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My latest machine

Lutiana

Lutiana

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Dublin, CA USA
I responded to an add on Free cycle for a guy who was giving away some old machines and I went and picked them up.

One was a P4 Dell in pretty good shape, uses RAMBus memory, so I think it is a P4 B since it is running at 2.6Ghz.

The other machine is in fact the gem. It is a Pentium 133Mhz with 80mb of RAM (72 pin SIMMS) a 6gb hard drive and a creative CT4720 sound card. It also has 3 Turtle beach Maui MIDI cards in it.

I'll post some more information and pictures once I get the machine plugged in and turned on.
 
Some more info:

  • CPU: Intel Pentium-S / P54C 133MHz CPGA
  • Motherboard: ASUS P/I-XP55T2P4 w/ 8kb L1 and 512kb L2 cache
  • RAM: 32Mb 32Mb 8Mb 8Mb 72-pin EDO chips - 80Mb Total
  • Graphics: Trident 9660 w/ 1mb RAM
  • Sound: Ensoniqu AudioPCI-97 ES1371
  • Network: 3com Etherlink III (PCI) 3C590TPO
  • HDD: 6281.4Mb (in 3 2Gb Partitions)
  • Removable Drives:1.44Mb Floppy, Sanyo CD-Rom
  • Other: Turtle Beach Maui Midi Wavetable Cards (ISA)
  • OS: MS-DOS 6.22 w/ Windows 3.11
 
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Assuming you like the form factor, that looks like a perfect DOS box almost as is. Just partition it properly and you're ready to go.

I think I've got a couple of Etherlink III cards, but I don't think I found drivers for them yet. Hopefully you'll fare better.
 
Ole Juul said:
I think I've got a couple of Etherlink III cards, but I don't think I found drivers for them yet. Hopefully you'll fare better.
Click to expand...

Drivers for these are a problem now? Practically every OS has a driver built in for the good ol' 3c509B/C.
 
The machine is running DOS 6.22 and there is a packet driver on the system for the 3Com and Win 3.11 is setup for networking as well.

What I think I am going to do is backup all the DOS stuff and probably dump Win98 SE onto it. I am selling the Maui cards though, since I have absolutely no use for them, hopefully some one else does.

I just managed to update the BIOS, so at least that is the most current now. I am thinking I may try to max the RAM in it (256Mb, or 4x64mb).

I notice there is a jumper on the board for Memory Cacheable Size, and it can be set to either 64Mb or 512Mb, the interesting thing is the max RAM (according to the manual) is 256Mb. So there are a few questions that come to mind: 1. Why would I want to cache the RAM? And Why would there be an option for twice the maximum RAM?

Also, can someone tell me what TAG SRAM upgrade would be for?
 
njroadfan said:
Drivers for these are a problem now? Practically every OS has a driver built in for the good ol' 3c509B/C.
Click to expand...

Yes, I never think about drivers on my BSD and Linux systems, but DOS has no drivers for anything built in. :) Anyway, now you mention it as 3c509 I do have a driver for that but had forgotten the alternate name - hence my confusion. :)

Looking at the remd out lines in my autoexec I see that I've used it recently, but remember now that the driver was hopelessly slow in loading. I seems that it needs to probe the card first. Can't have that, so out it went ... :)
 
lutiana said:
I notice there is a jumper on the board for Memory Cacheable Size, and it can be set to either 64Mb or 512Mb, the interesting thing is the max RAM (according to the manual) is 256Mb. So there are a few questions that come to mind: 1. Why would I want to cache the RAM? And Why would there be an option for twice the maximum RAM?

Also, can someone tell me what TAG SRAM upgrade would be for?
Click to expand...

The first Intel Triton Pentium chipsets (FX) were only able to cache the first 64MB ram.
You board has the HX chipset, that solved that - provided that the additional TAG SRAM was installed.

So.. if you install that, you need to change the jumper to 512MB. If its not installed, 64 MB.

Your manual is here:
ftp://ftp.asus.com/pub/ASUS/.../xp55t2p4/xp55t2p4-300.pdf

You want to cache the ram because its slow, and having more ram than the cacheble size might give a bit of odd (slow) behaviour - many people wanted to add more RAM to increase their systems speed, but achieved the opposite when exceeding the cacheble size.
 
Ahh, that makes sense. But why would the setting be for twice as much RAM as the system can have? IE the max the board will take is 256mb, yet it can cache up to 512Mb.
 
lutiana said:
Ahh, that makes sense. But why would the setting be for twice as much RAM as the system can have? IE the max the board will take is 256mb, yet it can cache up to 512Mb.
Click to expand...
Chipset thing - the max cacheble is 512 for the chipset- whether the mainboard takes it or not.
 
Congrats on a nice find. The Asus P55T2P4 is a legendary Pentium motherboard. And the rest of the system is basically what I would have built for myself in 1997 if money had been no object.
 
Dave Farquhar said:
The Asus P55T2P4 is a legendary Pentium motherboard.
Click to expand...

I remember buying one for the purpose of LAN Parties. In combination with some other stuff it was a great system for Command & Conquer Red Alert through Windows 95. :D
 
I dropped a 20gb HDD in it and installed Windows 98 SE. Runs great, though I suspect the NIC is either defective or my gigabit switch is having issues passing packets to it. The internet speed via it's 3com card is extremely slow (took about 20min to download 500k). I am going to switch it out with a 10/100 nic when I get a chance and see if that improves the speed.

Other than that I am very happy with the machine, and the Motherboard does seem to be pretty bullet proof.
 
lutiana said:
The internet speed via it's 3com card is extremely slow (took about 20min to download 500k). I am going to switch it out with a 10/100 nic when I get a chance and see if that improves the speed.
Click to expand...

That would be about 0.4 bps! "Extremely" seems like an understatement. lol
 
So I pulled the 3C509-TPO NIC and replaced it with a 3C905C-TX card. And boom, 45Mb in about 10 minutes. So I guess either the 3C509 is either defective or does not play well with my gigabit switch. In either case I am just going to toss is since I have a plethora of PCI nics that are better off in most situations.
 
lutiana said:
So I pulled the 3C509-TPO NIC and replaced it with a 3C905C-TX card. And boom, 45Mb in about 10 minutes. So I guess either the 3C509 is either defective or does not play well with my gigabit switch. In either case I am just going to toss is since I have a plethora of PCI nics that are better off in most situations.
Click to expand...

45 megabytes in 10 minutes? You'd better toss that 3C905C-TX card too while you're at it ;)

No seriously, have you tried other ports on the switch? Another switch and/or cable? Checked the duplex settings?

These speeds doesn't seem right and I wouldn't start to blame the cards just yet.
 
Nah, it seems to be working fine now. It was just the Windows Update that seemed to be a bit slower than I'd like. Copying things over my network now is actually quite fast. So I am happy with it.

Interestingly enough I found the driver for the sound card on Intel's website here, it includes the DOS driver.
 
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