Running Bentley Microstation or AUTOCAD R13/14 would be a good benchmark test for a 90's workstation. Especially if the computer was used by a telecommunications business.
Pentium PRO is ONLY good for 32 bit apps! They have a 16 bit "bug" that makes them superslow in DOS and 16 bit. There are many videos about it. A so called "flush" feature in the CPU makes it have to do twice the same in 16 bit. Thats why MANY MANY MANY was disappointed thinking that buyingf a PRO was superior to gaming and what not! Turned out this was a PRO cpu only for PRO work in 32 bit apps! This is a fact and many videos about it. The normal Pentium was way better at dos and 16 bit because of it did not have this flush feature! But the PRO was of corse superior in 32 bit apps! ... In the next generation Intel fixed this, but the Pentium PRO also due to its naming became a nightmare to gamers spending a fortune thinking this was the best choice for games and windows 16 bit apps.
you should donate more , I'm a owner of a bunch of pentium III S tualatin 1.4ghz cpus , but I can"t find compatible motherboards , especially dual socket . the few available on ebay are exaggeratedly over priced $400 or sometimes $600
I appreciate that you have good subtitles. I have a speech processing disorder and your audio dynamic range is very easy to listen to and your subtitles are absolutely perfect. Thank you for being accessible!
That case made me laugh out loud at work. I used to work for Teleflora, I worked at the Oklahoma City office, not Paragould, but I did work with them. I actually have one of those workstations at home. I got one after they were decommissioned. T1 built them for their higher end customers. The hot glue and tape was standard as it was T1's version of "military grade". Basically they were supposed to withstand a drop of a certain height (6 feet, I believe), so hot glue was their solution. The case was made by Lian-Li, the same company that built the Megaluminum Monster. The one I have at home is the same aluminum case as the said Monster. I've intended to message you to see if you wanted the Tandberg drive and controller card from mine, but I see you have one now.
I've worked with other tape drives of that era but not this one so I'll ask you: Does that tape have a write protect scheme of some sort and is it causing those errors? (Although it should say tape is write protected if that's the reason)
@@TheOtherBill it does have write protect, but it's pretty obvious when it's on, it's a big red plastic "switch". And his were brand new, so it wouldn't be in accidentally.
@@KlipschHead281 Yup, crazy that these were the first multi-processors by Intel. I worked at a CAD/drafting shop that ran NT 4 way back. We needed dual PPros to run AutoCAD.
@@purplepeak8575 Nice. Multiple processes makes a difference that we take for granted nowadays. It's crazy how many cores are on die now and how many processes run simultaneously. Back in the PPros days, the motherboards could do 2 to 4-way CPUs. I heard 8-way was possible, like with IBM's stuff, but I never worked with those board. Nowadays, many CPUs have 4 cores if not more. To think that most of what Clint does on LGR is single thread, single process, single CPU. This vid is the beginning of the multi-processing advancements.
@@AdBlock-User No IDE hard disk: "Damn, those alien bastards are gonna pay for shooting up my hard drive!" RAM Error: "Get that crap outta here." Successful POST: "Hail to the king, baby"
@@SeeJayPlayGamesmaybe for PPRO it wasn't all that worthwhile cost wise but a couple years later you could rig together a dual celeron rig with NT4 and have a really solid experience. This is what I did (dual boot with Linux). People don't remember how unresponsive single core systems used to be. The step up to dual CPU was a revelation.
I started my career building an NT 4.0 server and a number of workstations - the amount of times I yelled at my monitor during this "don't worry, it'll detected the 2nd processor", "yup, 2GB was the limit", "don't worry it'll convert to NTFS", etc. was SO MUCH FUN. Thanks for the GREAT blast from my past!
NT4 was quite the interesting OS…fond memories of having to reboot in order to acquire a new DHCP lease…6 Service Packs in total back when those were still a thing. But setup correctly with good hardware, NT was a best compared to regular Windows 3.11 or 95 🤘
The reason keen was so slow is the NT4 fully buffered VGA ram access, so instead of writing to the video card the dos app writes to a ram buffer and then NT writes it out to video. This was done to fully isolate dos apps. It's also why the sound blaster doesn't work.
