LGR - Building a Dual Pentium Pro NT Tower
Added 2024-06-10 19:12:24 +0000 UTCBack again with another retro computer build! And this one is a bit outside of my usual consumer level wheelhouse in terms of hardware and software. Which is exciting and energizing stuff! Annnd also more time-consuming with some surprising hurdles to overcome, because of course.
Mistakes were made, lessons were learned, ideas are brewing for future updates and fixes and tests... but yeah, lemme know your thoughts! For sure there are things I missed or overlooked. Even after roughly two weeks of working on this thing I still have a fair number of kinks to work out and little fiddly bits to address.
ALSO! I am about to fly over to Dallas, Texas for Vintage Computer Festival Southwest. Specifically I'll be there all day on the 14th and 15th, probably not very long on the 16th though since my flight home is that day. But yeah, I am stoked to attend a new show and I hope to see some of you there!
Comments
OK the NT build and NT things are very nostalgic for me. I built the beginning of my career on NT 4.0 Workstation and Server. When I started that run, it was in the time of SP3 and a little before SP4 dropped with IIS 4! Little did I realize how much of the next several years of my life would revolve around making web apps run on IIS LOL!
Steven
2024-07-02 14:12:35 +0000 UTCI ran Oracle 7 on SCO Openserver 5.0.5 with a Compaq Proliant with dual p-pros. This video brings back the memories.
Matt Standish
2024-06-15 13:25:17 +0000 UTCThis vid...ive watched 3 times. Very asmr for me. The edits on the cleaning is my fav! Very cool cmp too!!
Brandie Drown
2024-06-15 01:50:24 +0000 UTCI remember installing Windows NT on a computer, thinking it would be better than windows 95. Well not for my purpose, but you live you learn.
Mikkel Graugaard Hansen
2024-06-14 19:22:38 +0000 UTCReally cool video :) I hope to see more of it and it would be fun to see a comparison of render times and such between this computer and a high end gaming computer of the same year.
Uncleawesome
2024-06-13 04:11:27 +0000 UTCSo far a reliable resource has remained elusive. Each driver came from a different site or archive, found after much googling. Almost everything is mislabeled as being NT compatible when it’s really only 9x
LGR
2024-06-13 02:43:12 +0000 UTCCould very well be! I’ll have to poke around the settings, possibly try another drive entirely. It’s been absolutely rock solid other than that
LGR
2024-06-13 02:41:46 +0000 UTCI installed NT4 on my Alpha once on a whim which was an "interesting" experience because in addition to being hard to find drivers for, there was almost no software that will run on it.
Graham
2024-06-13 02:38:18 +0000 UTCLove the “Too Hot For TV” badge. You might need to add a viewer discretion warning before this episode for so much hotness! For the hard to track down drivers, do you have a more centralized place where one can find them, or possibly uploaded to archive.org if they aren’t already up there?
Chad Armstrong
2024-06-13 00:58:14 +0000 UTCLove NT4! My dual P2 "workstation" has a couple voodoo 2's inside and it actually runs Unreal better on NT4 than 98SE. Curious about the boot issues. I have NT4 installs on 3 of my machines and I've never run into that myself. Something between the motherboard and the drive maybe?
Adam Smith
2024-06-12 23:53:47 +0000 UTCI guess I'm cynical, I figured it was done so the IT guy at whatever company that bought it couldn't get in there and upgrade anything easily/without them knowing about it, thus securing the ever-important support license fee
Bryan Smith
2024-06-12 23:16:03 +0000 UTCNah, when you ship these regularly you do that. And Jane Average seldom opens their system to upgrade stuff.
BastetFurry
2024-06-12 08:03:26 +0000 UTCClint, you really outdid yourself with this one. I can't help but love uncharted territory for you. I live so vicariously in the retro world by watching your videos but this takes it a step further. You are discovering things as you film and share with us. That's awesome. Thanks for this upload!
Nate Greene
2024-06-12 03:53:49 +0000 UTCThey hot glued the PCI cards?!?! What kinda of chaotic evil planned obsolescence is that?!!!!
