You'd need something like a rack-mount server board for the quad-CPU install. You'd still be lacking some of the newer multimedia instructions, FSB speed, and probably wouldn't get an AGP slot. You could probably run modern lightweight 32-bit Linux distros OK on such a machine, but I think your modern internet experience would suffer and "late 00s" games would almost certainly be off the table.

However, I have seen Fallout 3 run on single- and dual-CPU Tualatin boards before.

I think that to find something to accept Quad PIIIs, you probably need to go PIII Xeon. I don't think there were ever Quad boards for the "standard" Pentium III

H3nrik V! wrote on 2022-12-22, 12:06:

I think that to find something to accept Quad PIIIs, you probably need to go PIII Xeon. I don't think there were ever Quad boards for the "standard" Pentium III

Are there any boards?

Quad PIII Xeon certainly won't have any fancy AGP, because it was mainly designed for servers. And yeah - it won't scale much in regular tasks, because limiting factor is FSB.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-12-22, 12:32:

Quad PIII Xeon certainly won't have any fancy AGP, because it was mainly designed for servers. And yeah - it won't scale much in regular tasks, because limiting factor is FSB.

Are there any boards that allow agp which also allow 4 pentium 3's?

The main issue you're going to have with using this for modern software is the Pentium III is a very outdated design and lacks SSE2 instructions (among others), which are required for a lot of modern software to work properly. I'm not sure if it's still the case, but 10 years ago I realized that you could barely use an Athlon XP for Youtube because the video player required the CPU to have SSE2 to perform acceptably (maybe it was 720P video). With a slow P4 and a new enough GPU you could run it fine, but with an Athlon XP it was a slideshow, even though the CPU itself was much faster. I'm sure the video player has changed dramatically since then, but I doubt the requirements have improved for older hardware.

So, the issue then is that you won't be able to run a lot of newer software... and older software can't make use of all four processors.

Using Linux pretty much takes the project out of my wheelhouse however. I have no idea how that will impact your ability to run games.

I don't known about how you are going to acquire that kind of monster of the machine (which having the size of small table)
for example:

But it think it possible to install 32bit linux (debian 32bit) on such machine, but the lack of SSE2 will cause some program to crash (i think firefox/chrome 32bit will crash if cpu does not support SSE2)
for the graphic, we can using pci graphic card like the fx5200 pci, that should be good enough to boot into graphical session.

Yes, I have the previous generation Netserver LH4 and it's a beast. It's the only computer I own that I can't lift. (And I'm a big guy).

Errius wrote on 2022-12-22, 18:11:

Yes, I have the previous generation Netserver LH4 and it's a beast. It's the only computer I own that I can't lift. (And I'm a big guy).

Did they advertise built-in theft-protection when they sold those things? 😀

SonicTopaz wrote on 2022-12-22, 10:36:

Hi, I'm into old computing. And if you lived in the late 90's to early 2000's (I didn't I'm 13), you probably know what the Inte […]
Show full quote

Hi, I'm into old computing. And if you lived in the late 90's to early 2000's (I didn't I'm 13), you probably know what the Intel Pentium III was.
The Pentium III (III means 3, it's roman numerals) was a beast back then, however was replaced by it's successor, the Intel Pentium 4.
However, I wanted to try something out.

I'm wondering, if this 90's processor can be used in 2022. Not one, but four. Here's what I want to accomplish:
Running modern Linux
Stable YouTube playback (I don't care if it's 240p or 1080p, as long as works)
Playing kind of modern games (Probably from late 2000's)
Other stuff

So yeah, I hope you can help me. Any mobo's you can find? Thanks

Here's a couple of Supermicro boards that allow for quad Slot 2 P-III Xeon setups. Just one option you can look into of course. Boards that accept four CPUs are generally very large so you will need a large case to accommodate something like that. Not to mention Slot 2 Xeon CPUs are big as well, but very impressive to look at. Personally, I wouldn't go beyond a dual CPU rig as it makes life much easier in the parts department and makes more financial/practical sense. Just my two cents.

SonicTopaz wrote on 2022-12-22, 13:06:

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-12-22, 12:32:

Quad PIII Xeon certainly won't have any fancy AGP, because it was mainly designed for servers. And yeah - it won't scale much in regular tasks, because limiting factor is FSB.

