feipoa wrote on 2020-02-23, 13:07:

H3nrik V! wrote on 2020-02-23, 06:05:

So very cool, running dual p55's!

...but with very non-matching interposers, fans, and heatsinks 🙁

who cares? it works!

maxtherabbit wrote on 2020-02-23, 19:13:

feipoa wrote on 2020-02-23, 13:07:

H3nrik V! wrote on 2020-02-23, 06:05:

So very cool, running dual p55's!

...but with very non-matching interposers, fans, and heatsinks 🙁

who cares? it works!

Exactly ! Someday in the future might try to match up the HS+Fans for appearance but as long as the cpu adapters work no need to ever change them out.

Some people's focus is functionality, others is looks; mine is both. If after some years I cannot procure an additional Evergreen or Kingston, I suppose I have a heatsink that matches the Evergreen and I can thermally epoxy it to the Kingston to increase the symmetry.

Those things are very expensive IF you can find one. Have two for 486's but none for pentiums.

feipoa wrote on 2020-02-23, 21:48:

Some people's focus is functionality, others is looks; mine is both. If after some years I cannot procure an additional Evergreen or Kingston, I suppose I have a heatsink that matches the Evergreen and I can thermally epoxy it to the Kingston to increase the symmetry.

I think we're on the same page, then .. I prefer function over looks, but of course, IF possible .. 😀

It's not a coincidence I have 2 Golden Orbs lying around to be modified to fit on one of my ABiT BP6's 😁

I hadn't expected to find another Kingston i233mmx so quickly, but as luck would have it, a CPU collector on CPU-World was planning a liquidation of his collection. The fan on the module was turn on then stopping, but after inspecting it, there was a wire (probably the one that connects to the armature windings) had broken free from its solder joint.

That looks a lot better now.

I was surprised to see the Raytheon chip inside the Kingston module. I haven't see a Raytheon chip on any of my vintage computer items so far.

For those of you who don't like the sound of the NEC-supplied Sensflow fan, I have tested two replacement options which are available at Mouser and Digikey. These were the quietest fans I could find with 3-wire in 120x120x25-38 mm sizes.

1. Mechatronics G1225L12B2-FSR
2. Sanyo Denki 9G1212M1011

The Senslow fan, which is on the far right in the photographs, is 38 mm deep and 120 mm x 120 mm. The Sanyo Denki matches those dimensions, while the Mechatronics is only 25 mm deep. Mechatronics is 29 dB(A) with 66 CFM and the Sanyo Denki is 32 dB(A) with 74 CFM. If you do not play to drop the fan voltage from 12 V, the Mechatronics was more pleasant to my ear, though the Sanyo Denki is still significantly quieter than the Sensflow.

As I am using fans on upgrade modules, a high flow rate case fan wasn't that important anymore. I decided to keep with the factory depth of 38 mm, but I added a 47-ohm resistor (1-W) to the Sanyo Denki's wiring to drop the voltage by a measured 4.65 V, meaning the fan is running 7.35 V.

If you are using the supplied P200 CPUs and don't plan on dropping the voltage, I would use the Mechatronics fan.

The supplied Sensflow fan has what appears to be a thermistor, RTD, or other type of sensor which adjusts the fan speed based on sensor input. But even in the slow state, the fan makes an irritating sound. I'm not sure if this noise is due to age or was like this when new.

Nice find with that second turbo chip. How does the system perform with dual mmx 233's? If your in the states or Canada take a look at www.frozencpu.com they have a large selection of quite high flow fans and other cooling parts. Their prices are good as well I buy alot from them.

Thanks for the tip. Most of those 120x120x38 mm fans on that site are trying to push 100+ CFM, so they are loud. There is an exception though, at 18 dB(A): https://www.frozencpu.com/products/4274/fan-2 … ?tl=g36c781s562

Your welcome. I do own a few of the fans you linked and it's very quiet and moves a ton of air.

I've run into a little snag related to using NTFS for Windows 98 for installation of games. It seems that the installers for games only see my NTFS partition (from within Win98SE) as around 2 GB. Once I've filled up more than 2 GB, the game installers claim there is not enough disk space and will exit. Is there a way to bypass this check in games?

EDIT: I started a new thread on this topic. No takers so far. Is there any way to bypass available hard drive space detection when installing games or other software?

I have a plan of action though - convert the W2K NTFS drive to FAT32 then see if the game installers can see the full size. Then install all the games. At which point, I can then either leave it as FAT32 or convert it back to NTFS.

EDIT2: I don't recommend trying to convert NTFS to FAT32, at least not in the configuration I have where W2K is setup as an extended partition rather than a primary.

EDIT3: Received the same error when trying to resize the W2K partition in both PQ Magic DOS boot and within W2K where the W2K boot drive was on another system so that the target HDD would not be locked. Thought I could make another FAT32 partition, but I've reached a snag. Might be time to reconsider the LAN Adaptec BIOS option.

EDIT4: Another idea I have is to use Norton Ghost 2003. I can make a clone of the Proserva's HDD, but upon making the clone, specify the size of the W2K partition is a lot smaller to leave allocated space.

I suppose you could install the game on a small partition and move it. Or you could hack the installer by jumping past the space check part, might be easy or not.
My drive is all FAT32 including where W2k sits. Have not tried to install a true DOS game yet so not sure what will happen if I try to put it on the extended 6Gb partition.