Bryan Smith
2024-06-12 03:10:15 +0000 UTCI’m sure it’d be fine! NT seems to be very well optimized and I’ve seen a number of 486 systems running it. Especially NT 3.1 through 3.51, which I plan to put on the Woodgrain 486 eventually
LGR
2024-06-11 22:32:16 +0000 UTCOh that could be a good lead to follow on the case, thanks! And yeah no kidding, we’ve weirdly regressed with BIOSes
LGR
2024-06-11 22:30:14 +0000 UTCYou post this just as I want to build and play with NT, but I don't have that cool of a motherboard. the board I with thinking of using is a 486 but i don't know if it's good enough.
chris turonek
2024-06-11 22:15:15 +0000 UTCRegarding the case, I wonder if this is something that came form California PC. The wayback machine failed me trying to search, but they still exist today and their website says they have operated since 1994. The build sheet at 9:53 seems to lead to that, along with the power supply from the same company. Also.... in WHAT parallel timeline are we living in that talking BIOS did NOT become a mainstream thing??? I WANT that!
Nachts
2024-06-11 21:53:59 +0000 UTCHa! Fair point… I’d rather hear an awesome old hard drive than old fan noise 😄
LGR
2024-06-11 19:17:50 +0000 UTCOh it would be fascinating to see how that handles dual Pentium Pros!
LGR
2024-06-11 19:16:53 +0000 UTCI also believe it has OpenGL, because I remember playing Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight in Windows NT using OpenGL. At that time we only had Matrox Cards. This site is probably of interest, if you haven‘t been there already anyway: http://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/Manufacturers/matrox_millennium.php
Johannes
2024-06-11 18:55:50 +0000 UTCThis cries for throwing an older Ubuntu or a modern Debian on it, at least thats what i would do.
BastetFurry
2024-06-11 18:46:26 +0000 UTCYep, that works perfectly fine.
BastetFurry
2024-06-11 18:30:10 +0000 UTCI like it how you put so much effort in putting new CPU fans on it to make it quieter, then install this huge loud beast of a HDD 😂 Yeah well, Windows NT was indeed meant for work...not playing around...I´ve read they often used it due to the lack of USB support to avoid that users put their games or even NSFW content on the PC 😎 My highschool had a computer room with janky K6 PCs with Windows 98 and this huge beast of a server which also very likely ran Windows NT and only had a small black and white screen. No fun for the teacher allowed, too 😁
Udo Krawallo
2024-06-11 17:51:32 +0000 UTCPro tip: if you spray or pour a little IPA on the hot glue it will release. So was I told, never tried it myself.
Dukefazon
2024-06-11 17:13:29 +0000 UTCEventually! It's nearly 3 hours away though, so it's not a quick trip. The one we already had in Atlanta is a similar distance.
LGR
2024-06-11 15:15:27 +0000 UTCI mentioned it briefly, but it’s emulating a DOS environment and there is no actual DOS underneath like Win9x, hence the lack of sound and device passthrough and such. Definitely need to try more workstation apps :)
LGR
2024-06-11 14:53:03 +0000 UTCLoved the video. One thing I didn't understand and may have missed was that you said that the command line wasn't DOS, but you ran DOS games. Is DOS included with NT, or did you run it separately. Just curious. Loved the build! I'd also love to see more workstation apps.
Alex Weiss
2024-06-11 13:53:06 +0000 UTCEntertaining video. NT 4 is such a weird mix of future and old Windows.
Alyxx the Rat
2024-06-11 09:15:46 +0000 UTCClint, are planning to visit the new Micro Center? They have free coffee cups for the grand opening and I snagged a few if you want one.
