TPU's Nostalgic Hardware Club

[Trekkie4]

More updates... Started taking this gigantic HP apart & have to say, I'm mildly disappointed in the terms of video card(s). I was expecting multi-GPU card (since that's what I found online, reference material & guides), but it actually turned out to be none other than nVidia Quadro2 AGP (2x/4x) card. Not even the "pro" model, just the standard AGP, even though motherboard supports Pro cards.

So once again I'd like to ask you guys for more help & information on Quadro2. As far as I could find, there's not much information on Quadro2, how does it keep up with MX400 for example, or even Radeon 9550?

Edit
Nevermind, 9550 is out of the question due to HP not being compatible with AGP4x/8x, but I can hopefully still find something along Ti4200 or MX440

 

[stinger608]

Man, I wish you were on this side of the pond @Trekkie4 ! I have an MX400 that is in retail box and basically brand new.

 

[Trekkie4]

Man, I wish you were on this side of the pond @Trekkie4 ! I have an MX400 that is in retail box and basically brand new.

You mean, you'd open your brand new, sealed MX400 card just because of me?! No way, hardware like that belongs to a museum! Well perhaps not at the moment, but give it few more years! I actually have a MX400 card in one of the boxes, but I was hoping to aim higher than that! Correct me if I'm wrong, but dual P3 CPUs at 2x 1GHz gives me about the same speed & performance as P4 chip running at 2GHz, especially since it's loaded with 1GB of RAM! So I was thinking of something more similar to Ti4800 or at least Ti4200, you know... Something powerful to run even the most demanding retro games like Half Life 2! We'll see, for now I've decided to leave the existing card, Quadro2. Actually I DO have one Ti4200 in stock, but it's missing a fan (someone removed it), so I wouldn't want to push my luck until I can find suitable fan or entire heatsink.

Anyhow, regarding the HP... I decided to strip it apart & clean out all the dust I could see & reach. I still need to make a decent cable management, but apart from that it's good as new IMHO

First of all, model number... Don't know who or what IRAC 1152 means


Boot up config (Iomega ZIP250 wasn't detected at the time, because someone unplugged it from the motherboard)


Diagram label on the side panel, extremely difficult to see & read!


Visualize system as it was, when I 1st got it. That CPU heatsink is actually just a shroud, there are two Slot-1 CPUs under.


Pretty dusty, which is why I decided to strip it apart & clean everything!


Front panel comes off in two steps...


nVidia Quadro2 AGP card


SCSI (PCI?!) controller card


Followed by two Quantum Atlas SCSI hard drives, 18.2 each (but they are showing signs of damage & bad sectors)


More details...


Two CPUs in place, both P3 1000MHz, SL4BS


Out with the PSU... It's Delta-branded by the way, the entire system is made out of high quality & reliable brands. All the fans are also Delta-Electronics, while the floppy & DVD drive are both Panasonic.


Integrated LCD screen & control buttons module


From now on, it's all the same, but in reverse - slowly putting everything back together again, final set of pics (hopefully) coming up tomorrow!

 

[biffzinker]

Thanks again @Trekkie4 for the photos. Should try it out as a server or workstation before turning it into a regular retro desktop.

 

[AsRock]

Some really nice stuff there, and as for the SCSI card
http://storage.microsemi.com/en-us/support/scsi/u160/asc-29160/

 

[Trekkie4]

Thanks again @Trekkie4 for the photos. Should try it out as a server or workstation before turning it into a regular retro desktop.

No prob! Hope to finish this one some time tomorrow, SCSI cable management is going to be PITA, especially with that cable terminator sticking out, but I'll give it a try... Or I might even remove it entirely, because both disks are extremely limited in the terms of storage capacity & overall health

Nah, I really don't have much use for a server around here, and to tell you the truth, I don't have a dedicated room, area where I could put one so that's not going to happen. Workstation ... for what is the question? Because this HP already is a workstation, for 3D designers... But just so you know, this one was never going to be just another, regular retro desktop I actually have big plans for this one, as long as I can get everything working!

Some really nice stuff there, and as for the SCSI card
http://storage.microsemi.com/en-us/support/scsi/u160/asc-29160/

Thanks for the info! Personally, I hate SCSI but I'm tempted to keep it inside just for the sake of wow factor & pure nostalgia!

 

[AsRock]

If there is any to keep it's gotta be a Adeptec .

 

[stinger608]

You mean, you'd open your brand new, sealed MX400 card just because of me?

It's not a sealed box by any means. It was just very rarely used I guess. I got it from someone else that put it in a system way back when then scored a much better card. It sat in its box in his closet for years.