Are there any boards that allow agp which also allow 4 pentium 3's?

The regular P3 doesn't support more than 2x SMP. You need Slot 2 P3 Xeons for 4-way configs.

And as for your question, you can search https://theretroweb.com/motherboards as well as we can. Select Slot 2 and 3.3V AGP. Results - or lack thereof - should be enlightening.

Note that there is absolutely no point in 4x CPU and high-end graphics as (Windows) software simply wasn't multithreaded back in those days. The first SMP-capable game was Quake 3 Arena, released in the (late) P3 era, and that offered very limited gain with dual CPU and nothing above that. The only sensible use case for multi-CPU was lots of concurrent (server) tasks.

If you really, really want to do something graphical with 4 P3 Xeon CPUs, take a look at the SGI Visual Workstation 540. That is however VERY exotic hardware requiring ditto software, so not a game machine, and it's so different to a regular PC you'll need to show a lot more own initiative than you've done here to do even simple tasks on it.

if you look around youtube some people have experimented with dual P3s and faster AGP graphics (HD 3850/4670) on newer games, and in general it's not very good,
those CPUs are going to be very limited by the FSB/memory bandwidth and they lack SSE2 even,
4 CPUs would probably not help much with games since the FSB/memory bottleneck would be heavy for that kind of work, the CPU is just to slow for games that use 4 cores well, and there isn't a practical motherboard for that available,

We are not living after post "Third World War" age, or after a great sun explosion. Radiation did not kill todays modern devices. The space capable working devices, Mars rovers or satellites currently have around 2,5 GHz limit, like PowerPC's RAD5500 processors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD5500 Any newer design(s) smaller than 35 nm processors, may not work at space (until specially developed) because of radiation and neutrinos etc. Rad5500 design is from 2010 era, so why not better ones possible, soon maybe?

From Windows and Linux side, there is no supported web browser today to enter into web without SSE2 support. There are very little amount of Windows XP capable computers left, there are unknown browsers like new moon, sea monkey etc. from not surely trustable sources for SSE only, but they have very limited support for the web. You don't have to distress yourself, Pentium III era is trash, Windows 7 and 8.1 will end extended support in January 2023 so 478 pin Pentium 4 processors will gone to trash again very soon. Some Amiga emulators like https://www.amigaforever.com for Commodore 64 and Amiga A500~1200 needs PIII and Pentium 4 systems, with a compatible joystick but again those are too far from now. Do not waste your money for those, they have retro value and not much cheap.

karakarga wrote on 2022-12-22, 19:49:

We are not living after post "Third World War" age, or after a great sun explosion. Radiation did not kill todays modern devices. The space capable working devices, Mars rovers or satellites currently have around 2,5 GHz limit, like PowerPC's RAD5500 processors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD5500 Any newer design(s) smaller than 35 nm processors, may not work at space (until specially developed) because of radiation and neutrinos etc. Rad5500 design is from 2010 era, so why not better ones possible, soon maybe?

From Windows and Linux side, there is no supported web browser today to enter into web without SSE2 support. There are very little amount of Windows XP capable computers left, there are unknown browsers like new moon, sea monkey etc. from not surely trustable sources for SSE only, but they have very limited support for the web. You don't have to distress yourself, Pentium III era is trash, Windows 7 and 8.1 will end extended support in January 2023 so 478 pin Pentium 4 processors will gone to trash again very soon. Some Amiga emulators like https://www.amigaforever.com for Commodore 64 and Amiga A500~1200 needs PIII and Pentium 4 systems, with a compatible joystick but again those are too far from now. Do not waste your money for those, they have retro value and not much cheap.

*coughs* K-meleon *coughs*

Also when I meant modern I meant kinda modern. How about let's change this a bit, any 2x pentium iii mobos?

SonicTopaz wrote on 2022-12-23, 09:04:

Also when I meant modern I meant kinda modern. How about let's change this a bit, any 2x pentium iii mobos?

Yes, they exist, but I think that's already been discussed. With a project like this it is much more practical to start at whatever site (ebay, craigslist, FB marketplace, etc.) you would normally go to for old hardware and see what is actually available. Things like this are so hard to find and expensive now that you just need to take what you can get.

