What to install on ye old PPro?

Discussion about systems that do not use the K6-x processors.
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jsc1973
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Post by jsc1973 »

I found a source for the PL-Pro/II the other day. One of Buy.com's partners apparently has some old stock available. They're $60 each.

http://www.buy.com/prod/Powerleap-PL-Pr ... 32105.html

If you get one, you must report back on how the Coppermine works. Better yet, I've always wanted to get ahold of a PL-Pro/II and a Tualatin adapter and plug a Tualatin Celeron 1400/100 into it. You'd have a 933 MHz chip running on a Socket 8 platform. I read somewhere or another that someone with an old dual PPro server had actually done this and been successful, but there were no pictures. I guess that's the Holy Grail of Socket 8.

I'm working on something almost as nuts right now myself. I've gotten ahold of an old Compaq Presario laptop that runs a Cyrix MediaGX CPU, and I've been upgrading it with modern components to see if it can be made useful (5400 RPM hard disk, maxed-out RAM, tweaked Win98se, CD-RW drive, etc.). Amazingly, and even though the benchmarks don't show it, the thing is probably three times as fast after the RAM and hard disk upgrades. And it's pleasant to use. I might have to post a report to my website when it's all done.

And if I ever have the time, maybe I'll break out the 486 stuff and assemble the ultimate 486 system...AMD 5x86-133 on a 50 MHz bus for 200 MHz. Faster than a P120. If AMD could have mass-produced the 5x86 to run stably at 200 back in the day, they'd have made a lot of money.
FIC VA-503+, Rev. 1.2, AMD K6-III+ 450@550MHz, 80GB Seagate ATA-100, 3dfx Voodoo3 3500 TV, TB Montego II Quadzilla, Win98se, 384MB PC100

Compaq Presario 1273, AMD K6-III+ 450@400MHz 1.8v, 40GB Samsung 5400RPM, extremely hacked Win98SE, 288 (yes, 288!) MB RAM
(Also an AMD FX-8350, which does the heavy lifting these days...)
fortoreibas
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Post by fortoreibas »

Talking about ultimate Socket-8-ness, I ran across this on the Wikipedia discussion page for the Pentium Pro. Someone used an ALR (never heard of it) motherboard that evidently has custom glue logic that allows the use of 6 Pentium II Overdrive cpus, whereas the standard supported by the chip itself is two-way.
http://www.puresimplicity.net/~hemi/Pics/Comps/ALR/

http://www.puresimplicity.net/~hemi/Pic ... U-POST.jpg
http://www.puresimplicity.net/~hemi/Pic ... /dmesg.txt
http://www.puresimplicity.net/~hemi/Pic ... -cards.jpg
http://www.puresimplicity.net/~hemi/Pic ... drives.jpg
http://www.puresimplicity.net/~hemi/Pic ... anager.png

Truth be told, it's always bugged me that the Pentium II Overdrive was limited to 2-way. Yes, it's based on the PII "Deschutes" core, but so is the PII Xeon "Drake", and the Xeon is 4-way+ compatible. The capability has to already be there. Never quite sat right with me.
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jsc1973
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Post by jsc1973 »

That's the first I have heard of a six-way PPro Overdrive system, but the Overdrive does have the capability for more than two-way SMP. A lot of people used it successfully in four-way systems with no issues. Intel, for whatever reason, just chose not to support the chip for anything more than a dual configuration. They probably had seen some sort of issue during validation testing for the chip that made them not 100 percent sure it would work in all systems.

The 440FX Natoma chipset didn't always work well with ordinary Pentium II processors, so I can see how Xeons mounted on adapter cards might have caused a problem.

I wonder which would be faster, that six-way OverDrive system, or a machine with dual Tualatin 1400s running at 933 on a dual PPro board?
FIC VA-503+, Rev. 1.2, AMD K6-III+ 450@550MHz, 80GB Seagate ATA-100, 3dfx Voodoo3 3500 TV, TB Montego II Quadzilla, Win98se, 384MB PC100

Compaq Presario 1273, AMD K6-III+ 450@400MHz 1.8v, 40GB Samsung 5400RPM, extremely hacked Win98SE, 288 (yes, 288!) MB RAM
(Also an AMD FX-8350, which does the heavy lifting these days...)
fortoreibas
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Post by fortoreibas »

jsc1973 wrote:I wonder which would be faster, that six-way OverDrive system, or a machine with dual Tualatin 1400s running at 933 on a dual PPro board?
I think it would depend heavily on a bunch of things, like what you were doing. That is: multimedia manipulation or database serving or something else?

Common features:
16+16 KB L1 cache
Fullspeed L2 cache (The PII Overdrive has 512, the Tualatin 1400 has 512 or 256, while the Celeron has only 256)
Support for MMX instruction set
66 MHz FSB max when installed on a Socket 8 mobo. (Yes, sometimes you can get a socket 8 mobo to do 70 or 75 MHz, but let's not worry about that now).

