Abit-BP6 ReCap - Dual Processor Motherboard Back to Life
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- Опубликовано: 19 авг 2024
- I was sent this Abit-BP6 some time ago but I'm ready now to get it up and running again!
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I too had this board, "back in the day". I ran my 466mhz Celerons at 525mhz easily. Was so much fun as an enthusiast board. No more stuttering and you could truly multitask long before the multi core chips we all know and love today.
I had a board like Luke with dual over locked Celeron CPUs. Very cool.
Oh wow! So many memories! 😻
I had one of these and used it to develop and test the C++ Linux-based data acquisition system of a high energy physics experiment at CERN, around 1999.
Having two CPU sockets, in times before multi-core, was an absolute saviour for dealing with soft-realtime; on a single core system any hiccup would become a system freeze. I loved this MB: even if it was really not the most stable thing, it was cheap enough that I could have it at my desk, all for myself. I don't think we would have succeeded without it ❤️
I had one of these too! I loved it. At a time when home NAT routers didn't exist yet, my dual-processor system acted as a server sharing the house internet across 3 systems (thank you SyGate!). When we weren't at home, it ran Seti@Home on both processors and churned through the data at an impressive rate. Good times!
savior**
@@allentoyokawa9068 thanks for translating to US English 😉
I remember running dual Celeron 366's clocked at 550Mhz. It was rock solid stable too.
When it comes to caps, they can be very much like the proverbial horse shoes and hand grenades: close enough is close enough. Any modern low-ESR electrolytic type from the likes of Nichicon, UCC, Rubycon, or Panasonic would likely have worked perfectly well in place of the originals. Do bear in mind that lower-quality parts may well have not met their stated specs on their datasheet, even when new.
I agree. Who knows what the original EE design documents would have specified, but I'm going to guess that those original caps were probably as accurately specified as your average Tinder profile. I just go for whatever Nichicon (or Rubycon) cap will fit in that footprint (filtered by lead spacing and diameter), has a 105C rating, and then sorted by lowest impedance / highest ripple current. I've yet to have an issue.
I remember in going through college one of my professors would say "meh, 10%" whenever a measurement or spec was a little off, lol.
Yeah, if that board was in my collection vcore would've gotten random salvage 8mm 820uf 6,3V alpos :D When replacing even low esr electrolytics with polymers lower capacitance is just fine(within reason) :)
That does explain why I'd find a lot of systems with the bad capacitor plague that were still functioning to one degree or another.
So the board possibly shipped without meeting the design specs? Or the caps shipped without meeting their advertised specs?
I suppose either could be possible.
Yaay! I had one of these boards with two Celeron 500's in it - a whole GHz of processing power and SMP to boot! I ran it with Linux and it worked a treat. I don't remember any issues with it and it ran as a reliable server for quite a few years. It finally got retired when cheaper, faster single-socket solutions became widely available. Great fun and a real talking point back in the day 😄
2 X 500 MHz =/= 1 GHz
@@eddiehimself I guess you mean != and yes I am quite aware of the fact that two processors in SMP do not produce the performance of one processor running at twice the speed.
@@spacedock873 Performance wise, maybe, but "two times 500 million cycles per second" is "1 thousand million cycles per second." Math!! You had it right all along!
@@spacedock873 That is used in programming as a substitute for the not equal sign ≠, but =/= is closer in appearance.
@@iroll I suppose I have to spell it out and say "two CPUs running in parallel at 500 MHz does not equal the performance of a single CPU with the same architecture running at 1 GHz..." but then again, I would surely sound like some smart-arse cunt like Jimmy Neutron insisting on saying "sodium chloride" instead of salt, as if it isn't patently obvious to the audience what I'm referring to.
I had that motherboard back in the day! My friends were jealous of my dual cpu gaming rig. 😂
Me too! Dual Celeron 300A's ftw. Ran stable at 450 MHz for years.
I was running an Abit with dual P3 800 mhz, A ton of Dollar per mb ram, 4, 80 gig Seagates in raid 0, and a Dual cpu 3dFX video card. I was a lan party god back when. 20 plus years ago.
I had one too. In a old school. Koolance watercooling case. It was one bad mofo in its day, til upgraded it to twin Athlon MP 1400s.
