today i was able to grab an original vectra power supply and the motherboard works perfectly

but i will never understand whats the deal with this pentium pro era to build a retro gaming PC, because the cpu is supposed to be really bad for 16bit WIn3.11 and Win95 &98.

it works properly using winNT

maybe its something to collect because of the size of the CPU

Pabloz wrote:

but i will never understand whats the deal with this pentium pro era to build a retro gaming PC, because the cpu is supposed to be really bad for 16bit WIn3.11 and Win95 &98.

The CPU is not "really bad for 16bit". I use it mainly with mid-90s DOS games and early Windows games together with a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI.
This is a comparison that the German IT magazine c't made in issue #1 of 1996 between a Pentium 133 and a PentiumPro 150:

As you can see the 16bit Performance is not too bad... 😉

But what made the PentiumPro so special? At the time there was a fierce competition between RISC and CISC architectures in the IT world. The cool guys were definitely in the RISC world (Sun Sparc, DEC Alpha, ...). The PC/Intel world was CISC, as were Motorola CPU based systems. Big iron servers were almost always RISC and PC servers were despised be IT professionals.

The PentiumPro was a different beast. It was internally RISC but used externally the well known i386 CISC instructions. It had an instruction decoder unit that broke down the complex CISC instructions into the simpler and quicker RISC instructions and was also able to optimize and parallelize on the way. The CPU experts of these days were all excited about it. And it turned out they were right. The PentiumPro is the true ancestor and the first in the line of Intel CPUs that do this until this day. So your Core i5 is the grand-grand-grand-son of the PentiumPro.

The PPro also had a 2nd level cache (on a separate die in the same package) that was running at CPU clock (200MHz) and not at FSB clock (66MHz) like the Pentiums at the time. This made him very expensive (prices from December 1995):

It was also the time when I got my first job after university. I could only dream of a PC with a PPro then. Now after the vintage computing wave got me, the first thing I wanted to have was a PPro. And I'm all happy with it.

Maybe now you understand...

wooow 2k for the cpu ? who would buy that in the 90s!!

This pc works very good, i was testing it yesterday with Pure DOS only

but it will be hard to find HP XA6 drivers for win95 and win3.11,

the chips it has are cirrus logic integrated videocard and that is found, but other chips are
intel sb82441fx sb82442fx drivers i think its named Intel 440FX (Natoma), but could not find drivers for it.

My PPro system has the same chipset (440FX Natoma).

You don't need chipset drivers per se for Win3.11, only EIDE drivers. I installed the Triones DMA (Bus Mastering) EIDE drivers from http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?file … &menustate=35,0. They work without problems and provide 32bit disk access in Win3.11. It seems this package also supports Win95. But I didn't bother to install it on my box. I went straight for Win98 SE. Win 98 and Win 98 SE come with all the drivers needed for this chipset and support IDE bus mastering out of the box. No need to install the Triones driver there.