Pentium Pro Motherboard

[Blackberry Junkie]

Does anyone know if there is such as Pentium Pro Motherboard with SDram memory? I have been looking for it and no luck to find it yet.

Thanks 🙂

ABETech

 

[SendTrash]

no such thing... there wasn't such a technology back then.. only edo ram

 

[anthrax]

Nope, he is right..u don't get Pentium Pro with SD ram... I beleive the last pentium pro Chipset was the Intel 440FX (Portland) chipset...supported up to 128 megs of 72pin EDO DRAM....I had one with my earlie pentium II 266.. .the next chip set was 440LX (Atlanta)..that had SD ram support and AGP..but I think that was only for PII...

 

[brinstar117]

I don't know if this will help, but there's some kind of sloket adapter that will let you use a PPro chip on a Slot 1 mobo. Just search (E)bay for one. I'm pretty sure you can find Slot 1 mobos that support SDRAM 😉 But I think the only chipsets it worked with were the 440FX and 440BX series... I don't remember too much more.

EDIT:

shoot, I tried seaching for some, but couldn't find any

try contacting Chrosmack Ventures

I was going to buy a couple many many months ago from this place, maybe they still have some. They were $22 a piece when I was going to buy them, but that was back in January. Good luck!

 

[AgentofEvil]

Well, I've got a classic pentium board with support for SDRAM, so I'm pretty sure they had the technology back then. It has the intel vx chipset, from memory.

 

[AndyHui]

The only chipsets that were validated to operate with the Pentium Pro were the 440FX (Natoma) and the 440KX/450GX (Orion) chipsets.

Neither chipset supports SDRAM....only EDO and Burst-EDO RAM, up to 1GB of either type.

SDRAM was first introduced to the P6 Family with the 440LX chipset, due to the additional bandwidth requirements of the new AGP bus.

While SDRAM did exist at the time of the Pentium Pro, chip densities and the relative "newness" of SDRAM made it both impratical to implement large enough amounts, and guarantee stability in systems where generally the Pentium Pro went into servers.

Portland and Atlanta refer to the names of the Intel motherboards, PD440FX and AL440LX based on the FX and LX chipsets respectively. Other Intel FX boards include the VS440FX Venus, PR440FX Providence, AP440FX Apollo and the server class BB440FX BuckEye.

While there were some slotket adapters made for the PPro from PowerLeap, chances were that they wouldn't work on most LX boards due to lack of BIOS Support as well as the usual voltage problems. Unlike the Pentium II, the VID and VRM are a little bit different and not always included on the processor.

 

[ilkhan_v4]

The 430tx chipset for Pentium's supported SDRAM. I have some of those slocket adapters for Pentium Pros, and as I recall, they only worked in 440LX boards, some 440BX boards, and a lot of Apollo Pro boards (NOT the 133A, just the ol' 100 MHz version). Some people were trying to get the P2 OverDrives to work in BX boards (500 MHz, full speed 512k L2, fastest chipset at the time... would have been damn fast).

 

[AndyHui]

Heheh...A PProOD/PIIOD on a BX board would have kicked @ss...😀

 

[majewski9]

There was pentium pro boards that used 168pin dimms. I don't think it was SDRAM though. Wasn't the pentium pro a socket 8 configuration? I never heard of a slot one adapter, so I assume there is no such thing. The Pentium pro is ancient! It was ahead of its times though! I remember looking at them when they came out. They were a lot better than my pentium 120!

 

[AndyHui]

Although the Pentium Pro is socket 8, Slot 1 and Socket 8 use the same bus and signalling, so essentially they are compatible.

Slotket adapters DO exist, although you do not have guaranteed success like you do with Socket370/Slot 1 Adapters, due to differences between the original Pentium Pro and Slot 1 processors.

EDO RAM does exist as 168 pin DIMMs.

Has anyone used one of these? These should be interesting for people with Socket 8 boards.

 

[Poochy]

EDO RAM does exist as 168 pin DIMMs.

Yep, I'm sitting in front of a "Micron Millenna Pro2 Plus", which sports a dual-PPro mobo with 4 168-pin DIMM sockets, supporting either EDO or FPM (mine has 4 EDO DIMMs). The interesting thing is that, according to the manual, you can mix/match EDO and FPM at the same time. It also indicates that the mobo will support up to 512MB, though the largest stick you can put in is a 64MB, so I'm not sure how you're supposed to get 512 🙁.

 

[AndyHui]

EDO and FPM are not that different...conceivably they can be mixed, although the EDO would simply operate in FPM mode.

 

[kylef]

Actually, I'm pretty sure that the chipsets were able to support either EDO or FPM on a 2-bank basis. For instance, my mobo reported banks 0,1 as FPM and 2,3 as EDO when I had two older SIMMs and two newer EDO simms in the same machine. I'm pretty sure they were fine to comingle; the only limitation was that if your particular memory page ended up on the slower FPM chips, tough luck. But to my knowledge, the controller chipset was able to use both without disabling the EDO functionality.