@@MedicatedOMO Hahaha. I absolutely love this.
You and I would have been good friends, I am positive of that.
As they should have been. This board with good celerons just stomped on everything else for the equivalent money. :P
I had this board, what a beast. In the midst of the capacitor plague. IBM servers and HP machines were also hit by bad caps.
Really cool to bring this beast back from the boneyard. I had a buddy back in the day that had a similar dual Socket 370 board (might have been the BP6) with dual 1Ghz Pentium 3's in it. And yeah, he put Win2k on the rig. Abit and EPOX are two board brands I still get a little misty-eyed about. So sad they're gone.
Mine are still here in a dusty grave somewhere. I will eventually have to see if anyone wants the bones. Abit and Epox were much loved, as well as several AMD boards from the Intel is slow days.
They made another board that was very similar called the VP6 that worked for Pentium III FC-PGA 370 processors.
I have the VP6 but it needs recaps. I found it at Goodwill for $10 back in 2010, but have never started the capping yet. It would be nice to try Quake III SMP mode on it. I also still have my Abit AX5, which I bought brand new around '97 & that board got a lot of use out of it & still does, with a 400mhz AMD K6-III+, iirc. I've never had the BP6, but I do remember reading articles on it back around Y2k, so I know it was a legend.
When I built my college rig back in the '90s I pored over Computer Shopper and all the other computing magazines, and decided that there was only one motherboard manufacturer that would do: ABIT.
I was able to get my Celeron 400 (on a "slocket" adapter) up to 533 MHz but the 100 MHz RAM wasn't stable at that speed. That era of computing was so much fun.
@@LionWithTheLamb That's the one. It supported the Tualatin PIIIs if memory serves.
Oh, that brings back memories. I had a dual PII 333MHz which I used mostly with BeOS, but dual booted it with Windows for games. I dubbed it the "Devil's Rig" and I loved it. I do think I still have the MoBo somewhere 'round here, but one of the processors is long gone.
What about BeOS? Do you still use it?
@@anon_y_mousse I loved it with a fiery passion of a thousand suns. But I haven't used it in some 15 years or so. When I typed in the comment I decided to gather enough stuff to build a rig to run it again and see how it stands the test of time, but it'll take a while to do it. Still have the original media, though, so I guess I can install 4.5 or 5.0. Never tried HaikuOS, but I think it's just not finished yet.
@@leandrocosta3709 I just looked at that the other day. Looks nice, but I haven't had time to delve too deeply. Been playing with TempleOS more. It's a pretty fun toy thus far.
@@leandrocosta3709 While Haiku is still in beta, it already beats BeOS R5 in almost any (if not every) possible way. The beta3 is already too old and missing many fixes, so if you want to try it, make sure to use one of the nightly images.
Take care!
@@foobar-9k thanks!! I'll get it momentarily and give it a try!
You couldn't find any caps in digikey because you were searching for exactly "6.3v rated voltage". In reality any cap with the same capacitance and same specs regarding the ESR, while supporting a higher maximum voltage would have worked just fine. Capacitor manufacturing definitely has improved, we now have capacitors of the same physical size that can withstand more voltage.
Nice that you were able to make it work anyway :D
I had a BP6 with dual celeron 533. I ran Linux, FreeBSD, and BeOS 5 on it back in the day. BeOS was a lot of fun because it was designed for dual processor systems and was super responsive.
It's such a shame that the source code for BeOS was lost and never found.
@@andersjjensen I've tried Haiku a few times over the years, but it just isn't quite there yet.
IVE BEEN WAITING TO SEE THIS BOARD AGAIN!! I'm the one who sent it in the original mailbag, I actually had two! I found them in the recycling room at Free Geek... I still have mine in my garage with an updated bios :P This board is the coolest thing in PC hardware history and ever since the MaximumPC retrospective I read on this board 10 years ago I wanted to see someone else talk about this board. Loved the video, I was really interested to learn more about ABIT's contribution to the capacitor plague :))
Watching now, but I’m excited. Thanks for covering this. Not only was the BP6 the Mobo in the first computer I built myself, I have one coming in the mail this week. What timing!
