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Anyone have experience with INTERGRAPH Pentium PRO era systems ?

J

jc179

Experienced Member
Joined
Apr 21, 2007
Messages
99
Hi everyone

I am really wanting to find a dual socket (or better) pentium pro setup, and so far despite looking for an IBM PC Server 365, I haven't found anything.

I stumbled across these - INTERGRAPH MSMT329 PROCESSOR BOARD FOR QUAD PENTIUM PRO 200 which looks to have a 4 CPU setup of Pentium PRO, with the CPU's still installed, however is it something I am not familiar with in terms of can it be used as a PC?
I see it has the usual standard fanfare of serial, vga, ps2 etc based on the pictures, and probably some weird power supply setup - ok solve that later.

It is unfortunately 200 lbs+ and takes up a monster 5U of rack units, probably cost me the same in shipping to get it here as the price, so not very ideal, but if I can't find anything else I suppose it'll do.

Just hoping if anyone can chime in if this will work as I hope, or perhaps is missing something or will require something external as well? From a bit of Googling the older intergraph stuff needed a special keyboard etc to worky....

link:
www.dreamhardware.com

INTERGRAPH MSMT329 PROCESSOR BOARD FOR QUAD PENTIUM PRO 200

INTERGRAPH MSMT329 PROCESSOR BOARD FOR QUAD PENTIUM PRO 200
www.dreamhardware.com www.dreamhardware.com

thanks for any info
Jonathan
 
Eh I have a few dual pentium pros. Can you use it as a regular pc, sure! But you are stuck installing linux or Win NT if you want to use anything more then 1 processor. I was considering selling my dual pentium pro build, if the right buyer came along. Intel mobo (PR440fX). Has dual 36gb 10k rpm drives, 256mb EDO ECC. Floppy and dual SCSI Plextor cdroms. Has in it right now a Matrox 200 gpu, but can swap that out for something else. Currently supports 4 monitors. Think it has a modern plus 80 broze 700w psu atm, might be 650w. (Its a Thermaltake 750w) SB Live! soundcard. Believe its a Chenbro, might be a Supermircro case, so super heavy and sturdy. Tall mid tower / short full tower. Shes not a light machine, but runs awesome. Was going to use it for a server for my vintage stuff , but then got a few older IBM p4 Netvista servers for free.

If you are interested I can pull the machine out and grab some pics whatnot.
 
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Yeah I should have been more specific in the sense of regular PC usage.. I mean with regards to its not bios locked or hdd locked to particular hdd or OS. I'm not sure on the OS side of things but some things like Grid Systems, or Xtrarex are locked to only certain models of hdd/ firmware revisions. That would be super annoying, though maybe possible to spoof, probably. However, if I'm going to this trouble to get something like this, I'd like to avoid the extra work and just use it as is. I would plan to run Linux maybe NT4 SMP on this box so no issue there with regards to being stuck in that regard on my end.

If any of your dual PPPRO setup is available for selling, do you mind sharing the details of the make/model of the actual system(s), or if its of a clone style AT system, what the internal motherboard is, and what case its in?

Feel free to fire me off a PM when you have a moment so this post doesn't get too cluttered up

thanks
Jonathan
 
Its an Intel branded board, with dual ppro200 256s. PR440FX Motherboard w/ VRM. If I have a chance tomorrow, I'll drag it out and take you some pictures. Its a nice clean, albiet heavy, machine . Do have the right box to ship it as well. Padded with foam whatnot. I have a thread here when I was building it, ill add it in shortly.
 
I would say its an overkill vintage workstation, or small server build. Guessing this is more what you were looking for.
 
Thanks, found a few pictures, looks like a decent case for sure - assume you want to sell it as a whole unit ?
Noticed in one thread you mentioned you have a spare mobo - Do you still have it? I do have a spare 200 pppro goldie here as well.... and Mobo /cpu would be far cheaper to ship....

Always looking for overkill, on this I'd probably mess about and use it in both configurations. I have a Tyan dual socket7 system I do similar with... If only electricity was FREE !
 
Sorry, sold off the spare mobo a year ago to a user on here, for a good deal I might add. But yes, its a complete turn key system. Everything is done, OS , drivers, software etc. Now that being said, might agree to a partial trade for that dual socket 7 board! And might even be inclined to part out the board / psu / memory / cpu w/ heatsinks, VRM and hard drives w/ SCA backplanes. Just remember the board is bigger then even an IBM XT board. So not going to fit most cases. Upside I have 3U cases the boards originally came in (3COM Firewire network cases). I have 2 cases, 1 with 2 psu's installed. Be happy to part with one for free if we can hammer out a deal, so you have a case. and 19" 3U Rack mountable with brackets, and lockable CDROM/FLOPPY cover. Got 4 of the machines in a deal for some other 19U stuff. Still have 2 cases left, as well as a spare VRM for a PR440FX board.
 
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I had a Dual Pentium Pro iItergraph system. I stripped out the Scsi hdds so I could fit one to a 386DX33 system and scrapped the rest.....
 
Hmm that's unfortunate for me timing wise- I'm guessing that was a while ago... . Any experience using the ppro setup?
 