Would you mind explaining that a bit further? I don’t understand what that buffering achieved. Isn’t the isolation part achieved by having the memory region access protected? So as long as the dos apps couldn’t access anything outside that region it should be fine. And therefore mapping the memory would have worked I guess.
@@Dangling-Pointer yes, and that’s what they did starting in NT 5.0, aka Windows 2000. I suspect they were just being overly conservative and didn’t view it as a significant cost given the target market of NT 4.
WHAAAAAT??? That case was from MY hometown??? I remember driving by that Teleflora office almost everyday, and I even had a few family friends who worked there! Man, it is truly a once-in-a-lifetime thing to hear one of your favorite RU-vidrs stumble upon your small town by complete chance!
41:22 This takes me back. My friend's older brother had an NT machine with a Matrox Millennium (and an AWE32) back in '98. He showed us exactly this, Quake 2 in OpenGL running at ~1 FPS and said "Now imagine this ... running smoothly." We were blown away. 😁
My best friend in Highschool spent a summer working at a baseball stadium to get both a Matrix Millennium and a fancy 21 inch 1600x1200 monitor. Don't ask how much it cost. It really blew my crap (forgot what I had) card out of the water. That said, I always teased him about haling that 70 pound thing when we did lan partys. I might of had a crappy 800x600 monitor but at least I didn't throw my back out when I was 16.
I used to work in an IT department in 2000 and built plenty of NT4 systems. When computers started getting much faster, and you logged off of NT account, the system would wait until the log off sound would play entirely before presenting you with the login window. Thought that was pretty hilarious back in the day.
Windows 98 would play the whole sound too. I had a minute long song as a shutdown sound for a while and noticed it would play the whole file before continuing.
I found NT 3.51 having some neat features to allow ROM diskless booting from network cards. (or a floppy) - I used it to boot PC, then select different install media (Win98, NT 3.51 or DOS)
@18:40 I used to work at a Harbor Freight, and indeed, "I don't *need* one, but you know..." was what everyone said when they bought one of those knives.
I had a talking bios and I loved it as a kid, felt so scifi. Pentium 4 prebuilt beige box back in 2001, Asus motherboard I believe. "System completed power on self test, computer now booting to operating system" was its full spiel.
The speech is provided by a Winbond W83791SD chip. I've heard it on an Asus A8N-SLI Premium (very fancy socket 939 motherboard, sadly dead) as well as on the original P4B, which I think was the first motherboard to use this technology.
This era is one where I started my tech career. First recommendation, SCSI hard drive to boot off of *however* make sure you have working SCSI drivers first as they’ll be needed in the boot process probably. Workstations of this era and especially that Mobo would have done IDE as an afterthought, hence the weird CD issues. Also during this time, removeable media came around and I suspect NT4 didn’t consider that thus that could also be the above problem if it is treating IDE as non-removeable storage but isn’t clearing the cache before it powers down. That could also relate to the USB driver install. But I’d suggest SCSI boot drive. Also, while I love the big foot drives, they couldn’t compete with SCSI in performance. Also, I’m surprised no one has made a website to spit out 3D printed IO shields for the back of the case. Drag and drop your ports in place, save as a specific model, etc. I am not talented enough to make but can’t be THAT complex.
Seeing Asymetrix 3D FX absolutely blew my mind! I had this program on my first computer as a kid, Windows 95, no sound card, no CD drive, but a Lexmark X11 printer and this program!!! I've not been able to find this program anywhere, at least not in a usable form. I was super psyched to see this finally again after all these years. It took ages to fully render and and then print out a full page of whatever I made, but I used to make little CD covers and wall art with this program. One was a truck with a giant TV loaded in the bed, I remember. Thank you so much for showing this! Never knew that it came on a Matrox CD, that's why I could never find it. Also never got a chance to use Windows NT, so thank you for bringing both of these to life for me today!!!
This really touched me, because many retro enthusiasts usually focus on the 9x series and XP, but NT 4.0 is often overlooked. It has the same appearance as Windows 95, which leads many to mistakenly believe that it works the same way. However, once you actually use it, you realize they're completely different. Just dealing with the drivers and software support separately for 95 and NT 4.0 is enough to drive you crazy. When you get into NT 4.0, you'll discover an interface that's deep and complex, clearly designed for engineers without any "dummy mode." But for hardcore enthusiasts, this makes it even more fascinating to dig into. Keep up the good work!