 

[biffzinker]

Thanks for the info! Personally, I hate SCSI but I'm tempted to keep it inside just for the sake of wow factor & pure nostalgia!

I'm use to dealing with SCSI from using Macintosh then Power Macintosh systems so I don't find SCSI to be a PITA for me. I remember trying to get a external UMAX flat-bed scanner to play along with a external Iomega Jaz Drive via Adaptec Ultra SCSI PCI card.

Found the card I had in a Power Mac Clone.
Adaptec AHA-2940/2940U PCI

 

[Trekkie4]

If there is any to keep it's gotta be a Adeptec .

Your wish is my command! No, seriously! I would never remove (original) SCSI controller, even if I'm not planning to use it, altogether! With that being said, I've decided to keep the SCSI equipment, but I'm probably going to add yet another, 3rd (ATA) hard drive which is going to be the main storage, while the two SCSI are going to be additional storage, just for "fun" & nostalgia. My only worry is the power consumption, 3 hard drives are going to pull a LOT of juice from the PSU...

It's not a sealed box by any means. It was just very rarely used I guess. I got it from someone else that put it in a system way back when then scored a much better card. It sat in its box in his closet for years.

Ah, OK then! Nevertheless, if I were you, I'd keep that MX (as it is) just for the sake of nostalgia! There are hundreds (and thousands) of MX400 out there, without boxes and/or any documentation. But that's just my personal opinion, I like it when the retro hardware (or software) is fully preserved & untouched Doesn't necessarily has to be sealed, as long as the packaging is in perfect condition & has all the documentation & instruction manuals included.

I'm use to dealing with SCSI from using Macintosh then Power Macintosh systems so I don't find SCSI to be a PITA for me. I remember trying to get a external UMAX flat-bed scanner to play along with a external Iomega Jaz Drive via Adaptec Ultra SCSI PCI card.

Found the card I had in a Power Mac Clone.
Adaptec AHA-2940/2940U PCI

I first came across SCSI that been custom-added into a Pentium 2 machine, long time ago. Someone sold it as just standard Pentium 2 (350MHz) unit, but either forgot or didn't care to mention the Adaptec PCI SCSI controller & WD Enterprise had drive. Obviously I took it out & kept the entire SCSI kit for some other project, so it eventually ended up inside old Pentium MMX 233 machine, it was a perfect combo IMHO since the Enterprise drive was pretty small in the terms of capacity. However, the motor (and seek) noise was terrible, I could NEVER get used to SCSI racket!

I still have it inside, and no I'm not going to change anything but after my initial experience with SCSI drives I've decided never to use this thing again. And I didn't ... until I got my hands on a Pentium Pro machine, which once again came with Adaptec SCSI controller & two Seagate Barracuda drives. True, I considered to swap them out for ATA units & remove the controller (and cables) altogether, but in the end decided to keep them. God knows why, that Pentium Pro is loud enough to wake the dead Not to mention these drives take a long time to spin down, twice more than your average 7200RPM hard drive. And yet, despite my feelings towards SCSI, now I have yet another unit with two more drives ... what a joy! But I'm all about originality & preserving the history, so therefore it stays! In fact, I might even be able to source yet another, identical Adaptec controller card if needed and could probably get it for free. In fact, I was offered to strip all the remaining parts from other HP Visualize unit, but decided not to take it. To be honest, I wouldn't know what to do with it...

So with that being said, here are more pics & final conclusion

Remember this card from way, way back? GeForce4 Ti4800SE, the most powerful GF4 out there AFAIK. Initially it was paired up with S478 Pentium 4, running @ 2GHz, but due to HP Visualize & the fact I could only use AGP 1x/2x interface, I pulled it out & swapped for ATI Radeon 9550. Yeah, I know... In the terms of performance, this is definitely a downgrade for Pentium 4 machine, however I DID end up with 4800 "extra". Which needless to say, ended up inside my HP Visualize system right away & was a perfect match!


With all the internal cables lined up & properly organized (as much as I could, considering the terrible case design without any "pockets" & empty bays) & Ti4800 set up, I would say this one is finished for now. Perhaps I'll add additional hard drive in the future, but 1st I need to source a pair of 5.25 to 3.5" conversion rails, since I'm all out of 3.5" drive bays.


3DMark 2001 benchmark results, running at 1024x768, 32bit color (24bit buffer) and 4x AA


Visualize is running Win2k, latest SP (again, for the sake of originality), but I might eventually change it to XP Professional, SP3. Again, we'll see...

