Definitely throw Win 2k on that thing. 2k fixed so many little issues with NT4 and you should see a lot better compatibility with games, and iirc most BP6 owners swapped to 2k as soon as it was available.
been trying win 2k on my single 1ghz p3 machine and (saying this as someone who grew up with win xp in the late 2000's early 2010's) it freakin kicks ass! orders of magnitude better than win98se in practically every way.
Hey, if you need help with telling the Stories (1:01:47) in the future, let me know. I'm part of a pretty big community (The Retro Web) who are probably a bit too knowledgeable/obsessed about that era of PCs for our own good. I (and many others in the community) would be happy to help connect any missing dots. I myself have what may have been one of the low cost (read: sketchy) direct competitors to the BP6 -- a dual 440LX Slot 1 board from everyone's "favorite" brand, PCChips (though it's branded Amptron). It's a.... very strange board.
Part of my internship at the soon thereafter failing Lucent Technologies was to build a small farm of Windows NT 4.0 workstations. Powerful but cheap. You bet it was a dozen BP6 machines with celeron 500s. I was told not to bother saving money on the 300a. I am a person that will brag about his dual Pentium 3 700 on an Abit VP6. I still have it and it rocks Windows 2000 hard. That was my first SMP@home but I had friends with the BP6 and Celeron 300s pushing 500+ and they were great.
The Enlight 7237 is the case I have built the most PCs in. My dad's company threw away tons of them and I put everything from Pentiums to Core i boards in them.
Absolutely loved mine. Beige box with a window cut in it myself. Dual Celeron 400's running at 550mhz with water cooling and CCFL lighting. Had a 500 watt car amp bolted to the right side of the case and a second PSU with a half farad cap, and i DJ'd parties with it!
I loved that era of computing. Everything you did was fully custom. You could browse posts on forums and get cool ideas. I had a K6-3 400 that I could only overclock to 450 and stay stable, and I was jealous of the crazy overclocks the celerons could get. I think I remember the Celeron 300a being notorious for effortlessly overclocking past 500mhz.
This episode was such a nostalgia fest for me. The first PC I built was from this era, and I was deep into some of this stuff. For what it's worth, I enjoyed the somewhat long journey you took us on to get to the actual motherboard. It had an Abit mobo and a Slot 1 Pentium 3 that I overclocked from 700 MHz to 900 MHz. To achieve that, I had a bunch of high flow fans, and I even did stuff like sand and polish the heatsink (which I'm pretty sure is useless now, but I had too much free time then). It was in a variant of the Enlight case that I rattle-canned metallic blue. I also dremeled a couple holes into the side and installed fans for extra cooling for the GPU and processor. All the fans made it sound like a jet spooling up when you turned it on. For its power light, it had one of the early blue LEDs. It was obnoxiously bright, enough to light up a room. I lugged it and a painfully heavy 19 inch CRT to a lot of LAN parties, and played a lot of Counterstrike and UT. It was my first DVD player, thanks to an MPEG card, and the first DVD I watched on it was The Matrix.
NT5/Windows 2000 Pro was what I ran on systems like this. Runs almost all W98 software since it had working Direct X 7 and even got DX 9 support a bit later. The UI was also pretty much exactly like XP but with a 98 skin on it.
I too have been having problems with PCI sound cards. Also just later 90's sound cards in gereral. They all work prettey much perfactly in Windows 98, but then I switch to DOS and the only soundcard that does anything my SB AWE64. I use usisound in DOS btw.
I totally remember the celeron hotness. My girlfriend at the time was absolutely bonkers about hers, lol. Also, unless it's changed since I was in grad school, most dictionary-based compression algorithms are impossible to parallelize. The state of the "dictionary" changes after every token is processed, so it's not possible to know what the state of the dictionary will be at any point in the file other than where the "head" is.
Yep, back then I was constantly on the overclocing forums and being envious of all the wild Celeron overclocks. I think I remember the Celeron 300a was super popular because you could pretty effortlessly get 500+ Mhz out of it.
The way to parallelize it would be by decompressing two files at the same time - this actually *should* be an area where zip has a huge advantage over 'monolithic' archive formats like .tar.gz, since each file within the archive is an independently compressed stream, something that's historically been regarded as a disadvantage since it of course makes the compression itself less effective than it otherwise might be.
The BP6 can be credited with getting a lot of enthusiasts excited about getting into SMP. But sadly it also quickly garnered a reputation for being a quirky beast. The Highpoint ATAPI controller was particularly hated. I went with an Epox dual slot 1 board instead with Celerons in 'slotket' boards. Still loved following the BP6 community.
There's not many legendary motherboards but BP6 is one of them. This thing with dual overclocked celerons, as much ram as you could afford and a copy of Windows 2000 provided serious epeen at the time, a legit PC workstation that many teenagers could afford. Of course it got absolutely thrashed by an Athlon released in the same year but meh, dual processors. It's still cool to have more than one processor and at least some FPS games could actually take advantage.
The reason for the CPU pingpong of processes was to make more effective use of the caches. Every time you had a TXT page fault it would switch cores. There was a non-zero probability that the cache on the other core hadn't evicted the page you wanted. It also meant that when you went above 50% core utilisation and a process got evicted, it would be landing on a core that probably already had it partially cached. The cost of context switching was less than a millionth of the page fault on rotating rust, so it wasn't a costly gamble.
I also wondered if it was to balance usage over time or to not overheat one while the other's running cold. Both running at a mildly high temp has got to be better than one burning itself out, right? I don't know if that would happen with just a bunch of basic windowed applications open, I am not really familiar with old Windows, but if it did it seemed like a reasonable thing to implement to me.
The oldest Windows I remember using genuinely was probably XP, but I was young and the computer was already outdated then. It's funny, I probably a little too young for XP and VHS and CRT TVs but I had all of them because my dad was a cheapskate, I think. I mean, if it ain't broke and all that. I also didn't get a phone until I was a lateish teenager, and it wasn't new, it was a hand me down. Awkward story ahead, here be dragons: One time, when I was really young, I took a picture of my, uh, willy with someone's phone, not mine but a family member, but then got really scared and couldn't figure out the interface to delete it, it was probably Android 2 or something. Core memory, I was very stupid.
Oh Abit. I had a BX6 back in the day and it was a beast. Such great products made by an absolutely incompetently managed company that drove itself into the ground almost as fast as it grew.
Biggest Issue with NT4, was lack of USB support. No USB flight stick\gamepad for you. Direct X support only up to 3.0 another big hindrance to gaming. PCI sound cards also an issue, you probably only would of had luck with a SBLIVE! and only the early versions of it too. Windows 2000 is where SMP systems got alot better for gamers running such a system.
Really nice description of multitasking and multithreading. I mean, I already understand this stuff intuitively but this is probably the best explanation I've heard of how this works. Like, you didn't dumb it down to the point of being an abstraction, but you did make it simple enough to understand (I think) for someone who doesn't already understand this stuff intuitively.
Tech Tangents made a video on this same board but mostly to document replacing bad capacitors. It might be worth checking your board's caps to see if they're still good.
20:11 WHAT!?! No backplate!?!?! 😂 I kid… But man, you’re taking me back on the nostalgia express! I’m so thankful you have this channel! I had one of these with overclocked Celerons, in a full tower case with casters on the bottom and three ultra wide SCSI drives, with a pair of 3-D Voodoo video cards running in whatever they called SLI. Please keep making these videos, don’t ever quit!
Also as a heads up, the reason we bought Celeron processors was due to the fact that you could overclock the hell out of them. You could not nearly overclock the pentium version. Not only because it would be unstable, but also due to the heat. The celerons gave you so much more performance when overclocking they blew past most of the pentiums that I knew about.
I finished my engineering degree in 2002, and had daily driver of Windows 2000 with dual boot of Windows ME (which worked better for me than 98 SE, which other preferred). I worked on a dual core machine which was part of my final degree project (it utilised multi threading for data processing). I remember thinking how I barely even needed ONE CPU to perform the task, and just using the dual processor config just so I can write this in the project description and justify buying the data, lol. It kinda made the system more stable of course, in case a background process would hog one CPU, the other one was running my code fine ("real time" data streaming in).
Overclock scene nowadays is a joke. The point of Overclock was to make slow mainstream cpu /gpu to go fast at a reasonable cost. Nowadays it means to make already very fast components to go even faster. Overclock became restrict to expensive cpu and high profile mainboards.