As an old dude who paid $400 cash in a "back door deal" for 8 MB/ram in Sept 1995 to run Windows 95 better on my 486 sx-50 (no math coprocessor) 512 MB is insane. That rig in 1996 would have been 5 figures plus. I used to lust after the dual P-Pro 200 - remember they had that RISC capability? Also I think Quake had actual dual processor / SMP support by the way too. Maybe Quake 2? What a case, what a rig, what a setup and what a video. Love that you took the time to clean and fully restore this buying new castors. Another LGR masterpiece as always.
This video brought me back to a summer break from college. Microsoft sent out free beta copies of NT 4 and I scrapped together some parts and built a little PC to run it on. It was familiar but different at the same time! I managed to get IIS working on it and hosted a tiny website that I would dial into from upstairs on a 14.4 modem :).
Matrox was my first video card. My Dad was a drafter and needed it for AutoCad. We had dual 21 inch CRTs, making me king of the neighborhood. I thought so anyway.
Since LGR foods is on permanent Hiatus can we get an LGR odds & Ends where you talk about your deck project and how its coming across. Heck the 8 bit guy did a bunch of videos like that, especially when he built his new studio. I would love to see it.
I know this is primarily a retro PC gaming channel, but I absolutely love 80s and 90s workstation hardware of all brands and stripes. I wish there were more channels that showed off this kind of stuff... but it's hard to come across. So as soon as I read the title I was excited! And I appreciate how this system was demoed in a fair way, not just running games, and also running it's proper OS. So thanks, Clint! I'd love to see more of this kinda content in the future!
I believe Pentium Pro had an issue where if you run 32 bit and 16 bit processes at the same time it would slow down dramatically making it worse that the standard pentium for things like dos which might be what is going on.
A 200 Mhz PPro even if significantly slower, could have been still crazy-fast for dukenukem3d or even better for a lame commander keen, dont you think so? We have played these on 486dx2-66, and it was still running acceptable. A PPro 200Mhz would run circles around such slow 486s, even if running in that strange 16bit slowdown mode.
@@ricsip You'd think so, but no. The issue is mainly to do with maths and the register sizes. The Intel designers did not expect people to be running 16 bit code on the Pentium Pro. It was indeed worse than a 486 when doing maths. And games do a lot of maths. It's far too complicated to explain in the comments. But if you search RU-vid, you'll find plenty of illsutrative videos that shows you in one picture that would take me several boring paragraphs to even attempt to explain.
This video has everything the great LGR videos have. An interesting case, cleaning, a unit with clues of its past life, an unusual OS, interesting bios, driver hunting, unusual media formats, parts hunting from storage... love it all!
But also not far at all. Still the same mounting hardware, still the same protocols just dressed up. We've come so far technologically but the actual physical pc standard has changed hardly at all.
I was lucky to score a PR440FX with dual Pentium Pro 180’s in 1998 or so for pretty cheap. This machine served as a server (running Solaris/x86 and eventually FreeBSD) and as a workstation (running Windows NT 4 and 2000) for many years. I think i finally took it out of service in 2008 or so. I have many fond memories of this motherboard - it is rock solid, flexible, and quite performant for its time.
