little bit of wishful thinking. Yeah, it would have been a great idea to include it, especially given the more workstation focus of the Pro, but that would have needed the MMX technology to be released in 1994 or 1995.... and it just wasn't available.

Ultimately I think we can all agree that a PPro for mixed-use DOS gaming is sub-optimal at best... harder to acquire... and more expensive to purchase. That doesn't take anything away from the fact that the design of the PPro really the genesis of the 'Core' line of processors we still use now, and it was a big step in the right direction; with the focus on 32bit performance which was clearly the future.

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.

Shoot me a PM - I have some OEM dual-fan ones knocking about. But I suspect shipping would kill the deal.

Honestly, just use a large-ish socket 7 cooler. So long as all the gold area is covered, you'll be fine.

luckybob wrote on 2024-04-19, 14:00:

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.

Shoot me a PM - I have some OEM dual-fan ones knocking about. But I suspect shipping would kill the deal.

Honestly, just use a large-ish socket 7 cooler. So long as all the gold area is covered, you'll be fine.

The sockets are not even close in size, the clamp on a socket 7 cooler will not work..

yea, you gotta jury-rig the clamp, but its a 35W chip. you don't need heat pipes and 20 pounds of copper to do the job.

-

appiah4 wrote on 2024-04-19, 07:09:

Pentium Pro and Socket 8 were short lived technologies

Short-lived? PPro was introduced in 1995 and superseded by P2 in 1997. That is as long as Intel's flagship as the P2 managed and longer than the P3. The reason PPros are so rare isn't that they were on the market for a short time, it's that they served a specific very expensive niche, and did not offer compelling performance benefits for mainstream computing (er, unless you considered Quake to be the only game in town). So they sold in small numbers to people running 32-bit code and FPU-heavy loads who nonetheless wanted an x86 system to do that on - and happily did so until the Pentium 2 came along that offered everything the PPro could do at a lower price and higher clocks. Oh, and with better 16 bit code performance, AGP and DMA IDE and yes, even MMX (for if you had a Winmodem).

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-04-19, 13:08:

[...] […]
Show full quote

[...]

Useless in what way ?

Yes I know that back in the day they were only HEDT machines ...but every single CPU after these all had MMX including every single server CPU so its not useless, there was no reason to omit it from the Pentium Pro as cost saving with these CPUs was hardly a consideration for Intel or the consumer.

Thankfully Intel did correct their mistake and add it when they used the Pentium Pro as the basis for the PII core.

What mistake? The PPro is older than the MMX instruction set; Intel's engineers were at the top of their game back in 1995, but even they couldn't time-travel and include something developed a year later.

Moreover, it was useless and the fact all Intel CPUs introduced from 1996 onward had it doesn't in any way change that. All humans are born with an appendix but it doesn't do anything and we can live without it. MMX was touted as 'multimedia extensions' but in fact that type of SIMD operations were rare and moreover the instructions weren't even utilized for the things they could have been until essentially the whole non-MMX legacy was no longer in mainstream use, i.e. from around 1999 onwards. So nothing a PPro could sensibly run would have needed or even benefited from having MMX instructions. Same story with SSE - it was the difference between P2 and P3, but by the time software actually started using it, P3s were long gone.

mkarcher wrote on 2024-04-19, 06:50:

Exactly. Intel never intended DOS / Win95 as target audience when they designed the Pentium Pro. The Pentium Pro was meant as "s […]
Show full quote

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.

i think if i do manage to find a board that supports the intel pentium pro for a good cost, ill put my original box copy of windows NT 4.0 to good use. the copy i have used to be sealed but since i dont really ever plan on reselling it i opened it for my own use.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-04-19, 08:30:

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.

for sure, ive checked ebay a few times and it seems most socket 8 boards go for aound 400$ on average.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-04-19, 08:48:

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.

yeah i mean aside from the cool galaxy background art of the splash screen and the gorgeous start up and shut down sounds, NT4 isnt a very useful OS today when compared to something like windows 95. unless someone is doing some networking or trying to run some sort of retro server.

-

I used Win2k since the last beta on a dual PPro on a PR440FX Intel board, so you are not stuck with NT4. Also, the PPro overdrives I upgraded that board with are noticeably faster (the older chips went into a different motherboard).

winuser3162 wrote on 2024-04-19, 18:00:

yeah i mean aside from the cool galaxy background art of the splash screen and the gorgeous start up and shut down sounds, NT4 isnt a very useful OS today when compared to something like windows 95. unless someone is doing some networking or trying to run some sort of retro server.

Many moons ago, there used to be a website that listed games that would run/were compatible with Windows NT 4. Can't recall the address anymore (probably archived on the Wayback Machine), but maybe someone with a better memory will know where to look. It was very useful when you wanted to take a break at work in that dark corner of the data center. ;-)