Marshall Kiker
2024-06-11 05:49:24 +0000 UTCRetroBytes actually just made a video on the Pentium Pro two weeks ago. According to that video, the Pentium Pro was great at running 32-bit code, but was awful at running 8- and 16-bit code. Apparently when an application attempts to read an 8-bit or 16-bit portion of the 32-bit registers, it causes a full pipeline flush, which absolutely destroys performance. This could be the reasoning behind the slow performance that you were seeing in the DOS software that you tried. Here's the video if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRkoSj9xv60
Flying Toaster
2024-06-11 04:22:01 +0000 UTCAh man, I actually had a copy of BeOS R4 in-hand while gathering up those boxes to show as potential OS options! But I put it down, thinking “nah, no one will recommend that I try this on here…” I gotta stop second guessing y’all 😄
LGR
2024-06-11 01:26:16 +0000 UTCWith a multi-processor setup of this era, you might wanna try running BeOS on it. Starting with R3 it supports x86, and it's built with SMP in mind from the ground up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjriSNgFHsM Their demos were all about showing that. Like using Cinema 4D and dynamically turning off one of the processors to show how it handled threading. Or throwing an insane number of applications on-screen and turning off a CPU to show how it could dynamically reallocate resources to keep apps running smoothly and only degrading what it needed to.
Timothy Miller
2024-06-11 01:07:34 +0000 UTCYeah that really caught me off guard, it seems like such a strange vestigial artifact to me. I’m sure there’s a good technical reason but still.
LGR
2024-06-11 00:52:33 +0000 UTCYeah, Windows NT 4.0 is "special". One of the reasons I don't like it is because, as you encountered, it creates the initial partitions as FAT and then converts them to NTFS, meaning if you want to use all the disk space on a disk larger than 2 GB (which is technically 2048 MB), you will need to create a 2 GB partition first, then create an extended partition in the Disk Management thingy after you've fully installed the OS.
Headset Guy
2024-06-11 00:32:30 +0000 UTCGigabyte boards are pretty good, in my experience. If I can ever figure out how to run a multi-processor system properly, I'm sure it would be a lot of fun.
Vintage486Lizard
2024-06-11 00:18:35 +0000 UTCFairly certain it's a Gigabyte branded one, some kind of server board. Gotta see if I can dig it out of storage.
LGR
2024-06-11 00:15:22 +0000 UTCOh that's rad. Yeah I don't get why we effectively went backwards from that, it's both useful *and* whimsical – what's not to love!
LGR
2024-06-11 00:06:54 +0000 UTCWhat model is your Pentium III board? I have a ECS D6VAA, and it's been testing my patience. I also have a Soyo-branded Pentium II board that supports multiple processors, and it has onboard scsi just like the machine in the video.
Vintage486Lizard
2024-06-11 00:06:35 +0000 UTCYes I'd love to dip into both sometime, these multi-CPU boards are wildly fascinating to me! I do have a dual Pentium III board as well, if I recall. Nothing Pentium II specifically, though the board in this build does support the Pentium II Overdrive processors so that'd be fun to compare.
LGR
2024-06-11 00:02:32 +0000 UTCLoved this video, in similar desire, I want to do one with NT4 but also 2000 Beta 3 (it was the last build to have bits for Alpha) on an Alpha. :)
Daniel Cayea
2024-06-10 23:45:09 +0000 UTCThis was a fun video to watch, though it hurt seeing the cards and front panel cables hot-glued into place. NT4 is a very interesting OS! I should experiment with it more myself. On another note, what are your overall impressions with vintage multi-cpu boards? Do you plan on doing anything with Pentium 2 or 3 MP (Multi-Processor) systems?
Vintage486Lizard
2024-06-10 23:38:38 +0000 UTCDude you have no idea how excited I was when I saw the talking motherboard. We have the one that’s like one step up from that board in inventory, the Asus P4C800-E, but the socket is wonky. The only way I was able to diagnose it was because if it can’t read the CPU, it yells out CPU ERROR. Very cool. Wish they still used that tech.
Jamie Pilkey
2024-06-10 23:19:35 +0000 UTCOh man, this looks awesome, going to need to clear my schedule.... now where's Kif with the etch-a-sketch?
Gareth P
2024-06-10 22:58:41 +0000 UTCTrue! Thankfully I have a nice assortment of drives to choose from, if you saw that bit in the video of my drive shelf :)
LGR
2024-06-10 22:49:36 +0000 UTCBut uh... OS/2 is VERY picky about what hard drives it likes. Maybe throw it a DeskStar to clam it up.
Rick Green
2024-06-10 22:38:33 +0000 UTCHope you enjoyed, Jamie! The vid and the meal both :)
LGR
2024-06-10 22:22:49 +0000 UTCAgreed! I made a brief Threadripper comparison in the video, too. The Pentium Pro still feels more special somehow.
