First post, by retrofanatic
- Rank
- Oldbie
Just picked this up yesterday as posted in 'Bought these (retro) hardware today' topic and thought I would start a new topic for it to commemorate my 300th post 😀 .
It is a COMPAQ Proliant 2500 in 'tower form' (one can purchase a rackmount kit to make it part of a rackmount system and mount it sideways).
Some pics:
This is a very heavy metal (and some plastic 🤣 ) monster...it turned out to be in nice shape after some gentle scrubbing and cleaning. The only thing I need to fix is the latch that holds the front translucent drive bay door closed. It is a pretty cool design as it essentially a two-part motherboard that plugs into a kind of backplane connector that has the SCSI and other connectors on it (i.e. fan, power, etc.).
Each motherboard part can be pulled out in it's tray by unlocking a latch in the back of the unit and pulling out the tray to reveal the ISA/PCI expansion slots on the upper board and the CPU and RAM on the lower board (that hangs upsidedown).
It includes:
PCI and EISA Slots
- Dual Pentium Pro Slots (Slot 😎
- Pentium Pro 200 CPU installed (I believe it is the 512k cache version??-not sure yet)
- up to 1GB of ECC memory (mine came with 640MB - including 2x50ns 256MB RAM modules - I wonder if it takes advantage of the speedy 50ns rating?)
- Integrated Wide-Ultra SCSI-3 Controller (40 MB/s)
- OS Support: DOS, Microsoft Windows NT, Novell NetWare, SCO UnixWare and OpenServer, IBM OS/2, Sun Solaris, and Banyan VINES operating systems (Can support Win 9x as well)
Since yesterday I have added:
- S3 PCI card (with VRAM expansion module for a total of 64MB) - used in lieu of the onboard video
- integrated controller is Cirrus Logic CL-54M30 with 1MB Video Memory - (all I needed to do to use PCI video instead was to flip a small dip switch and onboard video is disabled to allow PCI or ISA video to work instead)
- Yamaha YMF-71x ISA sound card
- Voodoo1 4MB Diamond Monster (thinking of using two of my Voodoo II 8MB cards in SLI instead)
- 10,000RPM SCSI Hard Drive (non-hot swappable - for now)
I have installed DOS 7.10 on the SCSI Hard Drive I added after running the proprietary SmartStart setup program from Compaq(HP)....there is no BIOS accessible on this board without booting from this disk first. As a quick test, I tried running Star Wars:Dark forces on it and it ran perfect. It seems to load everything much faster than my Pentium 166MMX DOS setup and sound works fine using my YMF-71x card (only have tested Dark Forces)...so I am happy so far...but I have a lot of testing I would like to do still when I can make some time to do so.
I am thinking that I may want to keep this system as a fast DOS only system until I get another voltage regulator to be able to install a second CPU, at which time I may opt to install Windows NT on another partition to take advantage of dual processing (even though i know there are limited games made to work well on NT).
Comments are welcome especially regarding....
- what O/S I should be running?
- does anyone else have a similar system? If so, what are you using it for? How do you like using it?
- what video card combo will work better than what I have in it so far?
- what games would be good to run on sucha system?