If you want some model numbers to look up I'm sure you can just search the forums here (or search google with the word "vogons" inlcuded) for dual tualatin, dual socket 370, dual Piii, etc.

But in the end, the system will be in the same boat as what we have already discussed regarding their lack of modern instruction sets, and I believe people have tried to test their capabilities many times before... when dual S370 boards were more common and people wanted to see what they could do with newer software. Basically, expect it to perform significantly slower than the slowest "Pentium Dual Core" due to: a lack of memory bandwidth (most only use PC-133, though some DDR 266 boards exist), the fact that the CPU "cores" are not even in the same socket and must communicate over some part of the motherboard, the core is very outdated with instruction sets from early 1999, and it will be limited to AGP or PCI video cards (sometimes 66Mhz PCI, but the card options are pretty limited for that).

I recently became the owner of a dual pentium III system. I wanted to have one since early 2000.
And now, to be honest, I can't find a real use for it.

Back then it was just not meant for games.
First you needed a system that could use multiple CPUs. So it was NT4, W2k or XP (in 2001)
Linux also used multiple CPUs well, but was not a viable gaming platform in 2000.

Once you had XP/2000 installed (because you don't want to game on NT4) and you start installing games, you realize that period correct games just don't use multiple threads. And now your 1.0 -> 1.4 GHz PIII is just too slow in single thread mode.

On the top of that, good luck finding a correct PCI graphics card. (Unless you have luck and/or money to buy a dual PIII motherboard with AGP)

And as this was also highlighted, the pentium III lacks some instructions sets. So trying to use binaries that needs these instructions will probably crash the program, or lead to awfully slow performances. As an overly simplify and technically incorrect analogy, it's like if your game needs DX11 and you have a DX7 card. It just can't work, not even with slow framerate. A binary requiring SSE3 or AVX-512 will just not work with a PIII. On Linux, this can be mitigated because you generally can compile the software from source. And the compilation toolchain can produce binaries without these instructions. (See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Microa … itecture_levels)

Games/applications using more than 1 thread only became prevalent 5 to 7 years later. Even in 2005/6, performances were better with a A64 Fx57 1c/1t than with a 2c/2t 200Mhz lower clocked Fx60. The second core could not compensate for the 200 Mhz speed difference.

So in my opinion, dual (and the far less common quad) PIII systems are just only popular among retro geeks. Because these systems were insane back then. But it never was a gaming plateform.
Sometimes, the hobby leads us to build things that did not really existed (or were super uncommon). Like using K6-2+/K6-3+ or pentium Tillamook mobile CPUs on desktop boards. Or knowingly forgetting the fact that 1.4 tualatin came out around the same time as P4 2.2Ghz Northwood and Athlon XP 2000+ Palomino. These things are just dream machines + a lot of fun.

acl wrote on 2022-12-23, 21:30:

I recently became the owner of a dual pentium III system. I wanted to have one since early 2000. And now, to be honest, I can't […]
Show full quote

I recently became the owner of a dual pentium III system. I wanted to have one since early 2000.
And now, to be honest, I can't find a real use for it.

Back then it was just not meant for games.
First you needed a system that could use multiple CPUs. So it was NT4, W2k or XP (in 2001)
Linux also used multiple CPUs well, but was not a viable gaming platform in 2000.

Once you had XP/2000 installed (because you don't want to game on NT4) and you start installing games, you realize that period correct games just don't use multiple threads. And now your 1.0 -> 1.4 GHz PIII is just too slow in single thread mode.

On the top of that, good luck finding a correct PCI graphics card. (Unless you have luck and/or money to buy a dual PIII motherboard with AGP)

And as this was also highlighted, the pentium III lacks some instructions sets. So trying to use binaries that needs these instructions will probably crash the program, or lead to awfully slow performances. As an overly simplify and technically incorrect analogy, it's like if your game needs DX11 and you have a DX7 card. It just can't work, not even with slow framerate. A binary requiring SSE3 or AVX-512 will just not work with a PIII. On Linux, this can be mitigated because you generally can compile the software from source. And the compilation toolchain can produce binaries without these instructions. (See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Microa … itecture_levels)

Games/applications using more than 1 thread only became prevalent 5 to 7 years later. Even in 2005/6, performances were better with a A64 Fx57 1c/1t than with a 2c/2t 200Mhz lower clocked Fx60. The second core could not compensate for the 200 Mhz speed difference.