This was indeed a fun video. As good as the summer of bench vids has been, it's nice to have you back in the studio. Looking forward to part 2! I think it would be cool to learn more about NT in particular. I know there's probably plenty of existing resources out there but any time I look it up, I'm confused about why it existed (beyond the technical improvements made to Windows) as a consumer product.
@@EvilCoffeeInc In a nutshell, NT existed because Microsoft recognized the inability of the legacy Windows code base to accommodate the needs of businesses. Windows 3, while pretty impressive for it's time and target audience, was simply not sophisticated enough to power a machine that needed to have 24/7 uptime. It was decently stable on its own, but the kernel did not leverage protected mode as much as it needed to in order to protect the OS from misbehaving apps. NT was a clean slate redesign that was intended to give Microsoft something on par with Unix in terms of stability and scalability, while still allowing the use of existing windows software. The way they went about this, from what I understand, is they hired a guy who used to work on VMS, a legendary big iron OS, and told him to just go nuts and make a kernel that could stand up to the rigors of industry. They then bolted the Windows 3 interface and APIs on top of that, which produced something that by and large could be used the same as their existing consumer OS, but still had a lot of rough edges that kept them from just switching the entire product line over to NT immediately.
Gotta love the unfettered willingness to pen a spiel in the RUclips replies. CRD is the last bastion of real RUclipsrs, the 'You' has meaning after all.
I wanted a DayStar Genesis Mac clone in 1996 for no other reason than bragging rights. Almost nothing I used would take advantage of the extra PowerPC CPUs, but _damn_ those things were dope.
I had a Precision 420! I had no idea the PIII worked with RAMBUS, I coulda sworn that was just a P4 thing. I also was completely unaware that you could do dual slot PIII. I thought that was just a Xeon exclusive thing at the time. Such a weird PC.
The Celeron A300 @100 MHz FSB. You paid the price for a Pentium II 233, but you got the performance of a PII 450. Half the CPU cache, but running at the full 450 MHz. Next to the 2600K one of the best Intel processors.
i've been building these early SMP systems for a while now. One of my favorite things is to give them some overkill GPU and SATA controller, slap SSDs on it, and send the system to moon seeing just how far you could've gotten in any multi-core aware software it can run.
You had three different types of people using those things back in the day and only two did actually benefit from it: Full on Linux nerds (Compile jobs etc), Game-server hosts and those with too much money that just wanted "the best". Kinda like the dorks that went with Pentium Pro and discovered that windows 9x and its apps don't run well due to slow 16-bit support in that processor 😂
I had a dual CPU board with P2-400s running on Windows 2000. it was a very good performant machine with most tasks. horrible with most games. I used it as a file server mostly.
40:30 that is outdated, because before 8th generation of the consoles, which most of the games of that generation and a bit after were optimized for, didn't have multithreading (yes PS3 technically had more than 1 core, but from my understanding they weren't general purpose cores, and so there was no reason to target more than a couple of cores for ports), but with PS4 and Xbox One developers had to target 8 slower, general purpose cores.
I had incredibly early broadband in 1997 with an INSANE speed of 300 kBit/sec. Back then I pulled ethernet cable to share the connection with my brother through a wall and just twisted the appropriate copper wires back together. Even piggy-backed ISDN over the unused pairs. Some scotch tape, tip top! You young people with your "crimping". pfft!
I had an M-Tech 534-R Mustang, which were for early Pentiums. It had a 83.5MHz bus speed, which was awesome for overclocking. Even running a Pentium 133, IIRC witht he 83.5MHz bus speed resulted in 166MHz CPU speed... but that bus speed was INSANE for performance. Back in the day ABit were some of my favorites, I had a BH6 which is probably abou this BP6 generation. Anyway, if you're so inclined, try to find one of the M-Tech boards they were amazing.
This brings back so many memories. The struggles of early multiprocessor machines. The lack of multithreading in software. The scheduler not really being the best for it, although, Windows 2000 and XP were a world of difference for SMP support. Then getting into things like processor affinity if you really wanted to fine tune a system. And then there was being in school learning about OS concepts. Threading, preemptive and cooperative multitasking and how preemptive is the only way to go. Windows 3.1 is a stark reminder of why cooperative multitasking doesn't work - one process breaks the rules and it's all over. I can say, adding threading to an application can be very complex, I've done it before but you really hit the nail on the head. It can be very hard to do and it needs to be done where it makes sense. It doesn't always make sense. Games, to your point are heavily multithreaded. Things like music, physics, graphics code, disk access, net code, etc.; are often all broken into threads. However, those threads may not be further subdivided so it can give the appearance of single threading where there's slow downs when a lot happens all at once and overall CPU usage is relatively low. Of course, synchronization across processors back then was a huge pain which is why a lot of old games struggle running on SMP or multicore machines. So it was all effectively single threaded even if there were some parts split into other threads. I think this video really did a great job at explaining a lot of these complexities without going into the mindbending realities of how threading is accomplished and controlled. Thank you for making this!
I had the Abit VP6 back in the day. It had several improvements over the BP6, although it came out right in the middle of the capacitor plague. It had dual P3 1GHz, none of that Celeron garbage. I agree with all of the downfalls of NT you mentioned, but NT was all about the stability. What made it so stable was the way it isolated processes in memory from each other, so if one crashed it did not affect any other. Of course, to isolate processes it used physical memory, which is why NT required much more RAM than Win98. But the way I ran it was to dual boot. Gaming was strictly in 98, "work" was in NT.
Yes, the BP6 was the first and only Socket 370 MENDOCHINO SMP System... Pentium 3 weren't supported... THough there were earlier Dual Slot1 BOards, such as the ASUS P2B-D or others, but nothing that was made for Celerons.
3dsMax mentioned 40min in, finally. The Bellevue housemate (worked for Sierra) rolled with a dual socket NT4.0 rig and always grumpped about how much a PITA is was to get multi-threading right. On the flip side it was CHEAP compared to an SGI systems rocking SoftImage. He dual booted win 98 for games and the 3dfx goodness. Ah memories.
26:28 i almost didn't catch that you were talking about the consumer-side of NT. Back then, i ran the best MSFT OS ever, Windows 2000 Professional, on a single-core P3-800EB. 🥰 Ripping a DVD on that thing took half a day - our IT trade school clique made it into kind of a hobby to rent DVDs, rip and share amongst us - that was about as fast as downloading via dial-up. Usually, i'd start ripping in the morning, go to school, and watch a fresh DVD rip upon return. The next day, i'd return the DVD to the lender (i think it was a VideoBuster, some big franchise here in Germany).
I bought a Tyan S1564D 'Tomcat IV' Dual Pentium board in the late 90's I was learning for an MCSE at the time and I ran NT 4.0 Server as a Desktop OS 233 Mhx MMX Processors ... fun times I disagree ... NT 4.0 was specifically designed TO LOOK LIKE WINDOWS 95 Come on Dude ... You are complaining about NON Issues for consumers if you a gamer you were running 95 / 98 / 98SE NT 4.0 was designed for Businesses .... running Applications like CAD and other LoB Apps
One of the more significant aspects to the ABIT BP6 was it had crappy quality electrolytic capacitors. Sure there were lots of other MB's that had bad caps but this one was one of the key MB's that started the bad cap awareness. It was so bad that even a 2yr+ MB, ABiT would willingly RMA it for free. I know I RMA'd 2 of the boards as a consumer. Not a computer service company. This was at the time an amazing board if you had an OS that took advantage of SMP. I used FreeBSD and it was a great machine for NAS and network routing.
I've always done my best to have all the PCs in the house be available for render farm duty. both cpu and gpu rendering power just kinda ready when my son or wife wants to make something. 1800x(8) 3700x(8) 7950h(8) 2x5460(32) plus 6650xt, 1060-6, 580-8, 970fe, 2080
I built a system with a BP6 and dual 333MHz processors in early 2000, overclocking to 550(IIRC) and running Windows 2000 Workstation as my desktop for a few years. Later I got an Athlon based system and moved the BP6 box to be the file/print/dial-on-demand server (I lived in a rural area where there was no broadband access) reducing it to the default clock speed and installing Windows 2003 Server (I worked for s university and that was when you needed only a .edu address to qualify for education pricing; I think i paid $125 to get the media, key and 5 CALs.)