OMG, I remember, back in the day, the combo Abit & Celeron being the absolute *beast* when it came to OC capabilities. I remember having my Celeron 300A being pushed to 450 MHz when I threw it on a BH6 mobo. This thing could outperform a Pentium III for way less expensive !
You won, mate : I subbed to your channel. Good old memories here 🥰
This was my favorite board back in the day... had 2x celeron 433's @ 750+ each, peltier cooled, iced over at all times... there was a second entire tower for this build, which housed 2x atx psu's wired in parallel to give 2x the amperage, for the cooling. I later did a VP6 build with, well... first with 2x coppermine celeron 733's @ over 1ghz, prior to the official barrier of 1000mhz officially being broken too mind you. And I had it, with two "cores" no less. Pretty neat. . . I later swapped those celeries for PIII 733's or 750's... can't remember the OG speed of them, but I also had both of those over 1Ghz as well. Also TEC cooled. . . But at this point I had a standalone benchtop PSU to handle all the cooling. Though, you had to be vigilant of startup power order, where before it was all instant and automatic. But this was better on space for sure, and more "professional" I guess. Regardless, these were great days...
Also, I just recently enough did a retro VP6 build, of course firstly recapping the VP6. Of all places I found it pop up on FB market, from a NY seller... shipped to me as an xmas gift, and it was for sure a great one. I have a video of it running on my channel, can't miss it.
You just sent me down memory lane when you mentioned Peltier cooling. Thank you!
I got a BP6 late in the game, when it was easier to find Celeron 533 matched pairs. I'm a Linux person, so I loved using Gentoo on these. They were an education and a joy.
Oh, and this was also how I started finding matched copper heatsinks. They were oddly cheap for solid copper. (Note to self: lock my office in case of meth heads.)
Oh man, i loved my BP-6. Dual Celly 400s, overclocked the snot out, water cooling! What did i ever do with that thing...
I remember wanting this board sooo bad, back in the days. I wouldn't have been able to fully utilise it. But the cool factor was off the charts for me back then 🙂
On the input and output of the VRM, you often have capacitors in parallel, which means capacitance adds up.
Abit and lots of other manufacturers often used more capacitance than actually needed, because by using the biggest size and capacity possible (they're restricted by cooler size), they could get much lower ESR (esr will vary with diameter and height of capacitor). So because of this, when you move from electrolytic capacitors to polymer capacitors, it's usually possible to use slightly smaller capacitance values (for example 1200uF instead of 1500uF would be perfectly fine on this motherboard)
Also, they tended to use 6.3v or 10v rated electrolytic capacitors on the output of the VRM because again, they needed very low ESR capacitors. Considering the output voltage of the VRM of less than 3v, you probably could use 4v rated polymer capacitors, but 6.3v polymer capacitors are also quite common.
Also, you should also be aware of other stores with good reputation like Mouser, Farnell / Newark (same company, different names in different regions, now owned by Arrow if my memory is correct) , RS Components, and TME (in Europe)
By the way ... as the board seems to use only 5v to power the CPUs, when replacing those 10v rated capacitors, you could replace with 6.3v rated polymer capacitors.
What is ESR?
@@renakunisaki Equivalent series resistance, it's a property of capacitors that can't be measured with simple multimeters, you need either "ESR meters" or "LCR meters" with ESR measurement function. In a super simplified way it's like the capacitor's internal resistance... in high frequency switching power supplies you want this ESR value to be as low as possible, but in other circuits (ex after a linear regulator, or in an audio amplifier) it's not as important or it's even preferred to have slightly higher ESR (for example some linear regulators are only stable with a capacitor on the output that has ESR value between 0.1 ohm and 1 ohm so you have to be careful when you make your selection)
In capacitor datasheets, you can look at the column titled Impedance at 100 KHz because at high frequencies, impedance is practically identical to the ESR value in electrolytic capacitors.
I had one of those boards! It was rock stable with two of the famous Celeron 300a CPUs overclocked to 450Mhz. Ran that thing for several years, SMP was a real luxury back in the day!
I've got a BP6 with 366's OC to 550. It also sports a Voodoo5 5500. Ran Linux and windows 2000 workstation primarily. It didn't get replaced until I moved to AMD Athlon. I wished I'd kept the Athlon machine too.
