Anyone own a pentium PRO system back in the day?

[Maximilian]

Was that basically the extreme edition of the day? How was it? I gather they were crazy expensive. I got 3 of them from ebay real cheap but nothing to plug them into, somone sent me a sawed in half motherboard with the last one i bought, guess they couldnt figure how to take it out of the socket

 

[Rifter]

I had an old HP one, i think it was a 180 or 200Mhz with 64MB of EDO ram. I got it for $40 about 8 years ago and it had a dead Hdd so i ran a small linux distro off a floppy to use it as a router/firewall, worked fine for 3 years till the PS crapped out.

 

[Jimbo]

I had the 200 MHz model back in the day, with a scorching 128 Meg of RAM. On NT 4.0 I was a GOD!

Seriously, I couldn't really tell much of a difference between it and my "old" 75 MHz Pentium in office applications.

 

[Rubycon]

Yes several of them even an 8 way Corollary system!

 

[Jimbo]

Finding a working old board to run those things is going to be a pain.
There is a good chance that ALL the caps will have to be replaced by this time.

Are you doing this as a personal project, or for some technology museum?

 

[Yuriman]

Got an old dual P-Pro 200 somewhere, with 4x 256MB of 168pin EDO. It used to have 3x 10gb 10k rpm drives in RAID-0, but they were too noisy so I sold them.

 

[wwswimming]

still have one. haven't fired it up in a while. they certainly offered workstation performance, for the software available at the time (1997-ish ?)

 

[sswingle]

I had a Pentium Pro 200 back in the day. Gaming performance was on par with my friends who had Celeron 300's.

 

[PottedMeat]

I got a PPro 180 / 256K with a Intel FX chipset motherboard for ~$5 a few years back. Still works fine, but the thermal tape holding the heatsink peeled off. I was thinking about taking the lid off the processor but it still works so maybe not.

http://processorfinder.intel.com/Details.aspx?sSpec=SY031

 

[Rubycon]

I had a Pentium Pro 200 back in the day. Gaming performance was on par with my friends who had Celeron 300's.

32 bit performance was superior but 16 bit performance was lacking due to the lack of a segment descriptor cache.

I very much preferred Socket 8 to Slot 1 Klammath parts namely due to its in package cache. Mine were 512KB parts.

My last PPro system had two chips and 512MB ECC (BEDO 72pin SIMMS) on Tyan S1668-D board. It booted Windows 2000 just fine in 2008. It was retired and I was able to keep the processors for decorative purposes.

 

[zsdersw]

I've worked with many servers based on the PPro. They were rock solid systems and it was a great little (or not so little.. Socket 8 is pretty huge) CPU.

I took one apart and exposed the CPU die (and cache die). Pretty cool.

 

[ultimatebob]

Yeah, I had a few old IBM PC Server 700 series servers that had multiple Pentium Pro's in them. Damn, they were ugly and huge! They had 15 drive bays (that held "huge" 9.1 GB SCSI drives), four processor slots, and 2 memory expansion cards that each had 16 SIMM slots on them. You could get 512 MB of memory on those suckers, but you needed 32 16MB SIMM's to do it

It actually ran NT 4 Server or OS/2 Warp pretty well.

 

[Maximilian]

Finding a working old board to run those things is going to be a pain.
There is a good chance that ALL the caps will have to be replaced by this time.

Are you doing this as a personal project, or for some technology museum?

I thought about it but nah it would cost to much and be too much hassle. My pentium pro works fine as a coffee placemat anyway

 

[pukemon]

Didn't own one, but when I started work back in 2001, my office had a dual Pentium Pro 200 server running NT4 and Novell Netware 5.5. It was eventually replaced with a dual Pentium III 733, running Win2000 Server.

 

[Tsavo]

I had a single and a dual system back then.

Cost lots of $$$.

 

[aigomorla]

LOL i had one.

With dual processors, and 2 Voodoo 2 cards.

Used it to play rainbow 6... thats the biggest memory i have off it.
No wait... BOT Wars in channel on EFNET on IRC is the biggest memory i have off it.

Oh and total annihilation absolutely FLEW on it.. i remember when i had 256megs of ram, and that was considered L33T.

 

[zsdersw]

I'm picturing the intro to "All in the Family"...

"Those were the dayyyyyyyyyyysss!"

 

[aigomorla]

I'm picturing the intro to "All in the Family"...

"Those were the dayyyyyyyyyyysss!"

they seriously were...



Even now when i think about it.. i get some nice processors, but i dont think ive had as much fun with a processor since the Celeron 300A days tho.

 

[Tsavo]

LOL i had one.

With dual processors, and 2 Voodoo 2 cards.

Used it to play rainbow 6... thats the biggest memory i have off it.
No wait... BOT Wars in channel on EFNET on IRC is the biggest memory i have off it.

Oh and total annihilation absolutely FLEW on it.. i remember when i had 256megs of ram, and that was considered L33T.

Yeah, those Voodoo 2's got HOT. No heatsinks, what a fabulous design.

 

[OBLAMA2009]

my first computer was an hp vectra pp150 that i got at costco. it used special memory that was rather expensive, which i got at an online at a discount. so i had 128mg which was alot. i later upgraded it to a 200. then i got three digital celebris pp 180s at the onsale auction (remember that?) when digital got out of pc's. i still have all of them in a spare room in my house. once i got a regular pentium and p3 machines i didnt really use them since nt wasnt compatible with lots of hardware and didnt have usb

 

[Arkaign]

LOL i had one.

With dual processors, and 2 Voodoo 2 cards.

Used it to play rainbow 6... thats the biggest memory i have off it.
No wait... BOT Wars in channel on EFNET on IRC is the biggest memory i have off it.

Oh and total annihilation absolutely FLEW on it.. i remember when i had 256megs of ram, and that was considered L33T.

Heheh that sounds like one of my old setups. It was an HP server, had 8 72-pin slots each filled with 32MB sticks. It was huge, and had two of the 512k 200mhz processors. I had 1 12mb Voodoo2, and the onboard video (whatever it was, it was terrible), and the distance between the video ports forced me to order a longer cable, as the 3dfx VGA connector was too short.

Played Quake2, Unreal (the original!!), Shogo, lots of fun old stuff on it.

 

[H20cooled]

I miss my PPro's. I rules SETI@Home back in the day with them, and then stepped up to my dual and quad xeon PII&PIII rigs.

The single PPro was sweet but when you started dealing with the SMP boards you were a god. I even had one of my dual PPro 200 rigs upgraded to the overdrive chips. If they would have supported quad with the overdrive chip it really would have made for some monster servers

 

[zsdersw]

I loved the original Unreal. Everything Unreal that came after it I had absolutely zero interest in.

Ditto the original Half Life.

 

[Tsavo]

Heheh that sounds like one of my old setups. It was an HP server, had 8 72-pin slots each filled with 32MB sticks. It was huge, and had two of the 512k 200mhz processors. I had 1 12mb Voodoo2, and the onboard video (whatever it was, it was terrible), and the distance between the video ports forced me to order a longer cable, as the 3dfx VGA connector was too short.

Played Quake2, Unreal (the original!!), Shogo, lots of fun old stuff on it.

I had an HP Kayak at work with 2 Pentium Pros and PC100 ram. That was a nice machine, built like a tank.

 

[zsdersw]

I had an HP Kayak at work with 2 Pentium Pros and PC100 ram. That was a nice machine, built like a tank.

Some old Compaq ProLiant PPro servers we had were built like tanks.. weighed as much, too.