In retrospect, I'd have made the W2K partition FAT32. I might have to reinstall W2K if the Norton clone doesn't work as expected. I've done the clone, but haven't tested it yet. The 36 GB SCSI drive will look like this:

4 GB, NTFS, primary partition: NT4
4 GB, FAT32, primary partition: W98SE
12 GB, NTFS, logical drive in extended partition: W2K
15 GB, FAT 32, logical drive in extended partition: FAT32

For pure DOS games, I'd just install them to the 4 GB FAT32 partition.

A user in the other post has suggested that I fill up the HDD with dummy ISO ROMs to confuse the installer. I doubt this will work, but I'll try it anyway.

Norton Ghost was able to make an image of my Proserva's HDD and leave 14 GB of unallocated space, however when I tried to boot W2K from the newly cloned HDD, I receive the following error:

I'm not sure why this is, but it probably has something to do with the reduced size of the W2K partition. When I look in the boot.ini file, which is located on the NT4 C:\ partition, I see:

[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=signature(ed90ed90)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINNT
[operating systems]
signature(ed90ed90)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINNT="Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
c:\bootsect.w98="Windows 98SE"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows NT Workstation 4.0"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows NT Workstation 4.0 [VGA mode]" /basevideo /sos

I've never seen this signature(ed90ed90)disk(1) designation before, perhaps because I have always had W2K as a primary partition in the past. Is this some type of emulated boot device and is it related to my problem with Ghost?

Here's what the pre-clonned HDD looks like:

The saga continues. I went ahead and reinstalled W2K on a primary partition this time (not extended) and using FAT32 with the intention of storing the w98games in a folder on the W2K partition. I went to copy some system update files and then it hit me why I never use FAT32 for NT5+ OSes:

I don't want to have to click Yes every time I copy over files with fancy NTFS characteristics. These little details bother me enough to forge on to a better solution. I am going to try converting the FAT32 partition to NTFS using convert e: /fs:ntfs. I am hoping that the previously noted issue with Paragon NTFS for Windows 98 and the game installations not finding enough disk space is related to the NTFS drive being an extended partition. Now that it is a primary partition, I'm hoping this solves the problem. If not, then I have no choice but to create separate partitions for W2K and w98games.

Note that all this fiasco could be solved by having the updated Adaptec 2940W code on this motherboard's BIOS. It is tempting to just throw in the 2940W PCI card rather than using the onboard SCSI. It is also tempting to just throw in another SCSI HDD to use for w98games.

W98 still did not like writing to NTFS partitions, so this is what I ended up with that worked:

NT4 - NTFS - 4 GB
W98 - FAT32 - 4 GB
W2K - NTFS - 12 GB
W98GAMES - FAT32 - 14.3 GB

All 4 partitions are setup as Primary Partitions. PQMagic was able to resize the W2K partition now. I struggled over what ratio of GB to give to W2K and what to w98games. Could have gone 10 GB / 16.3 GB, but I'm content enough with the current breakdown.

Once I finish installing my base set of benchmarking games on all 3 OSes, I plan to see if EDO memory really does nothing for this system vs. FPM.

feipoa wrote on 2020-03-14, 07:17:

I don't want to have to click Yes every time I copy over files with fancy NTFS characteristics.

Yes hate that and also hate getting asked for permission to launch an app in w2k even when only account is Admin and all read/write/launch are set to yes with notifications disabled Yet some apps (paintshop pro) still force a pop-up 🙁

Note that all this fiasco could be solved by having the updated Adaptec 2940W code on this motherboard's BIOS. It is tempting to just throw in the 2940W PCI card rather than using the onboard SCSI. It is also tempting to just throw in another SCSI HDD to use for w98games.

I have been thinking that too. Have a few W/UW scsi pci adapters sitting in a box doing nothing...might install one this weekend and disable the onboard 7880 but leave the 6370 enabled for the cdrom.

feipoa wrote on 2020-03-14, 07:17:

It is also tempting to just throw in another SCSI HDD to use for w98games.

I liked this option. Whole point of SCSI is to cram as may drives as possible! Take that IDE systems with your 4 drive limit

chinny22, the drive cage will fit up to 4 hard drives, but the emitted noise would be beyond my threshold. I have been able to accept buids with 4xIDE drives in RAID if they are quiet drives and 2xSCSI drives in RAID, again if they are quiet. Four SCSI drives is a bit much for my tolerance, though it might be amusing to build a 4-drive SCSI system with the noisest most worn out drives you can find. Could serve as some white noise for sleeping if you have noisy neighbours, housemates, or kids.

I have recently tested a few PCI SCSI cards, the Adaptec 2940UW, 2940U2W, and 19160 Ultra160 controllers. They all work on this system and do not have any issue with int13 extensions for HDDs larger than 8 GB in DOS. While the method I used above works on the onboard SCSI adapter, cloning the HDD makes W2K non-bootable on the cloned drive and this OS must be re-installed. NT4 and W9x were Ok since they are within the 8 GB limit. W9x needs to have the boot sector image recopied though using dd.

For the Adaptec 19160 host controller, I could not get W2K to install with it, even when using different W2K driver disk versions. The installer kept saying it could not find a CD-ROM drive. The work around was to install W2K with the 2940U2W then swap the card out for the 19160.

I'm curious what would have been the market for dual socket 5/7 systems based on the 430HX back in early 1996? According to wiki, the 430HX was released in February 1996, but dual Pentium Pro chipsets, the 450KX and 450GX, had already been released in November 1995. I have benchmarked the dual P233MMX against the PPRO233 and the PPRO is substantially faster in everything except DOS-only games, e.g. Blood and Sega Rally. This got me wondering why anyone wanting a dual CPU configuration back in early 1996 would choose the 430HX over the 450KX/GX.