Post evidence or lies
My god what a trip down memory lane. I had the same except i went NVIDIA. When I got the board win2k wasnt out yet and I had to "hack" in AGP support in windows NT4.
I've got the same board and it still runs but did need a recap after 5 years of operation, it had a Nvidia 5200.
@@0_1_2 How would he do that? Photos and videos can be faked too. Maybe he needs to invite you over to his house, so you can see it with your own eyes?
I didn't realize the BP6 board was based on the 440BX chip set.
In 2005 I came across a dual socket 370 board (GA-6VTXD) new in box for real cheap and used it to run SETI@home for several years.
It is an inserting board as it supposed to support up to only 2GB ram but I think you can put up to 3GB or 3.25GB if I'm remembering correctly and supports dual Pentium Ⅲ Tualatin Processors up to 1.4 GHz.
I'll have to dig that machine out again and check it out.😃
Some tips for you: you can actually use any low esr capacitors in there! For something this old you shouldn't matter, back in the days we would even use regular electrolytic and it would last. You can find some original size replacements on china like Aliexpress.
As for the capacitor removal, you should use a hot air gun and heat up the whole area that you are working on ( usually at 250C for lead based or 350C for lead free solder) for like a minute, and then work the capacitors out putting some new solder and BGA flux and it will clean the thru holes in one shot.
Tiago Mian
Are you mad, why you need the Old Xeon crap ???????
no brain ?????
@@lucasrem what are you talking about?
At least in my part of the world, most of us used these as servers, and ran Linux on them. Linux was SMP capable from long, long before this board was released. It was much cheaper than Dual Pentium IIs and faster than Dual Pentium Pros.
I had the board! Dual Celeron 366Mhz OCed to 550Mhz with Alpha coolers. That thing was over the top. I ended up selling it because of the OS issues you mentioned. I had too much trouble trying to get drivers for “consumer” hardware like sound cards and GPUs working on NT and 2000. Win2k was better but still painful.
Your cat cameo during the printing at the end was a pleasant surprise!
I had one of these boards I had several dual processor boards at the time. I think this was the one I had 300A chips on it running at 600Mhz. I bought a window AC unit and ducked it to the system pushing air directly on the heat sinks of the processors. I do remember it crashing and then the system would longer run over clocked.
I still have my dual processor board up in the attic, complete with both processors, it served me well before dying, always thought it was a PSU failure that trashed the board, the plan was to mount the board in a glass fronted wall frame, such an awesome machine before multi core arrived. immense nostalgia trip - thanks
I currently have right next to me a dual Pentium III 933 system on a ECS D6VAA board that I've had since new when I was a kid. I've since recapped it, added the 933's (used to be dual 450), 768mb of ram (can do 1.5gb but not stable overclocked) and running it at 150FSB at 1050mhz. Also added an Asus Magic 8170 Geforce 4 (originally an ATI rage 128, games said nope) and it's basically got Half-Life and CS 1.5 at the 100fps engine cap all the time. Reliving your childhood past on ACTUAL hardware of the time is the best way to go about it. I'll never let it go.
I had one with two Celeron 400's in it that overclocked to 600MHz. It was still working in 2003, despite the cheesy caps. That board left my possession that year, but I imagine it eventually died.
Nice to see tabby again, keeping an eye on the dot matrix. We look fwd to a follow up on this board. Great project.
Legend is right! It's rare that I remember the model number of a motherboard but Abit BP6 has that honour (along with Asus K7V). I had one of these running Windows 2000, it was packed with as much RAM as I could afford, two Celeron 366A's running at 550MHz and a janky pile of disks. It was our lanparty server, it hosted 'backups' of all games that people might need and all the other files that people liked to trade at these events as well as running any game servers we needed.
It was the first motherboard that us common gamers could use to put together a system like this, it was also pretty good just for general enthusiast/gaming purposes as well with id making sure to support SMP in their game engines at least, while there wasn't a whole lot of other software that could take advantage of the dual chips it was still pretty great for bragging points.
The BP6 was the first board i ever put money on.
I was a blast running a game in “real time” on one and the OS on the other.
(Winblows)
Loved it!