Really fun watching you discover Windows NT 4. That was actually the first version of Windows I ever used! Unlike most kids my age who got the Win9x experience, my dad refused to get anything DOS-based back then. Until the mid-90s we were a Mac household (classic Mac OS up through 9), but around '97-'98 switched to our first PC, a Pentium II tower on which we installed Windows NT 4 and later upgraded to Windows 2000. It turned out being convenient growing up on that platform, because when Windows eventually became entirely NT-based in the form of WinXP, I was more familiar with it than my peers coming from the 95/98/ME lineage. So much NT 4.0 dna persisted (and still does even into modern Windows), that I remember you could install NT 4.0 tools to add functionality to XP, like the Security Configuration Manager Tool for NT, which would add back the File Properties Security Tab that Microsoft disabled in XP Home Edition. 🤣
I had a desktop system, Dual Pentium Pro, 166mhz system for many years as my daily driver back in the day.... got it in 1996... Windows 95 ran beautifully on it.... Come the release of Win98, I was able to use Multi-link Modems for about an avg of 80kpbs speeds... then I got 1-way cable (For those who don't know, 1 way cable is a single box, Download is via Coax, and Upload is via Phone Line), and with that system, downloading FreeBSD ISO, I was able to reach 95mbit downloads, in 1999.... Truly a powerhouse of a system.... I was able to upgrade the processors to 200mhz and get more ram.... and the stability was just insane. Once windows 2000 came out... I was able to get a Daily Use uptime of over 2 years. Sadly that system no longer exists as a PSU Going back fried the board.... It was awesome while it lasted that's for sure!
Pentium PRO is ONLY good for 32 bit apps! They have a 16 bit "bug" that makes them superslow in DOS and 16 bit. There are many videos about it. A so called "flush" feature in the CPU makes it have to do twice the same in 16 bit. Thats why MANY MANY MANY was disappointed thinking that buyingf a PRO was superior to gaming and what not! Turned out this was a PRO cpu only for PRO work in 32 bit apps! This is a fact and many videos about it. The normal Pentium was way better at dos and 16 bit because of it did not have this flush feature! But the PRO was of corse superior in 32 bit apps! ... In the next generation Intel fixed this, but the Pentium PRO also due to its naming became a nightmare to gamers spending a fortune thinking this was the best choice for games and windows 16 bit apps.
Indeed, I took drafting classes in high school in the late 90s. From a 1998 tech upgrade until after I graduated in 2001, all the school PCs were running Windows NT4 with a Novell network. So yah, AutoCAD on NT4 is a somewhat familiar thing for me. 😎 (As are a couple other programs like Chief Architect.) Though the drafting classroom computers were nothing quite like _this_ beast! 😁
My first IT job out of the military was supporting NT4. Ahh.. the good old day. I got a lol when you tried that 6GB drive. I don't remember running into that install drive limit because I think most drives we used where not even that large yet. I remember configuring dual CPU workstations and being amazed how "smooth" they felt vs. a single core cpu we where used to back in the day. As great as it was I could never afford or justify the price back then.
Thanks for a great video. I had a custom built Pentium Pro 200MHz w/256k cache, SCSI-3, 128MB RAM and Matrox Millenium w/8MB. The processing for SolidWorks was very fast back in 1996. The Matrox card was inadequate for 3D CAD, an upgrade to dual boot Windows 95 and NT 4.0, a Diamond FireGL 1000 graphics card along with a Monster 3D (3D/FX) card made it great for gaming and 3D CAD. It's lack of MMX started to make it irrelevant for gaming a couple years later. I later updated to a Pentium II 400 MHz PC which felt noticeably slower in some respects, probably due to the P2 400's L2 cache not being on-chip.
Also, I remember from back then, you had to install an inf file to activate plug and play detection: Locate the Pnpisa. inf file in the Drvlib\Pnpisa\ folder (ex. x86) on the Windows NT 4.0 CD-ROM. Right-click the Pnpisa. inf file, and then click Install on the menu that appears. Restart your computer.
Wasn't the point of NT4 and subsequently NT5 (2000) to not use plug and play to keep the install streamlined or something? I use to work for the air force and dod reimaging workstations and we had a driver suite of only exactly what programs and drivers were needed
@@jsteezy80 I wouldn't be surprised if it was purposely omitted to reduce any potential stability issues. I do remember plug and play on Windows 95 being (sometimes) unstable, there's that infamous video of that tech guy plugging in a scanner at the Microsoft show for 95 and it bluescreens and restarts, to much applause lol. NT seemed like a very lean version of windows 95, just a lot more stable (No MS Dos for one!) Ah how I miss Windows 2k Professional!
That will only work for ISA cards (it's in the name) and generally only works to allow it to detect and potentially work with some BIOS-configured ISA PNP cards. It's not full PNP support nor will it work with PCI. It's mainly intended for a handful of Sound Blaster cards and will be automatically installed as part of their drivers, IIRC.