Mine was running XP Po just fine. It was used in a remote hut for a local radio station before it got decommissioned.
 
twolazy said:
Sorry, sold off the spare mobo a year ago to a user on here, for a good deal I might add. But yes, its a complete turn key system. Everything is done, OS , drivers, software etc. Now that being said, might agree to a partial trade for that dual socket 7 board! And might even be inclined to part out the board / psu / memory / cpu w/ heatsinks, VRM and hard drives w/ SCA backplanes. Just remember the board is bigger then even an IBM XT board. So not going to fit most cases. Upside I have 3U cases the boards originally came in (3COM Firewire network cases). I have 2 cases, 1 with 2 psu's installed. Be happy to part with one for free if we can hammer out a deal, so you have a case. and 19" 3U Rack mountable with brackets, and lockable CDROM/FLOPPY cover. Got 4 of the machines in a deal for some other 19U stuff. Still have 2 cases left, as well as a spare VRM for a PR440FX board.
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I'm ashamed to say that it was damaged. I had one of those heatsinks with the retention clips that required 900lbs of force to remove and the piece of shit harbor freight screwdriver bit I was using to pry it off shattered and then smashed several pins on the DBX. I've removed the chip from the PCB (which is completely undamaged thankfully) but I now need to source a replacement DBX. The motherboard was awesome while it was working though, I do appreciate the deal you made me.
 
maxtherabbit said:
I'm ashamed to say that it was damaged. I had one of those heatsinks with the retention clips that required 900lbs of force to remove and the piece of shit harbor freight screwdriver bit I was using to pry it off shattered and then smashed several pins on the DBX. I've removed the chip from the PCB (which is completely undamaged thankfully) but I now need to source a replacement DBX. The motherboard was awesome while it was working though, I do appreciate the deal you made me.
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That does suck, dbx as in data bus accelerator chip? That sucks, maybe tricky to find one. Depending on the pin pitch, is there anyway to solder fine wires to it? I once dremeled back the casing a bit to expose some on a wii gc2-d2b ic with #30 wire rap, where they cut the pins off at the factory. This is probably much finer pitch im guessing...
 
I've built several Pentium Pro machines from both OEM boards and server boards purposed for high-end machines.

The hardware looks impressive and damn-straight it's impressive but then you get to software options and immediately you get a few linux/unix kernels which are mostly so out of date now you could consider them obsolete, you can't use DOS for obvious reasons, you can't use 9X for the same reasons so that nuls a lot of why people want PC retrogaming so you end up with NT. That might work for some fringe gaming with enough patches for compatibility but then you're often feeding 16-bit code into a 32-bit optimized core which for the Ppro was a stiff performance penalty, plus 90% of the software you will find and install won't even be aware there's more than one core. Even Microsoft Office didn't support multiprocessing until later in the 2000's and Windows even today I still don't think has a layer for LPAR.
I don't even think I have any modelling programs that support multiple processors. Surely 3DS Max had to.
 
NeXT said:
I've built several Pentium Pro machines from both OEM boards and server boards purposed for high-end machines.

The hardware looks impressive and damn-straight it's impressive but then you get to software options and immediately you get a few linux/unix kernels which are mostly so out of date now you could consider them obsolete, you can't use DOS for obvious reasons, you can't use 9X for the same reasons so that nuls a lot of why people want PC retrogaming so you end up with NT. That might work for some fringe gaming with enough patches for compatibility but then you're often feeding 16-bit code into a 32-bit optimized core which for the Ppro was a stiff performance penalty, plus 90% of the software you will find and install won't even be aware there's more than one core. Even Microsoft Office didn't support multiprocessing until later in the 2000's and Windows even today I still don't think has a layer for LPAR.
I don't even think I have any modelling programs that support multiple processors. Surely 3DS Max had to.
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I do totally understand what your saying, but my use case is different than most. I'm not looking to run games or windows apps on it and do anything productive in that sense. I enjoy older unique and cool hardware, and this I would just run a very old linux, like slackware 8, so I can use the machine in SMP with relatively modern-ish (ssh, sftp, basic http controller, perl, basic DB) ,by a stretch , nothing more.

At either rate I am determined to find one, the intergraph machine is big huge and heavy, I would really love to find something smaller, but there just doesn't seem to be *anything* out there , except boards pulled from working machines on ebay for $800, which is totally useless, as I don't have the nice matching case , etc, that it went into... and hence drives my quest to find something, and the intergraph box being the only thing that's turned up so far. I'm not in a super big rush, but the seller mentioned that they have parted a few of these out "for parts", so I fear if I pass then I may lose out on a whole system entirely and be stuck going with an OEM board setup... which I prefer not to.. Yes I am way too late to this game it seems...

My preference would be a IBM, or COMPAQ, Dell , intergraph/ whatever machine, I really like the looks and nice case features... I really don't want to go for an OEM dual pppro setup as you lose all that nice back plane and setup that works so well together (and usually finding a nice case is a pita anyways), but if that was the only thing I can find I'd go for that too.

Jonathan
 
Even when the multi-chip Pentium Pros were being phased out from active service and showing up for scrap they were not desirable, even for running slack/FreeBSD on it I didn't see them popping up as fun boxes to mess around in because they wanted 800W or more which in the mid 2000's was still pretty crazy compared to a desktop and they were massive. It wasn't like say, a Challenge L or an Alphaserver where it was large, heavy, power hungry but at least looked pretty. There just wasn't yet a community for 90's high-performnce x86 systems and that culled the majority of them early on. I think the only machines I have ever seen in numbers in recent history was the Compaq Proliant 5500 series servers and the ALR 6x6. When the latter now surfaces, that's where the money is. I think the last one I saw sell in the open market went for $600.
 
That's part of the problem too I think, they weren't desirable at the time :( . None of the older hardware I have is by any means power efficient, everything of that era seems to draw 600w or more, but that's the nature of the beast.

I maybe in for a long time if I wait, 600 doesn't seem too bad for the ALR 6x6 to be honest given it is sought after, the biggest problem I see is getting it to Canada and more than doubling the price in freight and doodies.. The Intergraph 4x4 is $500 usd and about the same to ship it up here.... who knows what duties it'll take at the border too.
 
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