Edit
Now that I'm comparing benchmark results with other numbers, these 4431 points seem to be awfully low... Wonder what's the catch, I should be getting a lot more with 1GB of RAM, 2GHz CPU(s) and SCSI drive *shrug*

 

[biffzinker]

2GHz CPU(s)

Correction: You have two 1 GHz CPU/s so you'll never get prefect linear scaling in which it acts as a 2 GHz single core CPU.
Well there is some overhead cache snooping -additional traffic, memory bandwidth from the north-bridge being shared between the two CPUs, and etc. on the GTL+ bus with two Pentium III 1 GHz CPU's sharing the FSB worth taking into consideration. Also if the older software isn't multi-thread aware the second is going to go unused.

Edit: Did you clean out the heatsink for 4800SE? It looked a little plugged up on the one side with blackened dust.

Edit 2:

The above caps with the arrow look like there bulged out to me. The bottom two maybe?

 

[Trekkie4]

You're right, I didn't consider the possibility of software not being able to take full advantage of two CPUs... I know for the fact that Half-Life 2 could, but not sure about any other title *sigh* IDK, guess I'm clueless at this point, should I just swap the card back for original Quadro2 MXR2 & keep the system as it is, without further modifications & upgrades, or should I keep the 4800 & aim high? Because at 1000MHz, it seems like a waste of a very powerful card, capable of delivering much more performance than 4431 3D marks.

I was given that 4800 for free, around September last year. This HERE is the original post and yes, that "bulged" cap seems to be the same on both pics. Don't really know if it's bulged or not, to be perfectly honest I never really gave it a proper analysis or benchmark. As soon as I got the card, I loaded up some of the games I have, just to see if it works or not and (from what I remember) everything worked out OK, so I left it aside & moved on to another machine. But even if that's the case & caps really ARE bulged, there's not much I can do about it... These are SMD capacitors, and I just don't have the tools, steady hands and/or patience to fiddle with it

 

[Mr.Scott]

3Dmark 01 does take advantage of multi core/cpu setups up to 2 cores. The problem with it is that it's very CPU speed based. You're running 1000 MHz.

3Dmark 03 is much more GPU based.

 

[Trekkie4]

Yes, but I'm running two processors, each 1GHz. Which should equal (give it or take it) 2GHz in total output right? Unless I got something wrong...

 

[vigia]

You're right, I didn't consider the possibility of software not being able to take full advantage of two CPUs... I know for the fact that Half-Life 2 could, but not sure about any other title *sigh* IDK, guess I'm clueless at this point, should I just swap the card back for original Quadro2 MXR2 & keep the system as it is, without further modifications & upgrades, or should I keep the 4800 & aim high? Because at 1000MHz, it seems like a waste of a very powerful card, capable of delivering much more performance than 4431 3D marks.

I was given that 4800 for free, around September last year. This HERE is the original post and yes, that "bulged" cap seems to be the same on both pics. Don't really know if it's bulged or not, to be perfectly honest I never really gave it a proper analysis or benchmark. As soon as I got the card, I loaded up some of the games I have, just to see if it works or not and (from what I remember) everything worked out OK, so I left it aside & moved on to another machine. But even if that's the case & caps really ARE bulged, there's not much I can do about it... These are SMD capacitors, and I just don't have the tools, steady hands and/or patience to fiddle with it

If you look carefully there is printed the footprint for a through hole capacitor, you can replace them with leaded capacitors.

 

[DR4G00N]

Is it worth picking up a Soltek SL-75FRN2-L Golden Flame? I can get one for $20 cad with an athlon xp 2500+ in it.

It's the one without a fan on the chipset heatsink and has the cpu 4-pin at the top edge of the board.

 

[Mr.Scott]

Yes, but I'm running two processors, each 1GHz. Which should equal (give it or take it) 2GHz in total output right? Unless I got something wrong...

No. It is still 1 GHz. Think core count, not amount of processors.
If you had 8 of them, would that be the same as 8 GHz in performance?

 

[Mr.Scott]

Is it worth picking up a Soltek SL-75FRN2-L Golden Flame? I can get one for $20 cad with an athlon xp 2500+ in it.

It's the one without a fan on the chipset heatsink and has the cpu 4-pin at the top edge of the board.

The Golden Flame is a collector's board for sure. Getting harder to find every day. You won't get the stellar overclocks out of it like the good NF2 boards, but it does overclock.

 

[DR4G00N]

The Golden Flame is a collector's board for sure. Getting harder to find every day. You won't get the stellar overclocks out of it like the good NF2 boards, but it does overclock.