Back then when dual core cpus started with the Athlon X2, it was common to separate tasks and programs between cores using programs like process lasso and at some point Windows XP incorporated that functionality. It was normal to leave OS tasks on CPU0 and move games to CPU1 and things like that, it was a way to solve some bottlenecks if you run very CPU intensive games like RTS. Nowadays you don't really need to do that since we come a long way but you can still do it if you want.
The Mainboard I remember is the Asus A8V Deluxe. I didn’t regularly clean my PC when I was a child… One morning the PC just screamed „FAN ERROR! FAN ERROR!“ on full volume in endless repeat. I remember this so much, because it scared me. Now I’m sad that my current mainboard just has some leds for showing what is wrong.
the single cpu version of this board was probably the most popular at the time, the BH6, there was another model that had 4 dimm slots, but the BH6 was a lot cheaper, and the celeron was so cheap, and you could overclock a LOT the 300 would do 500 easily... that was actually my favorite time to think back on, i wanna put one together at some point, i even got me a voodoo5 5500AGP waiting for it :D
Back in the early-mid 2000s my dad worked at HP, and he would bring me e-waste home to mess about with. One of the best finds was an HP Kayak workstation, and soon enough all the parts to add a second Pentium 2 400 and a full loadout of RAM and worn out SCSI drives. With Windows 2000 it was a perfectly usable day to day machine for my introduction to downloading music and video on the internet (and sometimes homework), and when I saved up my pocket money for an ATI Radeon 7000 it could just about struggle through Wolfenstein ET or Jedi Outcast at 20-25fps. I think I even ran Red Hat on it for a while but games drew me back to Windows. Despite manually assigning every single task to CPU1 and the game to CPU2, I never saw an improvement in FPS from the second CPU.
Back in the day Tyan was the gold standard for *proper,* yet semi affordable, x86 multi-processor boards. I ran a dual Pentium Pro setup back in 97 w/NT 4.0 SMP. It wasn’t cheap, but it also wasn’t HP NetServer expensive :)
The original Celeron's didn't have cache, but then Intel released the Celeron "A" that had some cache, which made them not so far behind the Pentiums, and you could overclock them to the gills. Getting a 300 MHz Celeron A overclocked to 450 MHz wasn't a big issue. As for the Dual Processors: I do believe to remember that the Pentiums couldn't run in Dual CPU mode because Intel somehow hamstrung them to not cannibalize their newly created Xeon market. I really don't remember the details, but I do remember that the Celeron "A" was the only CPU that made sense in this configuration. (And yes, I had a 450 MHz NT4 BP6 system myself, and it was heaven because of how responsive it was, as you pointed out towards the end.)
Didn't have the BP6, but drooled after it, to replace my other P166 Linux-based FTP server. My normal PC back then had the good ol' Celeron 266 clocked to... 412? Mhz (just above 400 at least). Oh, and before Win2K (but especially with Win2K) , during the emergence of 3D-accelerated gaming the people who went NT also went nVidia Quadro or ATi FireGL, 'cause those were basically the gamer equivalent, but with drivers for NT -- albeit more CAD/3D Studio-focused stable OpenGL drivers. Thus, games that used OpenGL often ran happily on NT. Remember a dude at The Gathering 'round then had such a system.
9:24 "I used to work in e-waste..." Huh, no wonder you've got such an interest all this kind of stuff! Who else would care about otherwise seemingly boring, obsolete pc parts?
I was an early adopter of SMP. Of course I had a BP6 running a pair of Celerons. One thing to remember is that when Celerons first came out, they were on slot one. But although they had half the cache, it was on die cache running at full speed. For a snappy system try a pair of 300 Celerons running at 450 on a Tyan Tomcat.
I have a really funny relationship with this motherboard discovering it in a time when I shouldn’t have In 2007 I had a 1.2ghz celeron in a 370 socket board as my personal computer for homework Wanting to play flight simulator x to discover my computer wasn’t fast enough and looking at how to make my computer faster and finding the dual socket motherboard and became obsessed with it hunting everywhere for it in local computer shops
I had one of these with Celeron 533s. Having an SMP machine in your house on a college student budget was a game changer. I ran Linux, FreeBSD, and BeOS 5 on it at various points. I could test multithreaded code projects without needing to log into to college lab server. And as a daily driver, running multiple apps was so smooth.
That 3ds Max bit really takes me back to my college days in the early 2000s, when I got a useless “media arts and animation” degree from a for profit college that I’m still paying off. I was more of a Maya guy myself though.
"I've had terrible luck with pci sound cards with old machines" - I used to shove Crystal based cards in my old 98SE/2000 rigs when I was broke af and had to use those old things when AMD64's etc were brand new and they always used to work once you found good drivers.
It's probably nostalgia blinders, but this is my favorite video of yours recently. I didn't have a BP6, but I did have dual slot one P3 800s on a Gigabyte board running Windows 2000 a few years after this. I sometimes miss that rig.
This brings back soooooo many memories, I worked in IT back then, so I remember working on the HUGE, weird servers like that big boy you showed, as well as the "small" servers like that Dell. I remember running NT 4, 98, Red Hat, BeOS, AND OS/2 all on the same machine just to prove to myself it could be done. I remember struggling to get games to run under NT because of its limited support for DirectX. And yes, I remember using jumpers and DIP switches to set up clock speeds, IRQs, and the like, as well as working with a rat's nest of cables and trying to route everything around those damn ribbon cables that took up so much room, and forcing reluctant Molex connectors to plug in because I am the old. I love your channel and I love to see all of the old hardware that I remember from my youth. Thanks for resparking my memories.
This is an interesting view into an era I kind of missed, even though I was very much into computers at the time. I was just way too poor to consider anything close to cutting edge. I didn't even get a Windows capable PC until 1998, before that the most modern PC I had was my dad's old discarded 8088 work computer. By the time I could even get a 3D card, this age was already past.
I have to disagree. The ASUS P2B dual socket boards got introduced in april 1998, and was rather popular among enthousiasts, about a year before the BP6. What the BP6 brought to the table is supporting unmodified celeron CPUs, oh, and leaving that silly slot-1 stuff behind. I still have my ASUS P2B-DS based dual pII machine from 1998, I built about a dozen clones of that machine for other enthousiasts 🙂 I built that machine originally for testing FreeBSD and Linux SMP support which was still quite experimental at that point. I used mine for quite a while as workstation. (overclocking the pII 333 cpus in it to 400mhz). In the late 1990s, there were still ISA soundcards which were considered totally acceptable, if not a 'should have', especially the original GUS and original (ISA) SB16. Of course the GUS was mostly for demos and demo coders, whereas the ISA SB16 was mostly for very good compatibility with DOS games, but DOS games were still a huge thing in the late 1990s. If you lived in a 'pure Windows universe', you'd most likely use something more modern, but most of us didn't live in a pure Windows universe yet until a few years later. As an aside, one of the very first PC operating systems to add proper SMP support was OS/2 2.11 for SMP.
Those Enlight cases were primo back in the late 90s! I built shitloads of PCs in them. In fact, if I was building a system for you, it wasn't an option, you had to spring for the Enlight case. They were miles above your typical flimsy, paper-thin, sharp-edged sheet-metal beige box cases of the time. The system board mounted to a tray that pulled out and the drives mounted to rails. I t was the proto serviceable design of he time. Speaking of SMP, Ibuilt a buncha Dual-CPU systems to run NT & Linux on a special Dual Slot-1 board back around 98-99... used those Celeron Mendocino CPUs with the cache on the die and loaded them into SMP-enabled Slotket adapters. Wham Bam Dual CPU server machines on a shoestring!! Great times!! =]
I was doing video editing back in the mid/late 90s, so multi-cpu machines were needed, even with tons of add-in boards doing much of the heavy lifting. I had a dual P90 server made by ALR with a ton of PCI and EISA boards, and then a Tyan mobo with dual Athlon MP 1800s that eventually self-immolated.