I really like how you greatly improved the stability of that board by upgrading it to modern solid caps. I have been building PCs since the early '90's and really admire your work.
I used to run mismatched PPros, P2s and Celerons in SMP back in the day. I also killed a Celeron 300A doing the drill and solder SMP enabling mod prior to slockets and boards like the BP6 hitting the scene... When running mismatched CPUs, the CPU speed of the first socket/slot is what gets reported. The second socket runs at it's normal multiplier, and matching FSB. So if you've got a 366 and a 300, both using a 66mhz FSB, first CPU runs at 366, second at 300, BIOS reports the CPU speed as 366. Some systems will throw a minor fit if the CPUs don't match during post, like the old IBM rackmount Slot 1 systems I abused, but you could just keypress past the error and they'd run just fine after.
That's funny as fuck
Man I remember reading about dual socket motherboards in high school and wishing I could get a setup like that. My neighbor had a dual CPU setup on his PC and I thought it was the coolest thing.
I still have mine. I haven't fired it up in several years but I never had any stability problems, probably since I never overclocked it for any significant time. I have dual 300MHz Celerons in it and ran Windows NT. There was an active BP6 community and was the first time I ever saw water cooling for a PC. I remember a guy bought a transmission cooler from an auto parts store, some copper pipe fittings an aquarium pump and used a Tupperware container for the reservoir.
I owned one of these back in the day! Had Windows 2000 on it, dual Celeron 533Mhz. Was my dream machine.
I'd like to point out that those coolers are perfectly adequate for those cpus. Socket 370 coolers were often rebadged socket 7 coolers anyway. If you start doing cpu heavy tasks, yeah, get something better, but they'll really be fine for hours with those heatsinks. Seriously, check out all but the highest end coolers. All of them are smaller than either of the heatsinks you were using. Heck, that first one probably was originally a 370 cooler unless you picked it up brand new labeled as a socket 7 cooler. It was generally socket A that had the beefier coolers, and those are interchangeable with socket 7/370, though be careful with the putting a socket A cooler on Socket 7. It has a tendency to break the plastic clips on the socket. Ask me how I know.
I had one of these.
LOVED it!
I had a pair of 300MHz Celerons on it, which ran great overclocked to 450MHz.
I made a DIY water-cooled system, to make the PC quiet enough to use as a home theater system, back in 2000.
I remember wanting one of these so badly when I was in high school. It is awesome to see one running again ❤
This was the motherboard to buy back there. Like many ppl in the comments section, I also overclocked those dual celerons. Bought them at overclockers in the UK. Fantastic piece of kit.
Cool to see this one coming up, I still have mine, still runs with original caps even :)
The 2000s were a blessed time to be a computer nerd. I was attending a large state university at the time and lived in a dormitory specifically designated for lab science and engineering students. The sheer amount of hardware hackery on my floor alone was mind boggling. My friend Brian had a dual cpu mainboard which of course made him the coolest guy in the world. I don't think it was this one, but rather some kind of pentium server board (it was a long time ago and i barely remember the specs of my own hack job computer from that time period). As far as running OS's on board like that, we all, somehow, had win2k professional, which is not suspicious at all. That was a great OS btw.
Man this brings back Memories, till this day i still like windows 2000. Simple stable and clean !!
Thanks for the video! Im a long time Abit lover and still miss Abit boards - and many other like DFI, Chaintech, EPoX (now SUPoX just for Asian market), Soltek and many more.
There are boards i dont miss like PCChips and Albatron.
But yes, Abit is and stays my favorite board OEM of all time.
I hope to see more of Abit, and look forward to enjoy the videos!
Wow! The Abit BP6 brings back a lot of memories! I remember wanting this setup so badly!
I had this board and it was great, overclocking worked really well for me.
I had one of these back in the day, with dual P3s and Raid Maxtor drives running dual monitors. It was pretty nice.
Luckily I subscribe to you, as I have this exact same board that was shelved because of the exact same problems that you described. Thanks to being early in the age of this video, I have already ordered the same caps before they are all bought up, saving me the hassle of finding alternatives. Thanks, Shelby!
