How much was a pentium PRO?

[eric.kjellen]

Yep. Outside of some relatively rare and not-that-great models, virtually all of the cards with 3dfx voodoo1 or voodoo2 chips were 3d-only, leaving you with the need for a 2d video card. The new BX chipset with AGP4X and plenty of PCI slots was the perfect starting point, as the AGP TNT1 was blazing fast for 2d, and competitive or even better sometimes in certain 3d games (early D3D stuff), while the Voodoo2s would crank away beautifully at glide 3d/opengl titles. Quake II at 1280x1024 with SLI Voodoo2 was like butter, and was amazing at the time. It wasn't truly until TNT2 Ultra and particularly the first Geforce cards that single-board gaming returned to the top of the heap, and the lack of 32-bit color started to really put pressure on 3dfx. I also don't really miss the complicated pass-through vga cables for those old cards. It still was a great run though. A pair of Voodoo2's could play games extremely well for years, and they're still popular in classic gaming rigs.

Yeah now that you mention it I remember there were 2 cards and a cable running between the Voodoo2 and either the motherboard or the other video card, no idea what the other card was though but probably just something to display a picture. I miss that computer.

Is there any reason to keep them beside the good memories? Are there some special applications that they render better, kind of like with CRTs?

 

[Concillian]

I had a PPro 150 overclocked to something, 180ish I think? I don't really remember. I probably have it written down somewhere at home.

I was in college at the time. It couldn't have cost too much, as I'm a cheap bastard.

I recall that the 180 and 200 were pretty expensive, but the 150s were much more reasonably priced.
The 180 and 200s were crazy expensive, but the 150s were reasonably priced, as I recall.

It was my first ATX system, I had to buy a case for it because all the cases I had were AT cases. I threw that case out last year.

 

[Tsavo]

Quake II at 1280x1024 with SLI Voodoo2 was like butter, and was amazing at the time. It wasn't truly until TNT2 Ultra and particularly the first Geforce cards that single-board gaming returned to the top of the heap, and the lack of 32-bit color started to really put pressure on 3dfx. I also don't really miss the complicated pass-through vga cables for those old cards. It still was a great run though. A pair of Voodoo2's could play games extremely well for years, and they're still popular in classic gaming rigs.

IIRC, the V2 max res was 1024x768 in SLI. Cables were simple. A single internal ribbon to connect the two V2's and an external pass through to connect the 2D card to the 3D card.

What put a dent in 3DFX wasn't so much the 16 bit color, but cost. A good 3DFX 2D/3D setup was about $400. My Matrox MII with two Voodoo 2/12 MB was @ $750; the TNT was no where near that.

 

[Arkaign]

IIRC, the V2 max res was 1024x768 in SLI. Cables were simple. A single internal ribbon to connect the two V2's and an external pass through to connect the 2D card to the 3D card.

What put a dent in 3DFX wasn't so much the 16 bit color, but cost. A good 3DFX 2D/3D setup was about $400. My Matrox MII with two Voodoo 2/12 MB was @ $750; the TNT was no where near that.

Perhaps 'simple' isn't the word. The cabling was convoluted, the external VGA pass-through was a frequent complaint to high-end users, as the extra connectors tended to muddy the signal a bit, particularly noticeable if you had a 1600x1200 desktop. Tom's and others had articles on it

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a-3dfx-card-picture-quality-loss,76.html

I think you're right about the 1024 thing, it's been so long that back then 1024x768 was considered decent for 3d gaming

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87-8.html

A single TNT traded blows fairly decently with a Voodoo2 12MB, and offered 32-bit color as well. SLI V2's remained hugely effective until really the TNT2 and soon after, the Geforce era though. TNT was a good value, though some games just ran much better on 3dfx, particuarly glide and OpenGL games, which were soon to fall from the forefront.

 

[Arkaign]

IIRC weren't they dubbed "3D accelerators" at the time? And the advent of the combined 2D/3D integrated chip was when Nvidia coined the term GPU?

Sort of. Nvidia coined 'GPU' to coincide with their chips that finally included pixel shaders. Historically, this doesn't mean much, but that's when it caught on. It's such a generic term these days that I don't think it's any problem referring to older 3d-accelerated cards as GPUs either, even if they didn't have pixel shaders, their purpose was the same : offer gaming or professional-purpose 3d graphics performance as an add-on or optional onboard package. Speaking of, I wonder what the first notebook was to ship with an actual decent 3d chip was? I remember terrible notebook chipsets, even in $3000 notebooks, stuff like Tseng Labs, Cirrus, S3, etc.