This takes me back 25 years. I was floundering academically in college and took a break in 1999. I didn't know crap about computers and I decided to jump right into a MCSE program ("MCSE's earn on average more than $80k/year!") in NT 4.0. I was a little out of my depth and then Windows 2000 was right around the corner making the course near obsolete. By the time I got into the workforce, seeing a NT 4.0 machine was like seeing a unicorn. Never did get that MCSE credential. Not being diagnosed with ADHD until your mid-30s, folks.
“ADHD didn’t exist back in my day” I’ve heard a thousand times. It sure did Hubert, you just blamed the people for it like it is a personal failing instead of helping in any way. Anyway, I’m glad you did get diagnosed eventually even if you deserved to be seen earlier! 💛
@@mialemon6186 I was more on the inattentive side. I was able to skate by with it until 8th or 9th grade before my grades went from A's and B's to B's, C's, and the occasional D. And then it got completely masked when I was diagnosed with depression at 16.
This takes me back to college in '96. A handful of guys in my dorm were making and selling computers out of their dorm room. They had a lot people requesting network card upgrades because the school had ethernet which was mind blowing.
Cool video @LGR ! I used to troubleshoot old PCs like this in the early 2000s. Regarding your boot issue, my first suspect would be the BIOS battery. Back in the olden days some computers would refuse to boot if the BIOS battery was low. After that, my second suspect would be boot order - both the boot order of the BIOS and the jumper settings on the HDD. I found that setting my jumpers to "cable select" and putting my boot drive at the end of the cable was the most reliable way to go.
I used to build specs for a firm like this one in the vid in the UK back in the 90's. I was 24 and the 1st one I built we had to buy in the case from the US. I built it all and it cost a fortune. It was for a ISP back in 1997. Of course with it being US the voltage was switched for US. I plugged in the kettle lead powered in and BANG!!....every component blown!! good times....exciting times....a frontier time!! hahaha
That little switch was so critical back in the day, seemed like a lot of stuff we bought in the UK came set to 120V... I guess a lot more was coming from the USA back then.
Hi Clint, Just saw you on the panel at VCF and didn't want to bother you afterwards, but I just wanted to say, thanks for doing this work. Your videos bring me a lot of joy and it's always a bright spot when I get to watch a new LGR video.
Machines like these were what I grew up on at home. We never had pre-packaged, personal computers. We always built our own professional rigs. This is the way.
I miss my Pentium Pro motherboard, It was the only motherboard I had with an ISA slot. I gave it to one of my professors to use as a visual aid in their lectures for describing PC components. They said that it was nice to have a board with a processor that was large enough to see from the back of the classroom, so at least it was useful.
Oh man, I love this. I haven't been keeping up with you as much in the last couple of years and this takes me right back to the days of the Woodgrain 486 and the Megaluminum Monster. Whenever you build these niche and completely over my budget for the period computers, I geek out to the limit. That's why I'm still subscribed, great fun.
My older brother was a 3D animator and his first PC that he built specifically for work had dual Pentium II’s and man was that thing a beast! (By like 1996 standards lol). He then went on to do some work for Zeiss the optics company and he did the 3D for the Pixar logo with the jumping lamp. Unfortunately tho, his life was cut short and he passed away in 1998 but man I’ll nvr forget what a crazy machine that was back in the day and def something he was rly proud of.
I got a job at a small insurance company just before Y2K and my boss was a rebel - my NT Workstation was open to the Internet and he expected me to keep it secure any way I wanted. I learned a lot about system administration and security - my daily log checks were interesting.
That's not the "old days"... back in the "old days" we had 8 bit computers with just a few Kilobytes of RAM, and a cassette recorder to store and load programs, and maybe a floppy disk if we were really lucky! 😉 Someone will come along and tell us that in the "old days" the first computer they used had vacuum tubes and punched cards or paper tape, and filled the ground floor of a building. I guess these things are relative. 😂
About the start-up issue, the BIOS should have an option somewhere called 'Hard Drive spin-up time'. increasing the delay gives the HDD enough time to spin up before the OS is loaded. The BIOS: 'You load now!' Quantum Bigfoot: 'But I'm still sleepy, one more minute please?' 😂
Back in the day, I worked in a computer store that built primarily with ASUS motherboards. They all came with that stupid speech BIOS thing enabled. We had to remember to disable it because it was confuse/scare the crap out of customers. 🤣
That sounds like fun! I'd look high and low for a way to have it sound like HAL9000. I used to have a theme for my Win98 that had all the sound bytes from the film! ;-] Dave: "Open the pod bay doors, Hal..." _"I'm sorry, Dave, but I'm afraid I can't do that..."_
18:13 immediately got to this and recognized the song in the background. easily my favorite song ngl and certainly an interesting appearance. Your Love by The Outfield. great song.