There was a Toshiba Magnia server with dual PIII mainboard from Gigabyte. There were versions for Coppermine and Tualatin, but only some high-clocked server types. It had a cut-down version of retail board (sound outputs but no sound chip installed and old type AGP). Case was similar to that one, but black with door and legs(!) that could swing outside for better stability.Two fans, very massive, stable and sturdy case, in fact... I liked it that much I saved one from scrapping and use it for my rig even today, I am just replacing the mainboards as they come :P
Omg, i haven't seen that DFI lan party box in years. My buddy got one of those when we were building our PCs in the early to mid 2000s to play Guild Wars 1. Thanks for unlocking that memory
I still remember my dad building a dual Pentium 3 system on a dual Slot-1 motherboard (ASUS?) and being so incredibly smug about it because it was DUAL CPUs up in this BINCH I got a lot of mileage out of it later on when he bought a new system - it still kicked ass in TES IV: Oblivion and handled everything I threw at it as a clueless kid. God, I miss that Hammerite-painted deep blue box of my dreams.
This was exactly the point I entered the computing space in terms of building my own machines. The earlier variant of that case, the p3, and even that edition of Premiere were where I got started. In fact I'm recreating that build right now just for laughs. Win 2k for that period correct experience.
some info about NT4 and why it does not have some features of W95/98... Inside MS work was going on for NT 4 (Cario) to upgrade NT3.51 (Daytona) Win95 hit the market and the big business customers started wanting Win95 interface on NT 3.51..there were lots of arguments internally Cairo was not done so basically MS was at least 1-2 years out for NT 4 Cairo..well those big businesses carry alot of weight they buy things by the truck load...so NT 4 Cairo was put on hold (or at least planed for NT5) ..MS needed something fast..so they basically took NT 3.51 and put Win95 Chicago skin on it (there are a couple of dialog boxes deep inside NT 4 that are actual NT 3.51 boxes)..and released it as NT4 ...hated by overwhelming amount of people at MS...sold like crazy to businesses as an upgrade...work continued on NT5 Cairo but due to lots of issues a good portion of it had to be scrapped (i.e. Hermes etc) so what was left was now NT 5 Alpha (which would become Win 2000) ..this should explain the issues you had and also wondering how far back Win 2000 went... W2K Alpha would go back to late 1997 and Beta 1 would have been mid 1998... Internally MS was pretty proud of Win 2K and wanted to forget about NT4 NOT RELAVANT: i don't know how much is known about Hermes project i got to see it in action (in early Alpha) while i was at MS and play with it...one of the many features was that you had a master Admin screen for your whole company and you could configure it in many ways by department...i.e. when a machine was booted it could re-format the drive go out and get that departments disk image and install it automatically..(assuming large LAN pipe) any viruses or software the employees put on it would be gone..you could also manually trigger this and have the machine boot normally unless triggered ..all controlled by the master Admin screen..the part that was being worked on when it was stopped was in Admin screen you could drag and drop software packages and it would create a disk image for the department..
My first DIY build mobo was a Soyo 478 Mobo with a PNY FX 5200, 512MB DDR RAM, multiple HDDs starting with my recycled Quantum 15GB, a recyled WD 80GB, my Maxtor 250GB and 320GB ATA HDDs, a Lite-On 4x DVD Writer, a Creative 52x Writer, an internal Zip 250, an add-in ATA controller from Promise, and for a while, an Audigy sound card. And my shite Gateway P2 with a slocketed P3 933 and GeForce 2 MX 32Mb AGP 4x with 384MB SDRAM still got better fucking ping on CS 1.5... I don't understand these things sometimes.
In the very early days of multiprocessing the biggest win for me wasn't individual program performance improvements but instead the fact that the windows UI didn't lock up when a program was doing heavy work. You could start an intensive process and then go read the news on the same machine. I didn't start using SMP until I had windows 2000 in my hands which solved many of the quirks that folks saw using NT 4. I really loved 2000.
Amazing board! I've chosen it when I've been building my first pc. If I remember correctly only Quake 3 was able to utilise dual cpus in the software rendering mode, but it was still worth it :)
This was the dilemma in 1999: SMB was available but the software hadn’t caught up. WinNT ran worse in practice so you pretty much had to have Win98 too. You dreamed that Linux or BeOS would takeover the software market (like the silver quake3 Linux tin). Then WinXP came out in 2001 and was good enough and here we are.
The multicore CPUs we all know and love today are almost all still SMP. SMP does not require multiple sockets. The alternative to SMP is NUMA. In SMP, every core is basically interchangeable, and has effectively equal access to main memory, which is what makes it Symmetric. NUMA stands for Non-Uniform Memory Access, where main memory is divvied up between the cores and, from the perspective of any given core, some parts of main memory have higher access overhead than others-i.e. the overhead is Non-Uniform. (NUMA should be renamed PITA, in my opinion.)
I had an Abit bp6 late in the game, paired with a single pentium 3 500e pilfered from a Dell, using win2k. Ran it at 833mhz (166mhz fsb, 100mhz stock) for a year while I saved up for some spicier cpu's. It would boot at even higher clocks, but I couldn't get a sound card to work with the severely overclocked pci bus. By the time I saved up for the cpu's I wanted to put in it, the system was stolen from me. C'est la vie The board itself might be somewhat notable, but my personal experience with it certainly was.
To me the true peak of multiprocessor goodness is the various Socket A boards such as the MSI M7D Master and Tyan Tiger MPX. And with Windows XP being the OS of the day they were even somewhat useful! For a little bit of added fun you could even run the mobile Athlon XP-M chips in these things for sensible heat and power consumption.
We had multiprocessor consumer machines in the 80's, now they weren't like modern systems as the original CPU would be relegated to hardware control but they both were doing something. The BBC Micro was the machine in question, there was a Tube(R) port that allowed an extra processor to be added, either to allow a faster 6502 to be used or to use a completely different processor so things like CP/M could be used. It was also the way the original ARM1 was prototyped/developed for.
33:11 I thought I was totally insane for this, but as a kid, graphics glitching out and when games suddenly changed resolution to something like 640x480 terrified me beyond belief.
VMWare existed back then... I was running Win95 in VMWare in 1999, and waiting for a decently priced SMP motherboard. There were 2 solutions for running Windows games on Linux - WABI and I forget the other but in required installing Windows into Linux using some files from OS/2 Warp. But most games were still running in DOS, and DOSemu ran them really well on my Trident ViRGE T64+ card under Linux. The dual Celeron setup was great because they were the most overclockable of Intel's chips.
Overclocking has been a thing with PCs for as long as there have been PCs. I remember people overclocking the original PC, which led to "turbo" XT machines. I personally had the Abit BH6, the single-slot version of that motherboard. (In that same Enlight case, minus the front USB ports.) At the time, I was still running Windows 98, so the second processor wouldn't have done me any good. I had the classic Celeron 300A processor that would easily overclock to 450MHz with just a bump in bus speeds. That thing was a beast for the amount of money it cost me. I fondly remember the Dell PERC controllers. Well, not 'fondly' so much; they sucked balls.
I can't wait to go to bed tonight and listen to this and reset my brain after a long stressful day at work.
That's so sad 😧😞
Just quit, m8.
I can't wait to get to work and put this on to get through the first hour, but until then I'll preview the video for a few minutes
Aye, I watch these videos like feature-length movies. Imo the videos are more interesting than most movies these days anyways.
@@deadreaver666I was in a place a few years ago that if I quit like that, my husband and I both would be homeless.
Capitalism sucks
Definitely throw Win 2k on that thing. 2k fixed so many little issues with NT4 and you should see a lot better compatibility with games, and iirc most BP6 owners swapped to 2k as soon as it was available.
Windows 2000 is so underrated. It was basically XP with the Win9x/NT4 UI before XP even existed.
been trying win 2k on my single 1ghz p3 machine and (saying this as someone who grew up with win xp in the late 2000's early 2010's) it freakin kicks ass! orders of magnitude better than win98se in practically every way.
I kept Win2K on an SGI VWS320 and used it as a file server for years until shitty rural power killed the power supply in 2011.
The tiny bit I can contribute: those Starcraft images were splash screens.
Hey, if you need help with telling the Stories (1:01:47) in the future, let me know. I'm part of a pretty big community (The Retro Web) who are probably a bit too knowledgeable/obsessed about that era of PCs for our own good. I (and many others in the community) would be happy to help connect any missing dots.
I myself have what may have been one of the low cost (read: sketchy) direct competitors to the BP6 -- a dual 440LX Slot 1 board from everyone's "favorite" brand, PCChips (though it's branded Amptron). It's a.... very strange board.
