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You know what seems to be extra rare? Pentium II and III Xeons.

H

hunterjwizzard

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Most don't even know these exist far as I can tell. The CPUs themselves are as common as hydrogen molecules and while they seem to have jumped in price, for a long time you could get 1ghz PIII Xeons for $20. They were supposed to be "for servers and high-end workstations" but I've never actually seen an ATX Slot 2 motherboard. For a while it wasn't so hard to find proprietary dual and quad socket boards on eBay(though adapting these to work without the original server would be challenging). But aside from a few guys on the now defunct 2cpu.com I've not even met anyone with a working PII/III Xeon build in ages. I remember one guy on there even had an 8-way system he'd dust off for bench marking from time to time.
 
They were never common and were mostly proprietary OEM systems, so most motherboards were recycled.

I kind of wanted a dual XEON ages ago when I was collecting dual CPU motherboards but never found one that was a good deal.
 
I have two systems that have PIII Xeons, a Kayak XU and an IBM Intellistation whose model I've forgotten (and they are my x86 diamonds because both have high-end Intergraph cards, fast disks and as much ram as I could cram into them) and at least one more dual PIII Xeon ATX form factor Intel board buried in storage. There should also be at least one more dual slot 1 PII board.
There was a period in the mid-2000's where I too remember 1ghz modules were cheap and the SGI folk were using them to max out their Visual Workstations but those were the hold-out's. Between 2010 and 2015 those systems finally became too slow or incompatible with modern encryption to let them still be used as practical daily drivers. They mostly got recycled and here we are now.
 
Other than more cache (and more then 2 CPUs), what did the Pentium II and III XEONs actually offer?
 
I remember all the domain controllers from windows NT 3.1 forward all ran xeon. Thats the only time I ever worked on them
 
hunterjwizzard said:
I've never actually seen an ATX Slot 2 motherboard
Click to expand...

Slot 2 CPUs were so chonky it almost dictated a proprietary chassis to hold them securely. I guess Intel did sell “generic” motherboards with a giant ridiculous retention cage screwed to them, but I can’t imagine finding a case at your local CompUSA that they’d fit in. (You know, back when CompUSAs still existed.)
 
There was a time a few years ago when some NIB Slot 2 Pentium II Xeons were showing up on ebay, so I snagged one. I talked a friend about them, and supposedly he might have a Slot 2 motherboard floating around, because I'd love to play with it and see what it can do.
xeon.jpg
 
We used to work with Compaq ProLiants in the past and they had Pentium II and III Xeon on board. A colleague just happened to tell last Thursday he maybe had still one in the basement. I hope it still works. I had two myself but they broke down quite some years ago. Having no spare parts and not being real vintage at that time, they ended up in the recycling store.
 
I remember they were quite tall, and the OEM models had huge heatsinks but no fans? I assume they need different heatsinks then normal P2/P3 CPUs.
 
Mine all have heatsinks riveted on and cooling is provided through the custom cage they slot into or from a pair of fans on the support risers.
 
I did once get my hands on a dual PIII Xeon dell server, but it had been sitting out in the rain possibly for years, so naturally it did not post. I took the whole thing apart and was fascinated by its workings. I kept the CPUs for several years, and eventually ewasted them when because "modern CPUs are so much faster!" Still kicking myself.
 
we've all done it. These things go through stages. When they are worthless its hard to think one day this will be important again.
 
A place I worked in the late 2000s had piles of 4th and 5th generation Dell Poweredge servers, like 6450 that had these slot Xeons in them. Some of them were quad CPU.
 
I was lusting after 4 and 6-cpu Compaq and ALR systems in the late 2000's as they were being retired. Wasn't ever able to find one of those machines again in the wild.
When I did start accumulating multi-processor PPro, PII and PIII along with the Xeon variants another thing I quickly realized was that under NT there was kernel multiprocessor support but nothing you and I would run would ever took advantage of more than one thread. Even telling Windows to go and use another core was like telling a toddler to wash a car.
 
well, every decade or so, the ASUS XG-DLS ( https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/asus-xg-dls ) will pop up on ebay. its practically the only dual slot-2, non-oem, ATX board that I know of. If one does pops up on ebay, make sure the cpu brackets are included. they are unique to the motherboard. Also it requires the rare 2.8V xeons. 99% of all the chips you see on ebay are the 5/12v with the integrated voltage regulator. the asus board needs the 2.8v processors.
 
If you want a slot2 xeon, the only practical way tog et one is so hunt down a full rack server. not unlike how Victor Bart did very recently.


and you will quickly find out, it is not designed for first-time users. they are very picky about hardware.
 
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