Thanks. I'll grab it then, I haven't played around with any old AMD platforms so this should be a good learning experience at the very least.

 

[Trekkie4]

No. It is still 1 GHz. Think core count, not amount of processors.
If you had 8 of them, would that be the same as 8 GHz in performance?

Joke aside, yes I did (and would) think & assume so, yeah! IDK, I never had a dual CPU board before, but from all the experiences by other ppl & various reviews from around the web, I was under the impression how the CPU speed would scale up. As in running dual-core Pentium @ 2GHz is still 2GHz, but with two cores. However, running two Pentium 3 @ 1GHz would equal to one Pentium 3 running 2GHz in total. Therefore, by the same logic running 8 of them would indeed equal to one CPU, running at 8GHz

But really, if that's the case, then dual CPU boards are way overrated IMHO. Because not only they're not compatible with (most) of older apps & OS, but they also don't scale & cause a lot of issues. Except for maybe professional workstation (or a server), I just can't think of a good use for a design like that *shrug*

Anyway, I suppose at this point it doesn't really matter one way or another... HP "died" earlier tonight While I was benchmarking the MX400 card it started acting up, reporting disk problems (which I already know it's bad, at least one of the two SCSI drives) & eventually didn't want to boot at all, kept throwing BSOD. However, when I tried to re-install Win2k, the entire system hung up at the point where the actual setup begins, it would load up all the drivers & data from a CD perfectly OK & then nothing. The problem kept getting worse & worse to the point where it didn't want to turn on, at all. Standby LED doesn't light up, or even the onboard LCD screen, but the fans are working, same kind of symptoms I already witnessed several times over the last couple of years, and they all had one thing in common - PSU. So I'm in the process of getting another one, but until then it's "lights out" for Visualize

Edit
On a side note, I DID carefully check that Ti4800 card but no - from what I can see, the caps are NOT bulging, it only seems that way. I even checked them from the side, profile view to see if they're flat or "D" shaped, and they seem to be OK. Which is definitely a good thing, because I also checked the PCB design & there's no place for leaded capacitors, only the SMD ones.

 

[biffzinker]

As in running dual-core Pentium @ 2GHz is still 2GHz, but with two cores. However, running two Pentium 3 @ 1GHz would equal to one Pentium 3 running 2GHz in total. Therefore, by the same logic running 8 of them would indeed equal to one CPU, running at 8GHz

Two Slot/Socket 370 Pentium III @ 1 GHz is still 1 GHz just if the software is multi-threaded aware you would get say a .80 bump to the 1.00 of the other Pentium III. (1.00+.80=1.80 no perfect bump to 2.00)

 

[Trekkie4]

Right, I get it now... Too bad, it really disappointed me, in the terms of two processor configuration

Of course, with HP out cold, it doesn't really matter, unless I can get it up & running again. I'm waiting for the replacement PSU & will take it from there, to see what the heck is going on inside. Either that Ti4800 pulled too much current from the PSU & destroyed it, or one of the SCSI drives shorted & caused damage either to the PSU or motherboard itself. One way or another, I'll hopefully have all the answer(s) soon!

 

[DR4G00N]

I picked up that Soltek board today and the guy I bought it from threw in 2x 256MB Micron 266MHz CL2.5 DIMM's & A Gigabyte Radeon 9600 Pro 128MB for an extra $10.

It's a little dusty but works fine and there are no bulged or blown capacitors which is nice.

The CPU is an Athlon XP "Barton" 2500+ @ 1833MHz (166FSB * 11X)

I just ordered up a couple Samsung 1GB 400MHz dimms off ebay to give it a bit more oomph.

I need to grab a faster HDD though, currently I'm using a 15 year old Maxtor 40GB drive.

 

[Maban]

I picked up that Soltek board today and the guy I bought it from threw in 2x 256MB Micron 266MHz CL2.5 DIMM's & A Gigabyte Radeon 9600 Pro 128MB for an extra $10.

It's a little dusty but works fine and there are no bulged or blown capacitors which is nice.

The CPU is an Athlon XP "Barton" 2500+ @ 1833MHz (166FSB * 11X)

I just ordered up a couple Samsung 1GB 400MHz dimms off ebay to give it a bit more oomph.

I need to grab a faster HDD though, currently I'm using a 15 year old Maxtor 40GB drive.

View attachment 81253
View attachment 81254
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View attachment 81256

That is a beautifully hideous motherboard.

 

[Mr.Scott]

Board is in great condition. Nice buy.