Part of my internship at the soon thereafter failing Lucent Technologies was to build a small farm of Windows NT 4.0 workstations. Powerful but cheap.
You bet it was a dozen BP6 machines with celeron 500s. I was told not to bother saving money on the 300a.
I am a person that will brag about his dual Pentium 3 700 on an Abit VP6. I still have it and it rocks Windows 2000 hard. That was my first SMP@home but I had friends with the BP6 and Celeron 300s pushing 500+ and they were great.
The Enlight 7237 is the case I have built the most PCs in. My dad's company threw away tons of them and I put everything from Pentiums to Core i boards in them.
Absolutely loved mine. Beige box with a window cut in it myself. Dual Celeron 400's running at 550mhz with water cooling and CCFL lighting. Had a 500 watt car amp bolted to the right side of the case and a second PSU with a half farad cap, and i DJ'd parties with it!
I loved that era of computing.
Everything you did was fully custom. You could browse posts on forums and get cool ideas.
I had a K6-3 400 that I could only overclock to 450 and stay stable, and I was jealous of the crazy overclocks the celerons could get.
I think I remember the Celeron 300a being notorious for effortlessly overclocking past 500mhz.
This is going to be a 63 minute long core memory for me.
This episode was such a nostalgia fest for me. The first PC I built was from this era, and I was deep into some of this stuff. For what it's worth, I enjoyed the somewhat long journey you took us on to get to the actual motherboard.
It had an Abit mobo and a Slot 1 Pentium 3 that I overclocked from 700 MHz to 900 MHz. To achieve that, I had a bunch of high flow fans, and I even did stuff like sand and polish the heatsink (which I'm pretty sure is useless now, but I had too much free time then). It was in a variant of the Enlight case that I rattle-canned metallic blue. I also dremeled a couple holes into the side and installed fans for extra cooling for the GPU and processor. All the fans made it sound like a jet spooling up when you turned it on. For its power light, it had one of the early blue LEDs. It was obnoxiously bright, enough to light up a room.
I lugged it and a painfully heavy 19 inch CRT to a lot of LAN parties, and played a lot of Counterstrike and UT. It was my first DVD player, thanks to an MPEG card, and the first DVD I watched on it was The Matrix.
NT5/Windows 2000 Pro was what I ran on systems like this. Runs almost all W98 software since it had working Direct X 7 and even got DX 9 support a bit later.
The UI was also pretty much exactly like XP but with a 98 skin on it.
I too have been having problems with PCI sound cards. Also just later 90's sound cards in gereral. They all work prettey much perfactly in Windows 98, but then I switch to DOS and the only soundcard that does anything my SB AWE64. I use usisound in DOS btw.
I totally remember the celeron hotness. My girlfriend at the time was absolutely bonkers about hers, lol. Also, unless it's changed since I was in grad school, most dictionary-based compression algorithms are impossible to parallelize. The state of the "dictionary" changes after every token is processed, so it's not possible to know what the state of the dictionary will be at any point in the file other than where the "head" is.
Yep, back then I was constantly on the overclocing forums and being envious of all the wild Celeron overclocks.
I think I remember the Celeron 300a was super popular because you could pretty effortlessly get 500+ Mhz out of it.
The way to parallelize it would be by decompressing two files at the same time - this actually *should* be an area where zip has a huge advantage over 'monolithic' archive formats like .tar.gz, since each file within the archive is an independently compressed stream, something that's historically been regarded as a disadvantage since it of course makes the compression itself less effective than it otherwise might be.
450 was a given, 504 was common but not always
The BP6 can be credited with getting a lot of enthusiasts excited about getting into SMP. But sadly it also quickly garnered a reputation for being a quirky beast.
The Highpoint ATAPI controller was particularly hated. I went with an Epox dual slot 1 board instead with Celerons in 'slotket' boards. Still loved following the BP6 community.
There's not many legendary motherboards but BP6 is one of them. This thing with dual overclocked celerons, as much ram as you could afford and a copy of Windows 2000 provided serious epeen at the time, a legit PC workstation that many teenagers could afford.
Of course it got absolutely thrashed by an Athlon released in the same year but meh, dual processors. It's still cool to have more than one processor and at least some FPS games could actually take advantage.
The reason for the CPU pingpong of processes was to make more effective use of the caches. Every time you had a TXT page fault it would switch cores. There was a non-zero probability that the cache on the other core hadn't evicted the page you wanted. It also meant that when you went above 50% core utilisation and a process got evicted, it would be landing on a core that probably already had it partially cached. The cost of context switching was less than a millionth of the page fault on rotating rust, so it wasn't a costly gamble.
I also wondered if it was to balance usage over time or to not overheat one while the other's running cold. Both running at a mildly high temp has got to be better than one burning itself out, right? I don't know if that would happen with just a bunch of basic windowed applications open, I am not really familiar with old Windows, but if it did it seemed like a reasonable thing to implement to me.
The oldest Windows I remember using genuinely was probably XP, but I was young and the computer was already outdated then. It's funny, I probably a little too young for XP and VHS and CRT TVs but I had all of them because my dad was a cheapskate, I think. I mean, if it ain't broke and all that. I also didn't get a phone until I was a lateish teenager, and it wasn't new, it was a hand me down. Awkward story ahead, here be dragons: One time, when I was really young, I took a picture of my, uh, willy with someone's phone, not mine but a family member, but then got really scared and couldn't figure out the interface to delete it, it was probably Android 2 or something. Core memory, I was very stupid.
The dual-core CPU having on by a... Thread. Prime opportunity to say "no pun intended".
Oh Abit. I had a BX6 back in the day and it was a beast. Such great products made by an absolutely incompetently managed company that drove itself into the ground almost as fast as it grew.
Biggest Issue with NT4, was lack of USB support. No USB flight stick\gamepad for you. Direct X support only up to 3.0 another big hindrance to gaming. PCI sound cards also an issue, you probably only would of had luck with a SBLIVE! and only the early versions of it too. Windows 2000 is where SMP systems got alot better for gamers running such a system.
Really nice description of multitasking and multithreading. I mean, I already understand this stuff intuitively but this is probably the best explanation I've heard of how this works. Like, you didn't dumb it down to the point of being an abstraction, but you did make it simple enough to understand (I think) for someone who doesn't already understand this stuff intuitively.
Tech Tangents made a video on this same board but mostly to document replacing bad capacitors. It might be worth checking your board's caps to see if they're still good.
20:11 WHAT!?! No backplate!?!?! 😂 I kid… But man, you’re taking me back on the nostalgia express! I’m so thankful you have this channel! I had one of these with overclocked Celerons, in a full tower case with casters on the bottom and three ultra wide SCSI drives, with a pair of 3-D Voodoo video cards running in whatever they called SLI. Please keep making these videos, don’t ever quit!
Also as a heads up, the reason we bought Celeron processors was due to the fact that you could overclock the hell out of them. You could not nearly overclock the pentium version. Not only because it would be unstable, but also due to the heat. The celerons gave you so much more performance when overclocking they blew past most of the pentiums that I knew about.
I was running Windows 2000 pre release versions on my machine in 1999. It was still tons better than NT.
I finished my engineering degree in 2002, and had daily driver of Windows 2000 with dual boot of Windows ME (which worked better for me than 98 SE, which other preferred). I worked on a dual core machine which was part of my final degree project (it utilised multi threading for data processing). I remember thinking how I barely even needed ONE CPU to perform the task, and just using the dual processor config just so I can write this in the project description and justify buying the data, lol. It kinda made the system more stable of course, in case a background process would hog one CPU, the other one was running my code fine ("real time" data streaming in).
I remember having insane debates in my school about whether one prefers "AMI BIOS" or "AWARD BIOS" in exactly THAT era. As if one had a choice...
Overclock scene nowadays is a joke.
The point of Overclock was to make slow mainstream cpu /gpu to go fast at a reasonable cost.
Nowadays it means to make already very fast components to go even faster. Overclock became restrict to expensive cpu and high profile mainboards.
This was indeed a fun video. As good as the summer of bench vids has been, it's nice to have you back in the studio. Looking forward to part 2!
I think it would be cool to learn more about NT in particular. I know there's probably plenty of existing resources out there but any time I look it up, I'm confused about why it existed (beyond the technical improvements made to Windows) as a consumer product.
