luckybob wrote:

Got another motherboard recently. A Supermicro P6DLH. VERY similar to the asus. But overall a board that has several pros and […]
Show full quote

Got another motherboard recently. A Supermicro P6DLH. VERY similar to the asus. But overall a board that has several pros and cons compared to the P65UP8. Basically it comes down to how you want to use the board.
edit pic:

Different pci placement, no onboard scsi, daughtercard, chipset, overclocking!

I haven't played much with the new board much, but it seems to work fine at first glance. It supports overclocking! the board has silk-screened options for 50 to 75mhz fsb. I googled the clockgen chip and it has MANY more options. Most notably it will go up to 83mhz fsb. This works fine on the P6DLH, but the overclocking is disabled on the P65UP8. Same chip. I was REALLY hoping I could overclock the p-pro OD chips. the P65UP8 has the same clockgen, but I suppose the daughtercard overrides the jumper settings somehow. Or the OD chips set it to 66mhz, or both. Anyway, I did a few basic tests and they came out exactly as you would expect a p2-333 would be. it does work just fine @ 83mhz! This new board has the bios option for USWC, but I only get ~17fps in quake. So yea, I do need to investigate this.

Nice board!

Isn't there another version or a similar that has an AGP slot?

Memory Bandwidth - 263.88mb/s

Hmmm. Is it on PPro Overdrive or plain PPro?
I on IBM PC 265 and dual PPro 200-512 and i440FX have around 98 mb/s.
Hovewer, in Aida32.

Will try to retest with your tool.
Some words about my setup. I have 2x PPro 200-512 installed, and 2x PPro Overdrive, but there's no fan wire from m/b to Overdrive assembly. They are laying around ~2 yrs, have no time to install them. Stiil searching for riser card with 5 PCI /3 shared ISA for this model - p/n 93H1426 instead of my 3 PCI/3 shared + 1 ISA. Almost impossible to find. I don't even touch case stand (holder) for installing this PC in vertical position - that's ever rarer. My setup also lacks some internal case assembly part that covers CPUs and holds nearest to user egde of expansion.

There's also 4x 256MB EDO ECC ram, but it's instable with 4x sticks. Damned Ebay "1-800-4-memory" sent me ancient sticks with 32 (!!) chips PER SIDE instead of nice 8 per side on modern chips as in lot image. And it's obviuously overloads memory controller bus, since it's unbuffered.

With combo VIA6421 SATA/PATA controller + VIA USB 2.0 controller it's pretty nice running Windows XP.
I even had using it as backup machine when main PC was in upgrade state. Lacking MMX, though... Almost no video playback (absent MMX is a stop case equally in streaming and offline video - just no software that can run without it).

That benchmark was using the Pentium 2 Overdrive @ 5x70mhz = 350mhz, Intel PR440FX

The ram If I remember correctly was 45ns EDO 128meg sticks.

Sorry for the slight necro-ing but I just found this thread and, well, damn.

Any recent pictures / more benchmarks of this monster? (Pictures and videos of dual Pentium Pro setups are this holiday season's addiction)

I flutter between projects like a magpie with ADHD. It is still first in my heart, but I'm not much of a gamer. So once I got the system going, I went to the next thing.

Anything in particular you want to know?

luckybob wrote:

I flutter between projects like a magpie with ADHD. It is still first in my heart, but I'm not much of a gamer. So once I got the system going, I went to the next thing.

Anything in particular you want to know?

What's the current config, do you use it for anything? Would the board take P2 Overdrives (and do you have any to put in 😲) ? Honestly, if its fully assembled I'd love to see some pictures of it inside the case and stuff like that, I'm a sucker for builds like this one.

Oh my, I never took a picture of the finished insides.

yes, I have overdrives, damn things are QUICK. runs windows 2000 like a champ. Once I get this 286 off my bench I'll take a few pics. I think I got disillusioned when I found out how little the i960 did. It's not the fault of the hardware. That is working just fine. But it was designed to be a buffer on old slow network & scsi devices to take some of the load off the CPU. Well, the cpu's I have are fast. Add in fast hard drives, and gigabit ethernet, and there just isn't anything for the i960 to do. In fact it becomes a bottleneck! So with the new devices, it's actually faster to put it into dumb bridge mode.

My current plans are up in the air. I need to get a 2nd voodoo 2. (one died) and I'd like to see it play Diablo 2 and other games of that era. But again, I'm just not that big into games, so once I got the hardware, my projects just tend to... change.

luckybob wrote:

Oh my, I never took a picture of the finished insides.

