Anyone own a pentium PRO system back in the day?

[aigomorla]

Shogo, lots of fun old stuff on it.

OMG SHOGO

LOL..

i think i almost got carpal tunnel syndrome off those games.

I dont think i can play a game like that anymore.
Starting to feel my age after 2 hours alone.

 

[Arkaign]

Hahaha, yeah we're old!!!

The thing also had some 4.3G 10k rpm scsi drives, the 80-pin LVD kind. SCSI bios took foreeeever and the things would come screaming to life, 4 of those things going whirrrRRRRRRRRRRZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!

It was oddly comforting, like the old dial-up noise.

 

[her209]

I remember my uncle got one. It was damn expensive because of the new MMX technology. He used it to run Windows NT and Warcraft II.

 

[ArizonaSteve]

The first computer I ever built was a PPro 180MHz / 256K. It's at my dad's house in England, and I believe it is still working.

 

[MagickMan]

I ran a dual PPro 200 w/ 1GB of RAM as a personal Slackware web/email server for 6 years. Didn't pay a dime for it. My company was throwing it out after only 18 months, so I loaded it up in the car and took it home. It's still sitting in my hall closet and I'm not sure if it even works anymore. Was a great machine though.

 

[Rubycon]

I remember my uncle got one. It was damn expensive because of the new MMX technology. He used it to run Windows NT and Warcraft II.

Pentium Pros did not have MMX. The successor (Pentium II) did however but was inferior in many ways.

 

[Gillbot]

I had a few of the PPro Overdrive units even!

http://www.chipdb.org/data/media/1075/Intel_Pentium_Pro_Overdrive_PODP66X333_SL3KE_V11_cf.jpg

http://www.intel.com/support/processors/overdrive/

 

[H20cooled]

Pentium Pros did not have MMX. The successor (Pentium II) did however but was inferior in many ways.

The PPro Overdrive was the only one to support MMX.

 

[Arkaign]

Pentium Pros did not have MMX. The successor (Pentium II) did however but was inferior in many ways.

Yeah, it was weird how the progression went :

8088 through Pentium all had L2 cache on the mobo (if any, but that depended on mobo).

Pentium Pro suddenly had L2 cache on-package, and other than the latency worked as fast as the CPU core itself.

Pentium II had L2 cache on-package, but at 1/2 the speed of the core, so a P2-266 had 133mhz L2.

Pentium III started the same as P2 cache-wise.

Celeron Mendocino had models with 128k of on-die cache! This allowed remarkably close performance to the full 512k half-speed cache P2/P3, particularly when you compared same clock speed (eg; overclocked 300a @ 450mhz @ 100fsb to stock P2 or P3 450).

Pentium III Coppermine had on-die L2, but dropped the size to 256k. Later Tualatin-based P3's were finally available with 512k L2, but they were fairly rare.

Athlon K7 Slot-A had TERRIBAD L2 on some models. Thunderbird really saved the day here. I think the 1Ghz non-Tbird Slot-A K7 had either 1/4 or 1/3 speed L2, abysmal.

From Tbird/Coppermine forward, I think both makers have had full-speed L2 on-die cache.

 

[Tsavo]

All this cache talk reminds me of the COAST modules during the Pentium days.

 

[Rubycon]

All this cache talk reminds me of the COAST modules during the Pentium days.

How about FAKE L2 cache DIPS on motherboards? I had a 486 board that had those.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

Yep.

My brother had a P166mhz and I had a P90mhz. Those were awesome for gaming at the time. Games seemingly ran exactly the same on our P2 333mhz even though the P2 had a 16MB ATI rage card. It was a solid card for 1998.

 

[Tsavo]

How about FAKE L2 cache DIPS on motherboards? I had a 486 board that had those.

Vaguely.

As in, Google Vaguely.

I also remember shopping for computer parts with Computer Shopper before there was an internets.

 

[judasmachine]

I just missed em, I think. I had a 133 Pentium, and a 166 Pentium MMX, after that I jumped to a 400MHz Pentium II.

 

[zsdersw]

I remember fondly the first Nvidia card I ever bought.. a 16MB Riva TNT. Quite an improvement at the time, I must say.

 

[zsdersw]

I just missed em, I think. I had a 133 Pentium, and a 166 Pentium MMX, after that I jumped to a 400MHz Pentium II.

Yes, the 440BX chipset was solid. I built many PII/P3 systems back in the day.

 

[judasmachine]

Yes, the 440BX chipset was solid. I built many PII/P3 systems back in the day.

Yes that they were. I wanted the Celey 300A to mate with it for the 50% OC, but the 400 PII was a damn fine chip too. Ah the days when an 'upgrade' was 33-133MHz.

 

[zsdersw]

Ah yes, the Celeron 300A.. take the neutered Celeron 300 and give it some L2 cache. What a stupid idea that was; L2 cache-less CPU.

 

[Gillbot]

My first "real" PC was a P233MMX (or was it a 200MMX?) and ran me $2500

I spent hundreds on that "MMX" upgrade along with another 64MB stick of ram.

 

[Rubycon]

Speaking of Celeron 300As I ran one with no heatsink at all - just the naked SECC module. Running at 300MHz for weeks. (forgot about it!)

Put a decent heatsink/fan on it and o/c to 466MHz with no problems.

 

[H20cooled]

I loved my dual Celeron setup, I used it at the radio station for an audio workstation running NT 4 and then win 2000

 

[SlowSpyder]

I didn't own one, but when I worked my very first IT job my workstation was a Pentium Pro 200MHz.

I worked on a helpdesk, sometimes a few of us that worked there (and some friends that did not) would sneak in after hours on weekends and play Team Fortress against each other on those machines. Those were the days.

 

[zephyrprime]

I had a 180 at work. They weren't the "extreme" edition of the day since there was not as much consumerism in the CPU market back then. They were a poorly positioned product that Intel never quite knew what to do with. Eventually, intel got it right and made the Pentium Pro architecture into the Pentium II.

 

[tweakboy]

The P2B powned those days,, 450mhz hee

 

[Wreckage]

I had a dual Pentium Pro 200 set up. I ran Linux on it because of its smp support (originally ran NT). Very stable and reliable system.