 

[hans007]

One of these?

http://cdn.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K6/L_AMD-AMD-K6-PR200 (black ES).jpg

I think they're very rare, probably worth quite a bit.

yeah one of those. i think i gave it to a friend.

it was such a poor overclocker it would not even clock to 233 reliably. don't know if its really worth anything now, but i'm sure they are pretty rare.

 

[Tsavo]

Perhaps 'simple' isn't the word. The cabling was convoluted, the external VGA pass-through was a frequent complaint to high-end users, as the extra connectors tended to muddy the signal a bit, particularly noticeable if you had a 1600x1200 desktop. Tom's and others had articles on it

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a-3dfx-card-picture-quality-loss,76.html

I've seen quite a few V2's that had anemic pass through cables that gave "meh" IQ at resolutions lower than that. The cables that came with my Monsters would screw your day up if someone hit you with them. :awe: IQ degradation wasn't that noticeable with those.

 

[yottabit]

I inherited a wonderful PPro 200 workstation from the back computer closet at my work. It's visible in the start of my computer comparison video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvibGuRe9E0

And at the very end you can see me going on Anandtech forums with it People at work wouldn't believe me when I told them I could get it online. All I needed was a PS2-> AT adaptor, learn how to use the keyboard as a mouse, an ethernet card, and I put in a Diamond Stealth PCI graphics card for good measure with a fresh install of NT4 on an old 6GB HD I had lying around

 

[Dadofamunky]

The ribbon cables never bothered me, but I always thought the gold/brown PCB's were pukey:

^ you are looking at two 12-node clusters housed in plexiglass cases which were setup to be wind-tunnels courtesy of two $30 "walmart special" fans. Ghetto style ain't got nothing on me

ROTFLOL! IDC, you are a certified freak. I love it - raiding the old photo collections to beef up this thread. That's Tijuana Style.

Weird Stuff in Santa Clara is a few blocks from my office. I bought a couple of PPRO 256K chips there once ($25 apiece) for my antique stash. I should go over there for lunch soon.

 

[Dadofamunky]

I do NOT miss ribbon cable - OR unshielded power supply connectors. Geesh, I had completely forgotten about that.

I did have a dual-processor Pentium MMX-200 box for quite awhile, based on a Tyan motherboard, running Windows NT4 server with a superbly reliable PCP&C power supply, and a bulletproof case from the same company. It had 8 1MB SIMMs. Probably the only server-class machine I ever built. Sold it to someone. I bet it's still running. Kinda wish I still had it now. Although God knows what I'd do with it - probably run a Cisco IOS kernel or something on it, since that would be all it would be good for.

 

[OCGuy]

Wow, great thread guys....makes me want to dig out the old Packard Bell.

Great contributions, IDC. Man that PCB is ugly....

 

[JoJoman88]

My first system was a Gateway 2000 with a 33Mhz 486 with 8 Megs. of Ram,a 170 Meg WD hard drive, 3.5 floppy drive and a huge 15 inch CRT all for the low price of $2500. Wow,I think the 486 used 5 Volts Vcore,and when I dropped the 486DX2 66Mhz chip in that it used 3.3 Volts Vcore. That's a big difference form what we deal with today! Never had PPro but always wanted one in the day $$$.

 

[Rubycon]

Speaking of 486 land I do remember having an Everex and Zeos 486.
The Everex had a front panel with LEDs showing RAM activity/useage. I'll never forget opening large JPGs from nasa.gov and seeing them go all the way over to 11! (16MB) That was a LOT of memory in 1990. :biggrin:

Those Collaroy 8 way Pentium Pro boxes were ungodly expensive too! 512MB Burst EDO ECC memory per socket. Windows NT Server 4.0 Enterprise. DPT SCSI RAID controllers with 64MB cache (!) and 8 Cheetah 9LP UW SCSI HDD per channel. Those 9LPs - the original 10K drives - were LOUD! Some of those that still run today are scary sounding when winding up. They sound like a Trane Centravac chiller when started - I'm not kidding. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-O6tXsxXQgA Then that coffee bean grinder seek noise! :awe:

 

[LiuKangBakinPie]

 

[Idontcare]

Then that coffee bean grinder seek noise! :awe:

I kinda miss that seek noise, was the sort of unmistakable feedback you would get that confirmed you were really making your computer work for a living :biggrin:

That said, I do wish my computer was as silent as my cellphone. (without giving up performance, naturally, I want it all)

 

[Rubycon]

I kinda miss that seek noise, was the sort of unmistakable feedback you would get that confirmed you were really making your computer work for a living :biggrin:

That said, I do wish my computer was as silent as my cellphone. (without giving up performance, naturally, I want it all)

I've seriously considered an acoustic activity indicator that would click when a disk is being accessed. :biggrin:

 

[LiuKangBakinPie]

Can any one remember this

 

[Rubycon]

Can any one remember this

Yes I do remember those.
As recently as the early 90s I remember houses (that's place of musical performances not where people live hehe) that were using S-100 based computers to control lighting! Those had 64K - yes K not M! - RAM and a Z-80 CPU at 4.77MHz. Dual 8" floppies booting up CP/M. The computer was made by a company called California Computer Systems back in the 70s when these kids named Jobs and Woz were fulling around with fruit in their garage! :biggrin:

 

[LiuKangBakinPie]

Yes I do remember those.
As recently as the early 90s I remember houses (that's place of musical performances not where people live hehe) that were using S-100 based computers to control lighting! Those had 64K - yes K not M! - RAM and a Z-80 CPU at 4.77MHz. Dual 8" floppies booting up CP/M. The computer was made by a company called California Computer Systems back in the 70s when these kids named Jobs and Woz were fulling around with fruit in their garage! :biggrin:

Tell me you got that somewhere else and not if my SIG :biggrin:

 

[Idontcare]

I've seriously considered an acoustic activity indicator that would click when a disk is being accessed. :biggrin:

When I set up this "open concept" cluster, which I then logged into remotely from an office down the hall, I intentionally installed the networking switch for the cluster in my office (ran 300ft lan cables) just so I could watch the activity lights on the network switch light up and go all blinky-crazy when I launched a job that would use all twelve computers.

^ all of that processing power is present in my single Q6600 quad-core processor running at stock clocks.

An overclocked gulftown is probably 3-4x the aggregate processing power of this 12 node (800MHz K7's) cluster from 11-12 yrs ago. Not too mention the cluster cost about $7k for the hardware alone.

 

[ElFenix]

IIRC weren't they dubbed "3D accelerators" at the time? And the advent of the combined 2D/3D integrated chip was when Nvidia coined the term GPU?

the geforce 256 is when nvidia coined that term. it brought hardware t&l to the party. they later somehow adapted that hardware through driver updates to do antialiasing, basically killing the voodoo5's claim to fame.

I kinda miss that seek noise, was the sort of unmistakable feedback you would get that confirmed you were really making your computer work for a living :biggrin:

when i was 8 or 9 i thought that was the sound of the switches in the processor

 

[aigomorla]

When I set up this "open concept" cluster, which I then logged into remotely from an office down the hall, I intentionally installed the networking switch for the cluster in my office (ran 300ft lan cables) just so I could watch the activity lights on the network switch light up and go all blinky-crazy when I launched a job that would use all twelve computers.

^ all of that processing power is present in my single Q6600 quad-core processor running at stock clocks.

oh i thought u were setting up an overclocking competition or a lanparty. :biggrin:

 

[Idontcare]

when i was 8 or 9 i thought that was the sound of the switches in the processor

Well you were a rather savvy 8 or 9 yr old to have had the mental cognizance to associate the two and ascribe it such a working mental model.

If you were 8 or 9 yrs old in 1945 then you would have been right!

All I can say is there are grown adults who work in this industry that haven't the slightest clue that transistors are sexed up solid-state switches.

oh i thought u were setting up an overclocking competition or a lanparty. :biggrin:

Lol...enough time has passed since then that I don't mind admitting now that it was occasionally "repurposed" to serve as a Baldur's Gate game server for a few us that liked to do team play. We always wondered if people got suspicious of the fact that when they'd walk into the office there were four of us who seemed to immediately need to alt-tab over to a new window...

 

[aigomorla]

Lol...enough time has passed since then that I don't mind admitting now that it was occasionally "repurposed" to serve as a Baldur's Gate game server for a few us that liked to do team play. We always wondered if people got suspicious of the fact that when they'd walk into the office there were four of us who seemed to immediately need to alt-tab over to a new window...

lol pish... during my freshman / sophmore in college, i worked at a computer store.

We would have all the machines connected together to play Diablo1 over Lan.

Ahh used the OG 10BaseT Ethernet cards daisy chained and ended with terminators.

Ahhhh memories..

funny thing is the store sold more systems by showing people how addicting network coop was.

 

[Vic Vega]

I used to have an IBM workstation which had dual Pentium Pro 233MHz CPUs. That was a nice machine.

It was later replaced by a Pentium 2 450MHz machine which I had quite a few years until it was replaced with an Athlon 850MHz machine which was blazing fast, made the P2 look like a toy.