So in my opinion, dual (and the far less common quad) PIII systems are just only popular among retro geeks. Because these systems were insane back then. But it never was a gaming plateform.
Sometimes, the hobby leads us to build things that did not really existed (or were super uncommon). Like using K6-2+/K6-3+ or pentium Tillamook mobile CPUs on desktop boards. Or knowingly forgetting the fact that 1.4 tualatin came out around the same time as P4 2.2Ghz Northwood and Athlon XP 2000+ Palomino. These things are just dream machines + a lot of fun.

5-6 years ago I managed to find an Iwill DVD266r which was a monster of a board with dual Coppermine-T support (no Tualatin), ApolloPro266 chipset, DDR-266Mhz, respectable CMI8738 audio and universal AGP 4x. I later found a couple of Iwill DVD266u-RN boards which are similar but have ApolloPro266T chipsets for Tualatin support... but sadly those two have an astronomical number of bad capacitors so I never got them working. The DVD266r always worked fine, though I honestly never got around to doing anything crazy with it. As you mentioned, for gaming a dual-CPU system from this time period just doesn't give any tangible benefit. I guess one could theoretically do some totally unreasonable retro-streaming system with a low resolution feed of whatever you're playing... with the streaming happening on that second CPU which would otherwise be unused most of the time. Not sure if that's even possible though. Can't really think of anything else to use it for other than arbitrary multi-tasking for the sake of multi-tasking.

dual PIII might run dosbox and munt at the same time? then again you can do that on new computers anyways.

A case could be made that a dual board might have better features in some cases than a single board, so running a single cpu in a dual board could have its advantages.

acl wrote on 2022-12-23, 21:30:

I recently became the owner of a dual pentium III system. I wanted to have one since early 2000. And now, to be honest, I can't […]
Show full quote

I recently became the owner of a dual pentium III system. I wanted to have one since early 2000.
And now, to be honest, I can't find a real use for it.

Back then it was just not meant for games.
First you needed a system that could use multiple CPUs. So it was NT4, W2k or XP (in 2001)
Linux also used multiple CPUs well, but was not a viable gaming platform in 2000.

Once you had XP/2000 installed (because you don't want to game on NT4) and you start installing games, you realize that period correct games just don't use multiple threads. And now your 1.0 -> 1.4 GHz PIII is just too slow in single thread mode.

On the top of that, good luck finding a correct PCI graphics card. (Unless you have luck and/or money to buy a dual PIII motherboard with AGP)

And as this was also highlighted, the pentium III lacks some instructions sets. So trying to use binaries that needs these instructions will probably crash the program, or lead to awfully slow performances. As an overly simplify and technically incorrect analogy, it's like if your game needs DX11 and you have a DX7 card. It just can't work, not even with slow framerate. A binary requiring SSE3 or AVX-512 will just not work with a PIII. On Linux, this can be mitigated because you generally can compile the software from source. And the compilation toolchain can produce binaries without these instructions. (See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Microa … itecture_levels)

Games/applications using more than 1 thread only became prevalent 5 to 7 years later. Even in 2005/6, performances were better with a A64 Fx57 1c/1t than with a 2c/2t 200Mhz lower clocked Fx60. The second core could not compensate for the 200 Mhz speed difference.

So in my opinion, dual (and the far less common quad) PIII systems are just only popular among retro geeks. Because these systems were insane back then. But it never was a gaming plateform.
Sometimes, the hobby leads us to build things that did not really existed (or were super uncommon). Like using K6-2+/K6-3+ or pentium Tillamook mobile CPUs on desktop boards. Or knowingly forgetting the fact that 1.4 tualatin came out around the same time as P4 2.2Ghz Northwood and Athlon XP 2000+ Palomino. These things are just dream machines + a lot of fun.

I know that the P3 only goes up to SSE. I know some programs that will support my Pentium III though. I also know some games may not be optimized for the dual processing. However this is just a test.