LGR
2024-06-10 22:22:24 +0000 UTCOh yeck yeah. I think I have a 3Dlabs Permedia that would fit the bill for that kinda thing, I forgot about those!
LGR
2024-06-10 22:21:42 +0000 UTCBoth are solid ideas! I'd really like to do an OS/2 Warp 4.x video, I've always enjoyed the way that environment looks and feels
LGR
2024-06-10 22:19:16 +0000 UTCI'm not entirely sure what that is supposed to feel like :-D
Jim Leonard
2024-06-10 22:09:07 +0000 UTCConsider me confused then! The graphics control panel lists OpenGL acceleration support, and I've read that the Millennium was "the first card to support OpenGL." Although this site mentions that support is "through MCD," is that the software emu you're referring to? https://retro.swarm.cz/nt4-opengl-mini-client-driver-model-matrox-millennium-i-ii-and-ati-rage-ii-pro/
LGR
2024-06-10 22:07:40 +0000 UTCOn Quake 2 - the Matrox Millennium was a *GREAT* card for 2D use. It had no OpenGL. When you're picking OpenGL in Quake 2, you'r actually getting NT's software emulated OpenGL. Which is of course painfully slow for anything more complex than the "Maze" screensaver. You'd need a 3d accelerator that actually supports OpenGL. And the DOS game wouldn't see the video card properly, even if it did have enough RAM. NT 4's cmd had zero device-passthrough capability for MS-DOS programs.
Anonymous Freak
2024-06-10 21:53:07 +0000 UTCFor sure, Jim! I look forward to seeing you at a computer show where you're not running around like a chicken with his head cut off (hopefully)
LGR
2024-06-10 21:32:56 +0000 UTCI feel like this could be a good project box to mess with various OS's. (Though maybe have a separate drive for each OS, especially with OS/2). Could also be used as "CD Server" if you have a spare CD changer or two. (Or have a full A to Z drive alphabet soup)
Rick Green
2024-06-10 20:09:49 +0000 UTCI have a thing for windows NT Clint!!! Enjoy this moment too
Tom Anderson
2024-06-10 20:05:52 +0000 UTC@12:22, There's old Emerson 80286 machines that talk. @29:46 That's because NTFS was added very laaaate into NT3, so it was still very experimental, circa NT4..
Robert Butler
2024-06-10 20:03:42 +0000 UTCOne of my favorite things to do wtih this era and kind of machine is use high end OpenGL accelerators that were made only for CAD and force them to deal with games. I can't remember which one I tried but it had its own 3d chip glued to a bog standard cirrus logic VGA chip
Doug Johnson
2024-06-10 20:01:40 +0000 UTCI'll be bouncing around various people and locations, but hope to see you there :-)
Jim Leonard
2024-06-10 19:35:56 +0000 UTCAwesome - socket 8 goodness. This was one of my favorite CPU's of the era... I kind of think back on it as a 90's Threadripper.
13Cubed
2024-06-10 19:26:47 +0000 UTCOh, yeah… An Intel Providence board (Intel motherboards two letters always stood for something, in that era, it was cities. PR was Providence. PD was Portland, AL was Atlanta, SE was Seattle.) When I was first working at Intel, I was the last stop for support for that board. It had already reached end-of-life (by quite a few years,) and only had a short time left with support at all. I got assigned all the "about to be end-of-support" products, handed a stack of binders of the technical product specifications for them, and told "they're yours now, any tech support call that comes in to tier 1 for these is getting routed directly to you. Good Luck." That was my first day on the job. In that last 9 months of support for it, I got zero calls on it. (Same with a couple other similar board, including a OG Pentium server board that apparently some government agency had gotten an extra long support contact for.) But that case! With the smoked glass! Oh, man, I *WISH* my sample Providence had such a lovely case!
Anonymous Freak
2024-06-10 19:25:29 +0000 UTCThat looks amazing!
Robert Butler
2024-06-10 19:21:05 +0000 UTCHeck yeah, something cool to watch on my lunch today. Thanks Clint
Jamie Pilkey
2024-06-10 19:17:53 +0000 UTC