You guys and your computer porn!

luckybob wrote:

yes, I have overdrives, damn things are QUICK. runs windows 2000 like a champ. Once I get this 286 off my bench I'll take a few pics. I think I got disillusioned when I found out how little the i960 did. It's not the fault of the hardware. That is working just fine. But it was designed to be a buffer on old slow network & scsi devices to take some of the load off the CPU. Well, the cpu's I have are fast. Add in fast hard drives, and gigabit ethernet, and there just isn't anything for the i960 to do. In fact it becomes a bottleneck! So with the new devices, it's actually faster to put it into dumb bridge mode.

To make more effective use of the i960, I think it would be fun to source slower hardware such that the i960 brings the performance to within, say, 15-20% the performance of your existing, more modern, hardware.

luckybob wrote:

My current plans are up in the air. I need to get a 2nd voodoo 2. (one died) and I'd like to see it play Diablo 2 and other games of that era. But again, I'm just not that big into games, so once I got the hardware, my projects just tend to... change.

Why are so many of these Voodoo2 cards dying? Seems higher than the standard deviation of failures among PCI graphic cards. Seems like there may be a weak link on these cards which could use replacement.

1. I love computer porn, and regular porn too judging by the full 1.5TB hard drive i have....

2. I have zero interest in running slower parts on this machine. Its counter intuitive to all things I do. The only thing that I MIGHT ever do would be token ring at 16/4. But don't hold your breath on that.

3. well, i've had it for like 15 years, and kept fracking with it. It was only a matter of time tbh.

luckybob wrote:

...
Once I get this 286 off my bench I'll take a few pics.
...

How's it going with the 286? Hurry! 🤣

luckybob wrote:

...
I think I got disillusioned when I found out how little the i960 did. It's not the fault of the hardware. That is working just fine. But it was designed to be a buffer on old slow network & scsi devices to take some of the load off the CPU. Well, the cpu's I have are fast. Add in fast hard drives, and gigabit ethernet, and there just isn't anything for the i960 to do. In fact it becomes a bottleneck! So with the new devices, it's actually faster to put it into dumb bridge mode.
...

I sort of get how you feel, it's a cool feature that goes unused and that sucks. While using newer Sata controllers and ssds I learned to cope with not using integrated scsi/raid controllers available in mobos.

luckybob wrote:

My current plans are up in the air. I need to get a 2nd voodoo 2. (one died) and I'd like to see it play Diablo 2 and other games of that era. But again, I'm just not that big into games, so once I got the hardware, my projects just tend to... change.

If you set it up PM me and we can do a quick D2 run on SMP systems with SLI. I haven't done that before!

I'm using it to test 32 MFM hard drives. Then test about 15 sound cards, 10 modems, 10 other mfm controllers, a smattering of other random crap from the era. So it is doing "work".

in addition to the voodoo 2's, I want to add in a Matrox powerVR as well. Just for giggles. ^.^ (I'm waiting on serendipity to provide a cheap one)

slivercr wrote:

well, damn.

Had it not been for you pulling this thread up, it would probably go unnoticed for a long time.

@ Luckybob, your collection is mighty impressive. Just wanted to say +1 on the H/W pr0n. Thanks for all your shares!

Omg I need this thing. I just recently learned that these exist.

It’s amazing that one board can take you from a single pentium 75 to dual 75s to dual 233s to a k63+ to dual pentium pro to dual pentium II to dual pentium III and maybe even dual tualatins?!??

Speechless..

I don't think you'd *want* to run Tualatins on a 66mhz bus with EDO ram. But I suppose it's technically possible.

luckybob wrote on 2022-01-28, 09:47:

I don't think you'd *want* to run Tualatins on a 66mhz bus with EDO ram. But I suppose it's technically possible.

I want that very much though…. 🤣

Mmmm windows 7 on simms!

The celerons ran with 100fsb right? So they had higher multipliers? So a celeron may actually be a better fit than a pentium in this? Because the celerons went up to 1.5 ghz right?

So 100x15

Which would give us 990 66x15

The bios would have to support that multiplier. Iirc, support stopped at the 533mhz celeron. (Or there about)

I thought if the multiplier is fixed the BIOS doesn't matter?
Well except for identification on the POST screen.

depends on the board. CPU microcode is outside of my wheelhouse. As an example, it takes a bios update to run 900mhz P3 xeons. Without it, the boards cap @ 700 (or maybe 750)

PENTIUM PRO GANG GANG

luckybob wrote on 2022-01-28, 17:54:

depends on the board. CPU microcode is outside of my wheelhouse. As an example, it takes a bios update to run 900mhz P3 xeons. Without it, the boards cap @ 700 (or maybe 750)

With a early slot board like this, needing a bios update isn’t surprising.

I think there are a few users with experience patching for tualatins though yeah?