@@EvilCoffeeInc In a nutshell, NT existed because Microsoft recognized the inability of the legacy Windows code base to accommodate the needs of businesses. Windows 3, while pretty impressive for it's time and target audience, was simply not sophisticated enough to power a machine that needed to have 24/7 uptime. It was decently stable on its own, but the kernel did not leverage protected mode as much as it needed to in order to protect the OS from misbehaving apps. NT was a clean slate redesign that was intended to give Microsoft something on par with Unix in terms of stability and scalability, while still allowing the use of existing windows software. The way they went about this, from what I understand, is they hired a guy who used to work on VMS, a legendary big iron OS, and told him to just go nuts and make a kernel that could stand up to the rigors of industry. They then bolted the Windows 3 interface and APIs on top of that, which produced something that by and large could be used the same as their existing consumer OS, but still had a lot of rough edges that kept them from just switching the entire product line over to NT immediately.
Gotta love the unfettered willingness to pen a spiel in the RUclips replies. CRD is the last bastion of real RUclipsrs, the 'You' has meaning after all.
This finally happened to me, a CRD upload just as I open YT after long day at work. Thanks for the video as always
I wanted a DayStar Genesis Mac clone in 1996 for no other reason than bragging rights. Almost nothing I used would take advantage of the extra PowerPC CPUs, but _damn_ those things were dope.
I had a Precision 420! I had no idea the PIII worked with RAMBUS, I coulda sworn that was just a P4 thing. I also was completely unaware that you could do dual slot PIII. I thought that was just a Xeon exclusive thing at the time.
Such a weird PC.
I believe that the OS bouncing a process between two CPUs (or cores in a multi-core CPU) is meant to spread out the thermal load.
Knocked it out of the park with this video. Can't wait for the rest of the story.
2:46 "hanging on by a thread" lol good one
Or at least two threads
The Celeron A300 @100 MHz FSB. You paid the price for a Pentium II 233, but you got the performance of a PII 450. Half the CPU cache, but running at the full 450 MHz. Next to the 2600K one of the best Intel processors.
i've been building these early SMP systems for a while now. One of my favorite things is to give them some overkill GPU and SATA controller, slap SSDs on it, and send the system to moon seeing just how far you could've gotten in any multi-core aware software it can run.
You had three different types of people using those things back in the day and only two did actually benefit from it: Full on Linux nerds (Compile jobs etc), Game-server hosts and those with too much money that just wanted "the best". Kinda like the dorks that went with Pentium Pro and discovered that windows 9x and its apps don't run well due to slow 16-bit support in that processor 😂
I had a dual CPU board with P2-400s running on Windows 2000. it was a very good performant machine with most tasks. horrible with most games. I used it as a file server mostly.
Awwww, 24-core is quaint? My threadripper cried hearing that. Or that may be a cooler leak 😅.
40:30 that is outdated, because before 8th generation of the consoles, which most of the games of that generation and a bit after were optimized for, didn't have multithreading (yes PS3 technically had more than 1 core, but from my understanding they weren't general purpose cores, and so there was no reason to target more than a couple of cores for ports), but with PS4 and Xbox One developers had to target 8 slower, general purpose cores.
I had incredibly early broadband in 1997 with an INSANE speed of 300 kBit/sec. Back then I pulled ethernet cable to share the connection with my brother through a wall and just twisted the appropriate copper wires back together. Even piggy-backed ISDN over the unused pairs. Some scotch tape, tip top! You young people with your "crimping". pfft!
I've always liked NT4, but W2K was the really good OS. Most people around me abandoned Win98 for W2K. No one used ME, some used 98SE.
He finally got access to his studio!
We had a dual Pentium Pro system at work back in the day. We used it to live stream Princess Diana's funeral to the whole country. Simpler times.
Quad Pentium Pro systems were for the fancy folk.
I would love to build a sleeper PC in an old case but I'm a big dumbass who doesn't know anything.
Love the title, keep it. Can't wait for part 2, I almost feel like they should be released together!
Any motherboard with cheese outside the shell is definitely a sloppy build.
You didn't zip tie ribbon cables. You did the origami fold.
Damn good explanation of multithreading/multitasking!
I had an M-Tech 534-R Mustang, which were for early Pentiums. It had a 83.5MHz bus speed, which was awesome for overclocking. Even running a Pentium 133, IIRC witht he 83.5MHz bus speed resulted in 166MHz CPU speed... but that bus speed was INSANE for performance. Back in the day ABit were some of my favorites, I had a BH6 which is probably abou this BP6 generation. Anyway, if you're so inclined, try to find one of the M-Tech boards they were amazing.
I'll keep an eye out, thanks! 83MHz - did you have any stability issues with cards?
This brings back so many memories. The struggles of early multiprocessor machines. The lack of multithreading in software. The scheduler not really being the best for it, although, Windows 2000 and XP were a world of difference for SMP support. Then getting into things like processor affinity if you really wanted to fine tune a system. And then there was being in school learning about OS concepts. Threading, preemptive and cooperative multitasking and how preemptive is the only way to go. Windows 3.1 is a stark reminder of why cooperative multitasking doesn't work - one process breaks the rules and it's all over. I can say, adding threading to an application can be very complex, I've done it before but you really hit the nail on the head. It can be very hard to do and it needs to be done where it makes sense. It doesn't always make sense. Games, to your point are heavily multithreaded. Things like music, physics, graphics code, disk access, net code, etc.; are often all broken into threads. However, those threads may not be further subdivided so it can give the appearance of single threading where there's slow downs when a lot happens all at once and overall CPU usage is relatively low. Of course, synchronization across processors back then was a huge pain which is why a lot of old games struggle running on SMP or multicore machines. So it was all effectively single threaded even if there were some parts split into other threads. I think this video really did a great job at explaining a lot of these complexities without going into the mindbending realities of how threading is accomplished and controlled. Thank you for making this!
I miss the old days when you could see the circuit boards. New computers are just a bunch of painted shrouds and LEDs.
What?
You beat your record of puns per second in this one:)
The return of Ray Dude in the Studio.
Wow that double-wide server is SEXY AF in only a way 90s business machines could be!
I had the Abit VP6 back in the day. It had several improvements over the BP6, although it came out right in the middle of the capacitor plague. It had dual P3 1GHz, none of that Celeron garbage. I agree with all of the downfalls of NT you mentioned, but NT was all about the stability. What made it so stable was the way it isolated processes in memory from each other, so if one crashed it did not affect any other. Of course, to isolate processes it used physical memory, which is why NT required much more RAM than Win98. But the way I ran it was to dual boot. Gaming was strictly in 98, "work" was in NT.
Yes, the BP6 was the first and only Socket 370 MENDOCHINO SMP System...
Pentium 3 weren't supported...
THough there were earlier Dual Slot1 BOards, such as the ASUS P2B-D or others, but nothing that was made for Celerons.
3dsMax mentioned 40min in, finally. The Bellevue housemate (worked for Sierra) rolled with a dual socket NT4.0 rig and always grumpped about how much a PITA is was to get multi-threading right. On the flip side it was CHEAP compared to an SGI systems rocking SoftImage.
He dual booted win 98 for games and the 3dfx goodness. Ah memories.
26:28 i almost didn't catch that you were talking about the consumer-side of NT. Back then, i ran the best MSFT OS ever, Windows 2000 Professional, on a single-core P3-800EB. 🥰 Ripping a DVD on that thing took half a day - our IT trade school clique made it into kind of a hobby to rent DVDs, rip and share amongst us - that was about as fast as downloading via dial-up. Usually, i'd start ripping in the morning, go to school, and watch a fresh DVD rip upon return. The next day, i'd return the DVD to the lender (i think it was a VideoBuster, some big franchise here in Germany).
I bought a Tyan S1564D 'Tomcat IV'
Dual Pentium board in the late 90's
I was learning for an MCSE at the time and I ran NT 4.0 Server as a Desktop OS
233 Mhx MMX Processors ... fun times
I disagree ... NT 4.0 was specifically designed TO LOOK LIKE WINDOWS 95
Come on Dude ... You are complaining about NON Issues for consumers if you a gamer you were running 95 / 98 / 98SE
NT 4.0 was designed for Businesses .... running Applications like CAD and other LoB Apps
One of the more significant aspects to the ABIT BP6 was it had crappy quality electrolytic capacitors. Sure there were lots of other MB's that had bad caps but this one was one of the key MB's that started the bad cap awareness. It was so bad that even a 2yr+ MB, ABiT would willingly RMA it for free. I know I RMA'd 2 of the boards as a consumer. Not a computer service company.