I only kept the board contemporarily in hopes that the forums would catch up and make it easy to diagnose/repair. I ran cad/cam software on it and it was a screamer. I never remembered having latency issues while it worked, before it started to bug out. It ought to fast up even more with an SSD and maxed-out components. It’ll be cool to use it too since I still have the light pen and everything.
Hey man, great memories watching this video. I had a BP6 running twin 366s at 550 each (though unstable and eventually had to run at stock speed.)
I always preferred Win2000 over 98 (and even XP). This workstation served me well for years. Good times
Great video. This brings back some memories.... I had a dual P2/P3 slot setup back in the day. It used a iwill DBD100 board.
what a blast from the past ! :D was rocking a BP6 as a linux terminal server back in 2000
Some may refer to Steve from Gamers Nexus as "Tech Jesus", however they are mistaken. Tech Tangents is the one true Tech Jesus, saving old electronics from landfill, oh man.
My first dual-processor system was using two Pentium 150MHz on a Tyan board.
It was fun, but also much quirks.
Things are so much better these days.
When the tip of your current solder sucker gets too chewed up, they make versions that use a short stub of silicone tubing for the tip that work better for much cheaper than a powered vacuum gun. (Adafruit part #1597 for example). The silicone tubing can handle the heat of a soldering iron so you can press it right onto the tip and joint to suck the solder out without having to do the carefully timed move.
Love your content, Reminds my of why I got into IT. I grew up on this stuff, commodore 64- 386 systems - apple iie's - This is a time machine back to the good ol days for me.. Much love and appreciation.
I still have mine somewhere rattling around in a box in my shop. Last time I used it was around 2003 or so. It def had cap issues by the end. Mine ran dual 366 overclocked to 550 from day 1, with big old honkin globalwin heatsink/fans on it. Man I got some stories with that rig. Good times.
Oh, wow! This board brings back memories since I ran one back in the day for like a year or two as my main desktop. I think it then became a Linux server for a while. I don't really remember having any issues with it but that's over 20 years ago.
Your workbench gives me PTSD of my computer repair days and working with people that had no semblance of organization
I got to the 19 second mark in this video and immediately thought "OH MY GOD! I used to have that exact power supply!" Can't remember the manufacturer for the life of me... but that chrome enclosure is unmistakeable.
Cool! Back to then in the University we bought one (we want a relative cheap hardware we can run Linux with SMP, meant as the main server in the student's lab), backed up by donations from the users. So we went to the shop with kilograms of coins, they were really not happy there :) it took hours to count the money and all the time they come out with slightly different total value. At the end they said: "ok, enough is enough, let's say it's just the right amount of money" ;)
Nice! IIRC, Asus and/or ASRock boards were the ones with the polarity silkscreen backwards. I remember noticing it many years ago after a recap, but fortunately before powering it on :P.
As someone who owns a BE6-II semi-poly'd, I can only feel joy seeing his happiness. Those ABIT boards are literally getting scarcer by every day that's passing.
Figured I'd update on here, as I got a BP6 too :)
Damn, I remember wanting one of these when I was a teen, well almost an adult. This was around the time I won the contract to build my high school computer network (1st one). I was 18 :P and got over 100 computers on that network using 100Mbps hubs at the time (in spite of my recommendation to use switches the school opted for hubs and multiple links to the server, 1 per hub, top save on costs. Them managed/smart switches were much more expensive back then). Still had to open 56 computers at the time as a lot of them, unlike some years later, did not have embedded network adapter so I had to manually install those network cards. And most were in fact ISA, so because plug and play at that time was more like Plug and Pray I actually manually configured every single one to ensure there were no conflicting settings such as IRQs, DMAs or Base addresses. This was crucial in particular on any computer that had a sound card as those would typically have at least a base address conflict and typically at least the base address and IRQ. DMA's only a bunch of them I had to be worried with.
I lost you sometime ago when my system took a huge, I MEAN HUGE, dump on me, had to rebuild it anew, it took time and money. I nevertheless persevered searching, searching, searching and finally giving up on finding you again amid all the clutter out there in RUclips land. THEN... just when I stopped looking you, as if by magic YOU REAPPEARED!!!! I'm now convinced you're the wizard I thought you were!!!! I LOVE your channel it's like Christmas morning for Nerds such as me. Thanks for the gifts of your video's! I don't know if I can say we, but I love watching your work dude! Thank you so very much!!!