I’m so proud of you LGR, I’m 40 this year and you make me feel still young even though I love old tech. A beautiful testament to what you do and this community. So thank you so much for this and keep being amazing 🎉🎉😊❤
Perfect cozy viewing. Thanks Clint. Edit - On the tape drive - run a cleaner on it - sounds stupid I know - but I used to have to clean those types of drives all the time - that may help the tape backup run.
The bios speech was on almost all Asus high end board between 2000 and 2005ish. I have a collection of all asus A8N boards, and they all have the POST reporter. Funny thing is that it's customizable. You can put your own voice in there if you wanted.
Yeah, I vaguely remember something like that so I dug around and found this in an old Vogons thread: "Pentium Pros were bad at running 16-bit code because of the register renaming that was implemented as part of the Out-of-Order-Execution logic. The key word here is 'partial register stall'. That is, register renaming treats all registers, including 'partial' registers (eax being the full register, ax, ah and al the partial ones, for example) as separate internal registers. However, there is overlap, so when another part of the register is accessed (eg, al was modified, then ax or eax is read), multiple internal registers need to be combined. This requires a pipeline flush to make sure that all register values are current. Since 16-bit code always uses partial registers, this leads to excessive pipeline flushes in the Pentium Pro."
God this rules; I've always wanted to see you cover the more workstationy side of Windows - these old versions of NT, the insanely powerful for the time systems that ran them etc. Honestly for a first attempt with this sorta system, it didn't turn out too bad! Also that is one hell of a case, and just... the way this thing chomps through multitasking productivity shit like it's nothing is crazy. Really cool to see NT 4.0 in action too - the ways that it it's like 95 aesthetically whilst so clearly being its own thing that preceded 2000 and XP is fascinating. Also - coolest startup sound in Windows' history
That bios voice bought back memories. My family always had odd computers around, including at one stage an ex-server with dual 386 processors from memory. But that voice, one of our PCs had that exact voice whenever it booted. "Power on self test, computer now booting from operating system"
There's something beautiful about loving a thing for the thing itself. Not for how advanced or new or cutting-edge it is. But just for what it is. How it was made. How it came to be and what it does because of that. It's why I love older consoles and hardware. I don't think many modern things can compete with a PS2 or a Gamecube in terms of how much I love the things for what they are.
The Pentium Pro was amazing, as long as you didn't run any 16-bit code... Then it was awful. But calling it 'Pro' was a really bad idea because 'Pro' suggests faster than normal, right? So people bought them and tried running Windows 95. Whoops.
@@codebunnies Can't blame them, the Athlon XP was definitely a better performing cpu compared to P3's or P4's, and you can also overclock them like a champ...
@@czeky274Yes, exactly. Athlon XP was indeed better performing, than similar era P3 and P4s. And the XP in the name was officially confirmed to be because of windows xp. So you cannot really blame the average computer owners, if they connected the 2 things together when buying a new PC.
I believed for decades, that win95 was 16bit. But nowadays, I saw some retro videos about getting win95 run on 13th gen intel core i9. The guy seems to be quite pro retro hacker, so I somewhat believe what he says. And he says win95 was already running 32bit code most of the time. The 16bit code was under win3.1-era. So running win95 on a PPro wouldnt necessarily mean that it had to be that strange slowdown mode.
@@ricsipA ton of the win95 code was 16bit. And the 16bit code kills the performance of any 32bit code that's running at the same time on the ppro. The ppro has to run pure 32bit or it hugely slows down. Nt4 was pure 32bit but many applications weren't. You'd basically have to run software made for the ppro at the time.