This was at the time an amazing board if you had an OS that took advantage of SMP. I used FreeBSD and it was a great machine for NAS and network routing.
I've always done my best to have all the PCs in the house be available for render farm duty. both cpu and gpu rendering power just kinda ready when my son or wife wants to make something. 1800x(8) 3700x(8) 7950h(8) 2x5460(32) plus 6650xt, 1060-6, 580-8, 970fe, 2080
I built a system with a BP6 and dual 333MHz processors in early 2000, overclocking to 550(IIRC) and running Windows 2000 Workstation as my desktop for a few years. Later I got an Athlon based system and moved the BP6 box to be the file/print/dial-on-demand server (I lived in a rural area where there was no broadband access) reducing it to the default clock speed and installing Windows 2003 Server (I worked for s university and that was when you needed only a .edu address to qualify for education pricing; I think i paid $125 to get the media, key and 5 CALs.)
Back then when dual core cpus started with the Athlon X2, it was common to separate tasks and programs between cores using programs like process lasso and at some point Windows XP incorporated that functionality. It was normal to leave OS tasks on CPU0 and move games to CPU1 and things like that, it was a way to solve some bottlenecks if you run very CPU intensive games like RTS. Nowadays you don't really need to do that since we come a long way but you can still do it if you want.
The Mainboard I remember is the Asus A8V Deluxe. I didn’t regularly clean my PC when I was a child… One morning the PC just screamed „FAN ERROR! FAN ERROR!“ on full volume in endless repeat. I remember this so much, because it scared me. Now I’m sad that my current mainboard just has some leds for showing what is wrong.
Oh and only MENDOCHINO (PPGA) Celerons are supported, the newer Coppermines are not.
Intel removed SMP Support from Coppermine Celerons due to the BP6
The MSI 694D based of the VIA Apollo Pro 133 chipset was also around and about at this time and might be considered a contemporary of the BP6.
the single cpu version of this board was probably the most popular at the time, the BH6, there was another model that had 4 dimm slots, but the BH6 was a lot cheaper, and the celeron was so cheap, and you could overclock a LOT the 300 would do 500 easily... that was actually my favorite time to think back on, i wanna put one together at some point, i even got me a voodoo5 5500AGP waiting for it :D
Back in the early-mid 2000s my dad worked at HP, and he would bring me e-waste home to mess about with. One of the best finds was an HP Kayak workstation, and soon enough all the parts to add a second Pentium 2 400 and a full loadout of RAM and worn out SCSI drives. With Windows 2000 it was a perfectly usable day to day machine for my introduction to downloading music and video on the internet (and sometimes homework), and when I saved up my pocket money for an ATI Radeon 7000 it could just about struggle through Wolfenstein ET or Jedi Outcast at 20-25fps. I think I even ran Red Hat on it for a while but games drew me back to Windows.
Despite manually assigning every single task to CPU1 and the game to CPU2, I never saw an improvement in FPS from the second CPU.
Back in the day Tyan was the gold standard for *proper,* yet semi affordable, x86 multi-processor boards. I ran a dual Pentium Pro setup back in 97 w/NT 4.0 SMP. It wasn’t cheap, but it also wasn’t HP NetServer expensive :)
The original Celeron's didn't have cache, but then Intel released the Celeron "A" that had some cache, which made them not so far behind the Pentiums, and you could overclock them to the gills. Getting a 300 MHz Celeron A overclocked to 450 MHz wasn't a big issue. As for the Dual Processors: I do believe to remember that the Pentiums couldn't run in Dual CPU mode because Intel somehow hamstrung them to not cannibalize their newly created Xeon market. I really don't remember the details, but I do remember that the Celeron "A" was the only CPU that made sense in this configuration. (And yes, I had a 450 MHz NT4 BP6 system myself, and it was heaven because of how responsive it was, as you pointed out towards the end.)
Didn't have the BP6, but drooled after it, to replace my other P166 Linux-based FTP server. My normal PC back then had the good ol' Celeron 266 clocked to... 412? Mhz (just above 400 at least). Oh, and before Win2K (but especially with Win2K) , during the emergence of 3D-accelerated gaming the people who went NT also went nVidia Quadro or ATi FireGL, 'cause those were basically the gamer equivalent, but with drivers for NT -- albeit more CAD/3D Studio-focused stable OpenGL drivers. Thus, games that used OpenGL often ran happily on NT. Remember a dude at The Gathering 'round then had such a system.
9:24 "I used to work in e-waste..."
Huh, no wonder you've got such an interest all this kind of stuff! Who else would care about otherwise seemingly boring, obsolete pc parts?
I was an early adopter of SMP. Of course I had a BP6 running a pair of Celerons. One thing to remember is that when Celerons first came out, they were on slot one. But although they had half the cache, it was on die cache running at full speed. For a snappy system try a pair of 300 Celerons running at 450 on a Tyan Tomcat.
I have a really funny relationship with this motherboard discovering it in a time when I shouldn’t have
In 2007 I had a 1.2ghz celeron in a 370 socket board as my personal computer for homework
Wanting to play flight simulator x to discover my computer wasn’t fast enough and looking at how to make my computer faster and finding the dual socket motherboard and became obsessed with it hunting everywhere for it in local computer shops
I had one of these with Celeron 533s. Having an SMP machine in your house on a college student budget was a game changer. I ran Linux, FreeBSD, and BeOS 5 on it at various points. I could test multithreaded code projects without needing to log into to college lab server. And as a daily driver, running multiple apps was so smooth.
That 3ds Max bit really takes me back to my college days in the early 2000s, when I got a useless “media arts and animation” degree from a for profit college that I’m still paying off. I was more of a Maya guy myself though.
"I've had terrible luck with pci sound cards with old machines" - I used to shove Crystal based cards in my old 98SE/2000 rigs when I was broke af and had to use those old things when AMD64's etc were brand new and they always used to work once you found good drivers.
It's probably nostalgia blinders, but this is my favorite video of yours recently.
I didn't have a BP6, but I did have dual slot one P3 800s on a Gigabyte board running Windows 2000 a few years after this. I sometimes miss that rig.
This brings back soooooo many memories, I worked in IT back then, so I remember working on the HUGE, weird servers like that big boy you showed, as well as the "small" servers like that Dell. I remember running NT 4, 98, Red Hat, BeOS, AND OS/2 all on the same machine just to prove to myself it could be done. I remember struggling to get games to run under NT because of its limited support for DirectX. And yes, I remember using jumpers and DIP switches to set up clock speeds, IRQs, and the like, as well as working with a rat's nest of cables and trying to route everything around those damn ribbon cables that took up so much room, and forcing reluctant Molex connectors to plug in because I am the old.
I love your channel and I love to see all of the old hardware that I remember from my youth. Thanks for resparking my memories.
This is an interesting view into an era I kind of missed, even though I was very much into computers at the time. I was just way too poor to consider anything close to cutting edge. I didn't even get a Windows capable PC until 1998, before that the most modern PC I had was my dad's old discarded 8088 work computer. By the time I could even get a 3D card, this age was already past.
I have to disagree. The ASUS P2B dual socket boards got introduced in april 1998, and was rather popular among enthousiasts, about a year before the BP6.
What the BP6 brought to the table is supporting unmodified celeron CPUs, oh, and leaving that silly slot-1 stuff behind.
I still have my ASUS P2B-DS based dual pII machine from 1998, I built about a dozen clones of that machine for other enthousiasts 🙂 I built that machine originally for testing FreeBSD and Linux SMP support which was still quite experimental at that point. I used mine for quite a while as workstation. (overclocking the pII 333 cpus in it to 400mhz).
In the late 1990s, there were still ISA soundcards which were considered totally acceptable, if not a 'should have', especially the original GUS and original (ISA) SB16. Of course the GUS was mostly for demos and demo coders, whereas the ISA SB16 was mostly for very good compatibility with DOS games, but DOS games were still a huge thing in the late 1990s. If you lived in a 'pure Windows universe', you'd most likely use something more modern, but most of us didn't live in a pure Windows universe yet until a few years later.