I just did a cap replacement on a mid 2000's motherboard that went excellent. I really didn't think too much about the final spec though, cause it was at the power delivery and the cpu caps were still good. I really had no choice, because this was a windows xp embedded system that runs an old wide format scanner/copier. Thankfully I also had some spare compatible ram hanging out - the system went from crashing constantly to processing jobs in half the time.
I ran a server at one of my first jobs on a BP6. It had two Celeron 300A at 450 MHz (they ALL did it stable, due to the disabled cache I guess, I also had a 300A@450MHz at home in a BE6 IIRC), ran 24/7 for at least 3 years, hosting pages on the Internet like a boss (it ran RHL 6.2 or so, no issue with SMP support obviously). It was like 10th of a price of a proper dual Xeon system, ideal for a small local provider.
And of course one day it started misbehaving, now we know all it needed was a recap, but hey, it did its job long enough there was already better hardware to migrate to. I say BP6 was a win and a legend!
I had the same setup. Celeron 300 had no cache and no performance 300a had cache and geat performance. 300a always worked at 450. The belief was that it was the same design as the Pentium 450, de-rated to fill a hole in the product ladder.
I'm so stocked about future videos about this build. Thanks!
This was the era when motherboard makers started getting innovative and not just delivering a generic PCB. I remember I had an ASUS Black Pearl socket 370 mainboard that was really nice overclocking wise. This Abit board was just something I read about but cound never afford back then.
My first SMP capable mobo was an Abit board with dual Celeron and modified socket 370-slot 1 adapters (Slotkets) installed. Then I upgraded to the BP6 board, which got lost when I moved many moons ago. Scrapped all of my 32-bit computers...
Love this board first build I did on my own. One of the only boards I wish I still had.
I owned one of these too. Originally an impulse buy as I was wanting to dual CPU, but didn't take into account the limited os options due to their SMP restrictions. I tested 2000 and was unhappy with it, same for NT. I gave up and used 98se for the majority of its life until XPs Pro 64 bit hit and actually forced the install. Incredibly it worked with XP albeit sluggish for several years until I discovered Linux distros and tried too many to count. I kept the board alive long enough to see it to my next PC which was a P4 Dell. All in all, it was in my memories at least the most rugged board I've ever owned- and I've owned many.
64 bit on P3?
Dude. Kemet, is top of the line brand for polymer capacitors. Not some "ok brand". For electrolytic Nichion and Rubycon, and maybe Panasonic, are way to go, but Kemet is also good. Kemet is extremely popular in automatic and industrial applications, due to their testing and reliability and adhering to specs. Also their ceramic capacitors are superb, with only TDK and Vishay, having similar quality products.
man I remember abit. Thanks for bringing back fond memories.
Wish dual-sockets were still mainstream... they're really cool. 'You ever seen a board with a pair of tower coolers? they're super sick
Oh wow. Blast from the past! I had one of these and it was great. No cap problems.
Omg omg. I had one with two Celeron 366As! Was my first experience with Windows 2000. Thank you for making this video.
Tagg xoc has a RUclips channel where he mods a lot of old mobos. He has a video on capacitor shopping that's extremely helpful. Highly recommended
One thing I've definitely noticed is that if youre just recapping one board it can be cheaper to order all the highest value caps you require instead of ordering the specific values you want in each position. Because of the way digikey and mouser do bulk pricing. You can pretty much always get it down to just two parts based on electrical characteristics. Every time I've needed more it's been because of physical size issues.
Nice video, I had this same board with dual 433 celerons back in the day. I can't for the life of me remember who I sold it to but I know I sold it, wish I still had it.
23 years old... I had one of these boards in high school running celeron 400s.
A few years ago I stumbled across a System with an even older Gigabyte GA-586DX dual socket board that was even still in use. Caps are fine, just the Dallas was dead. It came with an single CPU, but i managed to get two identical replacements. It is important to have CPUs with identical stepping level for stability reasons. It runs Windows 2000. The Gigabyte lacks an AGP slot and PCI graphics cards limits the usability for retro gaming, however its quite cool see it working from an retro perspective.