Pentium II Overdrive advantages:
6 processors vs 2 processors

PIII Tualatin 1400S advantages:
Improved L1 cache controller vs the PII family
Lower latency L2 cache (ATC) with a 256-bit data bus. The Celeron Tualatin didn't inherit this, which kept its yields up.
Support for SSE1 instruction set
Higher multiplier than PII Overdrive (10.5x)
Hardware prefetch
Smaller fab process

Celeron Tualatin 1400 advantages:
Improved L1 cache controller vs the PII line
Higher multiplier than PII Overdrive (14x)
Support for SSE1 instruction set
Hardware prefetch
Smaller fab process

Hey, this is getting better. I just found a retired server in storage with a dual PIII mobo already populated with two 512KB PIII Tualatin 1400/133's. That only gets me 693 or 735 MHz on a 66 or 70 MHz FSB, but it's still good to try. I just have to come up with the PL-Pro/II adapters and one more Neo S370 adapter.
fortoreibas
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Post by fortoreibas »

jsc1973 wrote:I found a source for the PL-Pro/II the other day. One of Buy.com's partners apparently has some old stock available. They're $60 each.

http://www.buy.com/prod/Powerleap-PL-Pr ... 32105.html
I just noticed that Buy.com also has a Powerleap pl-370/t Tualatin adapter for $77.18.
http://www.buy.com/prod/powerleap-pl-37 ... 32103.html
interwb
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Actually it DOES work with Coppermine 633 and higher but...

Post by interwb »

Actually it DOES work with Celeron 633 and higher but you need to get the Powerleap PL-Neo S370 adapter which converts the ppga370 to fcpga370 circuitry. We sell that adapter for $50 as they are very hard to find.

In addition, you can then stack a Lin Lin Tualatin socket 370 adapter (or Powerleap PL-370/T which we just ran out of stock on!) on top of the Neo S370 so that you could use a Celeron 1400 (14 x 100bus) to get a maximum Socket 8 cpu speed of 14 x 66mhz = 933mhz!! Yes that is the actual top speed and YES someone has gotten that done before, look at this Japanese article with PICTURES of an earlier version of the PL-Pro/II version A.... we sell the smaller newer version B:

http://www.gwits.net/~yamagin/custom/hand_7.html

Thanks
INTERWEB Computer Solutions

jsc1973 wrote:I found a source for the PL-Pro/II the other day. One of Buy.com's partners apparently has some old stock available. They're $60 each.

http://www.buy.com/prod/Powerleap-PL-Pr ... 32105.html

If you get one, you must report back on how the Coppermine works. Better yet, I've always wanted to get ahold of a PL-Pro/II and a Tualatin adapter and plug a Tualatin Celeron 1400/100 into it. You'd have a 933 MHz chip running on a Socket 8 platform. I read somewhere or another that someone with an old dual PPro server had actually done this and been successful, but there were no pictures. I guess that's the Holy Grail of Socket 8.

I'm working on something almost as nuts right now myself. I've gotten ahold of an old Compaq Presario laptop that runs a Cyrix MediaGX CPU, and I've been upgrading it with modern components to see if it can be made useful (5400 RPM hard disk, maxed-out RAM, tweaked Win98se, CD-RW drive, etc.). Amazingly, and even though the benchmarks don't show it, the thing is probably three times as fast after the RAM and hard disk upgrades. And it's pleasant to use. I might have to post a report to my website when it's all done.

And if I ever have the time, maybe I'll break out the 486 stuff and assemble the ultimate 486 system...AMD 5x86-133 on a 50 MHz bus for 200 MHz. Faster than a P120. If AMD could have mass-produced the 5x86 to run stably at 200 back in the day, they'd have made a lot of money.
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PL-Pro/II with PL-Neo S370 with Lin Lin Tualatin 370 Adapter!
PL-Pro/II with PL-Neo S370 with Lin Lin Tualatin 370 Adapter!
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fortoreibas
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Post by fortoreibas »

Somehow that picture is both profoundly interesting and ludicrous.
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swaaye
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Post by swaaye »

I have a PPro system with a PPro 200 1MB @ 233. It's fun to mess around with a CPU that was $2500 in its day. :)

I would actually seriously consider Win9x or WinME on a 200 MHz system though. I'm not convinced of 9x being a major problem for PPro anyway. The OS is almost entirely 32-bit and all your apps would most likely be 32-bit unless they are ancient. Performance is excellent, and games run really well. The Opera browser works in 98SE and Me. PPro's full-clock cache, backside cache bus, and FPU make it superior to any Pentium aside from a higher clocked Pentium MMX, perhaps. (IMO)

I tried 2K on it once and XP. They were rather sluggish. So I really don't recommend NT5 on such slow clocked CPUs. I think too that the relatively slow 66MHz EDO DRAM is a major performance impediment to PPro. Both the low clock speed of the RAM and that it is EDO.... SDRAM is much better.
fortoreibas
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Post by fortoreibas »

I noticed that Interweb now has 12 of the PL-Pro/II on Ebay for $60. I'm thinking of picking one up.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0288400826
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