As an aside, one of the very first PC operating systems to add proper SMP support was OS/2 2.11 for SMP.
Those Enlight cases were primo back in the late 90s! I built shitloads of PCs in them. In fact, if I was building a system for you, it wasn't an option, you had to spring for the Enlight case. They were miles above your typical flimsy, paper-thin, sharp-edged sheet-metal beige box cases of the time. The system board mounted to a tray that pulled out and the drives mounted to rails. I t was the proto serviceable design of he time. Speaking of SMP, Ibuilt a buncha Dual-CPU systems to run NT & Linux on a special Dual Slot-1 board back around 98-99... used those Celeron Mendocino CPUs with the cache on the die and loaded them into SMP-enabled Slotket adapters. Wham Bam Dual CPU server machines on a shoestring!! Great times!! =]
I was doing video editing back in the mid/late 90s, so multi-cpu machines were needed, even with tons of add-in boards doing much of the heavy lifting. I had a dual P90 server made by ALR with a ton of PCI and EISA boards, and then a Tyan mobo with dual Athlon MP 1800s that eventually self-immolated.
There was a Toshiba Magnia server with dual PIII mainboard from Gigabyte. There were versions for Coppermine and Tualatin, but only some high-clocked server types. It had a cut-down version of retail board (sound outputs but no sound chip installed and old type AGP).
Case was similar to that one, but black with door and legs(!) that could swing outside for better stability.Two fans, very massive, stable and sturdy case, in fact... I liked it that much I saved one from scrapping and use it for my rig even today, I am just replacing the mainboards as they come :P
Omg, i haven't seen that DFI lan party box in years. My buddy got one of those when we were building our PCs in the early to mid 2000s to play Guild Wars 1. Thanks for unlocking that memory
I still remember my dad building a dual Pentium 3 system on a dual Slot-1 motherboard (ASUS?) and being so incredibly smug about it because it was DUAL CPUs up in this BINCH
I got a lot of mileage out of it later on when he bought a new system - it still kicked ass in TES IV: Oblivion and handled everything I threw at it as a clueless kid. God, I miss that Hammerite-painted deep blue box of my dreams.
This was exactly the point I entered the computing space in terms of building my own machines. The earlier variant of that case, the p3, and even that edition of Premiere were where I got started. In fact I'm recreating that build right now just for laughs. Win 2k for that period correct experience.
some info about NT4 and why it does not have some features of W95/98...
Inside MS work was going on for NT 4 (Cario) to upgrade NT3.51 (Daytona) Win95 hit the market and the big business customers started wanting Win95 interface on NT 3.51..there were lots of arguments internally Cairo was not done so basically MS was at least 1-2 years out for NT 4 Cairo..well those big businesses carry alot of weight they buy things by the truck load...so NT 4 Cairo was put on hold (or at least planed for NT5) ..MS needed something fast..so they basically took NT 3.51 and put Win95 Chicago skin on it (there are a couple of dialog boxes deep inside NT 4 that are actual NT 3.51 boxes)..and released it as NT4 ...hated by overwhelming amount of people at MS...sold like crazy to businesses as an upgrade...work continued on NT5 Cairo but due to lots of issues a good portion of it had to be scrapped (i.e. Hermes etc) so what was left was now NT 5 Alpha (which would become Win 2000) ..this should explain the issues you had and also wondering how far back Win 2000 went...
W2K Alpha would go back to late 1997 and Beta 1 would have been mid 1998...
Internally MS was pretty proud of Win 2K and wanted to forget about NT4
NOT RELAVANT:
i don't know how much is known about Hermes project i got to see it in action (in early Alpha) while i was at MS and play with it...one of the many features was that you had a master Admin screen for your whole company and you could configure it in many ways by department...i.e. when a machine was booted it could re-format the drive go out and get that departments disk image and install it automatically..(assuming large LAN pipe) any viruses or software the employees put on it would be gone..you could also manually trigger this and have the machine boot normally unless triggered ..all controlled by the master Admin screen..the part that was being worked on when it was stopped was in Admin screen you could drag and drop software packages and it would create a disk image for the department..
My first DIY build mobo was a Soyo 478 Mobo with a PNY FX 5200, 512MB DDR RAM, multiple HDDs starting with my recycled Quantum 15GB, a recyled WD 80GB, my Maxtor 250GB and 320GB ATA HDDs, a Lite-On 4x DVD Writer, a Creative 52x Writer, an internal Zip 250, an add-in ATA controller from Promise, and for a while, an Audigy sound card.
And my shite Gateway P2 with a slocketed P3 933 and GeForce 2 MX 32Mb AGP 4x with 384MB SDRAM still got better fucking ping on CS 1.5... I don't understand these things sometimes.
In the very early days of multiprocessing the biggest win for me wasn't individual program performance improvements but instead the fact that the windows UI didn't lock up when a program was doing heavy work. You could start an intensive process and then go read the news on the same machine.
I didn't start using SMP until I had windows 2000 in my hands which solved many of the quirks that folks saw using NT 4. I really loved 2000.
Amazing board! I've chosen it when I've been building my first pc. If I remember correctly only Quake 3 was able to utilise dual cpus in the software rendering mode, but it was still worth it :)
This was the dilemma in 1999: SMB was available but the software hadn’t caught up. WinNT ran worse in practice so you pretty much had to have Win98 too. You dreamed that Linux or BeOS would takeover the software market (like the silver quake3 Linux tin). Then WinXP came out in 2001 and was good enough and here we are.
The multicore CPUs we all know and love today are almost all still SMP. SMP does not require multiple sockets. The alternative to SMP is NUMA. In SMP, every core is basically interchangeable, and has effectively equal access to main memory, which is what makes it Symmetric. NUMA stands for Non-Uniform Memory Access, where main memory is divvied up between the cores and, from the perspective of any given core, some parts of main memory have higher access overhead than others-i.e. the overhead is Non-Uniform. (NUMA should be renamed PITA, in my opinion.)
I had a dual slot 1 PIII 450 back in the day. Ran win 2k on it.
I had an Abit bp6 late in the game, paired with a single pentium 3 500e pilfered from a Dell, using win2k. Ran it at 833mhz (166mhz fsb, 100mhz stock) for a year while I saved up for some spicier cpu's. It would boot at even higher clocks, but I couldn't get a sound card to work with the severely overclocked pci bus. By the time I saved up for the cpu's I wanted to put in it, the system was stolen from me. C'est la vie
The board itself might be somewhat notable, but my personal experience with it certainly was.
To me the true peak of multiprocessor goodness is the various Socket A boards such as the MSI M7D Master and Tyan Tiger MPX.
And with Windows XP being the OS of the day they were even somewhat useful! For a little bit of added fun you could even run the mobile Athlon XP-M chips in these things for sensible heat and power consumption.
We had multiprocessor consumer machines in the 80's, now they weren't like modern systems as the original CPU would be relegated to hardware control but they both were doing something. The BBC Micro was the machine in question, there was a Tube(R) port that allowed an extra processor to be added, either to allow a faster 6502 to be used or to use a completely different processor so things like CP/M could be used. It was also the way the original ARM1 was prototyped/developed for.
I had the exact same motherboard, CPUs, case, and hardware for years; and yes I triple booted between windowsNT, 95, and Linux slackware!
33:11 I thought I was totally insane for this, but as a kid, graphics glitching out and when games suddenly changed resolution to something like 640x480 terrified me beyond belief.
VMWare existed back then... I was running Win95 in VMWare in 1999, and waiting for a decently priced SMP motherboard. There were 2 solutions for running Windows games on Linux - WABI and I forget the other but in required installing Windows into Linux using some files from OS/2 Warp. But most games were still running in DOS, and DOSemu ran them really well on my Trident ViRGE T64+ card under Linux. The dual Celeron setup was great because they were the most overclockable of Intel's chips.
Overclocking has been a thing with PCs for as long as there have been PCs. I remember people overclocking the original PC, which led to "turbo" XT machines. I personally had the Abit BH6, the single-slot version of that motherboard. (In that same Enlight case, minus the front USB ports.) At the time, I was still running Windows 98, so the second processor wouldn't have done me any good. I had the classic Celeron 300A processor that would easily overclock to 450MHz with just a bump in bus speeds. That thing was a beast for the amount of money it cost me.
I fondly remember the Dell PERC controllers. Well, not 'fondly' so much; they sucked balls.