First post, by jheronimus
- Rank
- Oldbie
Soooo, this happened. I was looking for a horizontal AT case for my Socket 7 machine. Instead I found a Pentium Pro machine. It was 8 bucks, in working condition and fairly complete. I also know that PPros are quite rare — the CPUs alone are often worth 75 bucks on the Russian market, and Socket 8 motherboards/PCs are usually sold without a CPU. This is probably due to two reasons:
1) Pentium Pro was not a "home user" platform, so people are unlikely to have one stashed away somewhere in the closet.
2) Looks like these CPUs are also a very desirable "prey" for people who harvest old hardware for gold — searching for Pentium Pro on YouTube would give you quite a lot of videos on this topic.
So even if I actually never thought about getting a PPro before, I decided this is an opportunity I could not pass up. Besides, this machine meets a lot of goals I was trying to accomplish with my Socket 7 build anyhow.
So, here it is, in all its glory:
The specs are:
Pentium Pro 200 Mhz, 256KB L2 cache;
Intel AP440FX motherboard;
8x Sony CDU311 CD-ROM drive;
WDC AC21600H — 1,6 GB;
4x16MB EDO RAM;
Crystal 4236 integrated audio;
Virge/DX 2MB integrated video.
The machine also comes with two integrated USB ports.
I can't identify the machine itself. On the bottom it has this:
But I'm not sure if the FCC ID is for the motherboard only or the whole PC. Did Intel even ship computers under its own brand in 1996?
Also Krakatao is written on the bottom 😀
It's probably a misspelled Krakatoa — the code name of the Intel AP440FX motherboard.
Inside it also has the ISA ethernet adapter. You can also see the Virge chip on the board:
And here is the mammoth CPU:
I was surprised by the termal paste. Not only was it intact, but also so sticky that even after I removed the radiator brackets, the piece still required a bit of an effort to remove. I decided to keep this paste, so sorry for the "dirty" CPU look:
The CMOS battery is also intact and has the charge.
The system has 6 expansion slots: 2 PCI and 3 ISA. However, the screw that holds one half of the riser card is so tight that I couldn't unscrew it — probably will need a better fitting screwdriver (right now I'm just doing damage to the screw head). I've already added a 12 MB Voodoo V2 1000 card and a Sound Blaster AWE64 CT4500 with 8MB RAM (aka the best Windows 9x sound card I have ATM). I will also probably install a mobile rack in the empty 5,25 drive slot. I'm not going to mess with the RAM (AFAIK, this motherboard is somewhat picky about the EDO sticks and doesn't have slots for PC-100/PC-133 anyways) but will probably replace the HDD. Not sure whether I want to change the onboard Virge for a Matrox Millenium II.
Right now the HDD has Windows 98 installed, but the system only boots in safe mode. I'll probably just install a Windows 98SE from scratch — once I figure out how to make the system boot from a CD. Changing boot priority in BIOS does not do anything.
The BIOS also has options for disabling cache and choosing boot speed between "turbo" (surprisingly, it's full speed) and "deturbo". The onboard audio can also be disabled from the BIOS, not sure about the Virge.
That's all for the moment, gonna go see Civil War tonight and maybe mess with the system later (and post additional photos!). I really wonder who actually made this PC.