I recall the last cap to remove took quite some time to get the solder to melt on the ground plane indeed. Recapped 2 years ago IIRC.
wow memories, I bought one of these while I was taking my MSCE courses. I built it with a dual OS of NT 4.0 and 98 SE. It ran awesome and we played some serious HalfLife LAN parties.
My favorite motherboard ever. I was just thinking about it this morning for some reason.
It’s time for (I guess) the ultimate Socket 370 system!
I recall from working on server kit back in the 90s that it was possible to have dual CPUs with each running at different speed with NT. I didn’t really test it thoroughly but the OS reported the two different speeds. I think this was either a 486 based system or perhaps Pentium 1.
I had one of these boards, I populated it with two 1GHz PIII's, 1GB of RAM, two AT166 RAID cards, a Matrox AGP dual head video card and dual booted between Windows 2000 and SuSE 10.0. Ah memories :)
Also, Windows 2000 is probably ideal for that build if you want gaming performance of the day. The games are single threaded but win2k does support smp so windows 9x gaming while running dedicated servers for the same game on the same system with maxed out SDRAM will fly. Some Linux distro from the era is probably ideal for whatever weird use case you have.
True windows 2000 has a way wider range of driver support and is way more stable
I miss Abit. My Pentium II BX6 system was at the height of the 90s excitement as it seemed every week PC specs were improving massively.
I had one circa 1999, with 2 Celeron 433 running at 490 MHz, 256 Mo ram, a Voodoo 3 and UW Scsi disk.
What a beast ! :)
this dudes room reminds me of the late 90s. love it!
I had one of these bought from a computer show in Cali with my dual celery’s setup, I felt like a million buxs that day.ll now look at where we are
I've got the same to look forward to on my VP6. Unlike the other couple I've seen for sale mine still has all original Jackocn caps - though luckily, I have a lot of spare standard and low ESR (bought explicitly for VP6's VRM - local electronics store ftw) caps due to other boards having needed repairs.
Overclocking dual Puentium III is fun.
Had this board with 2x400 MHz celerons in it. When it was time to upgrade it became a file-server as it had 4 independent IDE-channels. It was at the time when the 80-pin IDE cables with higher speed was introduced so one controller with 2 channels of UDMA-66 and 2 channels of normal UDMA-33, so you could actually have 8 disks connected to it. So i had one boot-disk and three 500 GB IDE disks in raid 5. Problem was that these much more modern disks was too fast for the board. Solution was to use 40 pin cables on the UDMA-66 controller forcing it to fall back to UDMA-33. Used this as a file server for almost 10 years. It was pensioned in late 2010.
I had one. At the time, Celerons ran on 66MHz boards where Pentiums ran on 100MHz. Celerons also had half the cache of the Pentiums... BUT the Celeron cache ran at full clock speed as opposed to the Pentiums' half clock speed. So, if you ran Celerons on a 100MHz board, you could get almost the same performance for way less cost.
Awesome, I have the same board. I bought it new in 2001. I am running dual p3 933 pentiums on it With winXP. Still has original caps and none are bulging. Works perfectly fine. Use to use it to run all of our Lan party games.
All bulging caps are bad but not all bad caps bulge.
I had one of these fun boards back in the day. Still have the processors Cel500s. I upgraded to a MSI 649D with p3 1ghz, still have and it does run also. Then i have a SGI rack mount thats running a Tyan with p3 733 procs. Anyways thanx for sharing the video, great to remember the classics
I only remember seeing dual CPU boards in magazines, Dual Slot-1 mostly. That was the fantasy setup right there.
This really brings back old memories... And the old Total Annihilation game that actually supported SMP and ran so much better on multi CPU boards... :)
Had one of these with dual Celeron 433's running nt4. Loved it. Never missed a beat
It was a workstation grade system at the uni student computer club. Running Linux and/or FreeBSD I think. Another option were to use certain P-III boards but use some converter thingy so you could put two Celerons in them. Never owned one myself, I was short on cash in that period. I did have a dual Pentium-I (yes Pentium I, non standard multiprocessing) though. Compaq Proliant 1500 Pentium-I version (there also is a P-Pro version, which I also acquired later)