A Good Old Socket 5 Question

[macrospect]

Well I was "curb shopping" the other day and found me a server What a learning curve it is with this thing (seeing its damn near 10 years old) The mainboard is like 1 foot and a half long and addin cards is what makes it become an offical computer. Everything down to the SCSI and bios are all featured within addin cards.

Its also has a blazing fast 90hmz Intel socket 5 cpu, and a 166hmz Intel socket 5 cpu (as pictured below)(Woo go dual processor)(Also feat. a 30hmz system bus ). I was going to upgrade the 90hmz one to a 166mhz one, but came across a problem. As in the picture below there is the heatsink, and right next to it is another chip with no heatsink, it looks exactly like the cpu in its socket. What is the second chip? If I was going to upgrade to 166hmz would I need to upgrade both chips at once?

Here are the numbers I got off of the 166hmz board:
The CPU
A80502166 SY017
L6290060-0161

Under the cpu (Whats printed on the core)
16161760AG
A80502166
SY017/VSS

And that other chip
A8249866
C6040778
SX988

The numbers from the 90hmz board:
The CPU
A80502-90 SX968
ICOMP INDEX=735
L5S51396-8489

Under the cpu (Whats printed on the core)
E5084608NA
MALAY 525 ES
A80502-90 SX968

And its other chip
A82497-60
C4450654
SX866

And finally a picture to show you what I am talking about:
The front:

The Back

And a picture just for the hell of it to show you how big this thing is:

PS: This is a ALR server. All boards including the pcb for both cpu's have ALR's name printed on them. (ALR stands for American Logic Research)

Now to get theat damn mouse and second hard drive working

~DaRkF0g~

 

[FreiDOg]

And that other chip
A8249866
C6040778
SX988

And its other chip
A82497-60
C4450654
SX866

they're part of the 'chipset' so to speak, actually a cache controller. If memory serves it basically acts to catch a memory access from the CPU, and if the request is already in motherboard cache, it would use that to return the value if not, it would perform the memory access and if appropriate would store the value in the cache as well as returning it to the CPU.

 

[macrospect]

they're part of the 'chipset' so to speak, actually a cache controller. If memory serves it basically acts to catch a memory access from the CPU, and if the request is already in motherboard cache, it would use that to return the value if not, it would perform the memory access and if appropriate would store the value in the cache as well as returning it to the CPU.

So if I wanted to change out the 90hmz one with a 166 one, would I have to also upgrade the cache controller too?

Who knows the fastest mhz speed I can go for a socket 5? Is 166 the top?

 

[The_Mage18]

So if I wanted to change out the 90hmz one with a 166 one, would I have to also upgrade the cache controller too?

Unless you have an Electrical Engineering degree you're not telling us, you're not changing the cache controller. Short answer, no.

Who knows the fastest mhz speed I can go for a socket 5? Is 166 the top?

The officially supported speed was 90. Me thinks that chip is either A. An Overdrive processor or B. A socket 7. This is possible since the proc is on a daughterboard that connects up to the backplane. Each daughterboard does not have to match the other exactly to work in dual mode, it's just more efficient if they do.

BTW it looks like that beast supports EISA and multiple RAM cards. You might be able to upgrade it enough to run XP!

 

[Glyndur]

The numbers from the 90hmz board:
The CPU
A80502-90 SX968
ICOMP INDEX=735
L5S51396-8489

Under the cpu (Whats printed on the core)
E5084608NA
MALAY 525 ES
A80502-90 SX968

Just a note, I think that 90 Mhz board has an Engineering Sample on it, hense the ES. Plus I have a box that looks just like that and it uses 6 pentium pro CPUs on addon cards, 3 per card. You might be able to get the PPro cards off ebay and turn that thing into an oldskool monster.

 

[macrospect]

I was curious about changing the so-called cache controller because it does unplug... i think. It looks like the chip itself plugs into a socket. Im not brave enough to try and remove it nor do I want to ruin it.

As for it being a overdrive processor I did some reading on them today. From what I got out of it overdrive was made only for socket 7. I also read that socket 7 cpus have an extra pin, making it so you cant use them in a socket 5 type board. I am 100% sure this is a socket 5 cpu, i took both cpus on both boards out of thir sockets and checked.

BTW it looks like that beast supports EISA and multiple RAM cards. You might be able to upgrade it enough to run XP!

Lol currently the ram is maxxed out! Every slot is full and the most I can squeeze out of it is ~64mb I may be able to upgrade the sticks themselves, I have no clue what size sticks are in there. There are kingston, samsung, and PNY ones in there all mixed together, none of which are labeled how much stick holds. The board seen on the bottom is the only place that ram can go. The other 4 slots above it (2 of which I am using right now) are for expansion cpu's. The problem is I cannot find any ALR products, so I have no idea where to get more daughter cards at, so I can stick more cpus in there.

PS. Its running windows 2000 server and takes a mere 8mins to get to the login screen. I think I am going to stick a IDE hdd in there. The SCSI ones seem to bottleneck the hell out of the system.

Which brings up my last point. The 2 hard drives in there are HUGE! I mean they are server type hard disks, I was told they are the type, that on the drive itself if 1 disk fails another will record the non-corrupted data, keeping the system stable. Think of it as a raid-all-in-one i guess. I dont know if this is true, but all I can say is it is too damn slow, windows took 4.5 hrs to install

Heres a picture, yep thats what a old school 760MB Drive looks like.

And the semi-full system specs for the hell of it:
Pentium 1 90hmz+166hmz cpu's
64MB RAM
1 Maxtor 1.2gb hdd
1 Seagate ~1gb hdd
Paradise 88 8 Bit video card
500 Watt power supply
SCSI Addin Card
Belkin PCI Ethernet Card
7 120mm Delta Fans

Yeah I know you wish you had something this great too

 

[macrospect]

Just a note, I think that 90 Mhz board has an Engineering Sample on it, hense the ES. Plus I have a box that looks just like that and it uses 6 pentium pro CPUs on addon cards, 3 per card. You might be able to get the PPro cards off ebay and turn that thing into an oldskool monster.

Funny you mentioned that. I was looking at them eariler today, I have no idea what the hell the slot type is in this thing though. Ill take a pic tomorrow and post it up. That would be INSANE if they fit. Considering the PPro's are REALLY cheap!

 

[Cong Sat]

Belive its called a backplane. The interfaces are proprietary.

Amazing that they ran win2k on it. I'd suggest NT4. It runs great on old P5's for a cheapie server. The only thing that blows in that NT4 don't have PnP and USB support.

 

[macrospect]

Umm as far as USB support. This board itself does not have USB ports but It does have 4 pci slots, and I was going to add in a card. Couldnt I use the driver disk that cabe with the usb card? Or is usb un-compatable all together with WinNT?

What is PnP? Ive heard of it everywhere but I have no idea what it does.

Thanks for the replies!

 

[Cong Sat]

NT4 doesn't support plug-&-play (PnP). It supports USB, but you can't unplug/plug things in while its running (main function of PnP also). If you want to, you'll need a reboot.

 

[BigBadBiologist]

NT4 doesn't support plug-&-play (PnP). It supports USB, but you can't unplug/plug things in while its running (main function of PnP also). If you want to, you'll need a reboot.

Actually, NT4 does support ISA PnP, but not by default. There is a folder on the NT install CD that includes a PnP driver that you copy over and modify the system.ini file (I think- I haven't done this in years so I forget the specifics).

/edit: also, as far as I know the P100 was the max socket 5 CPU. I have one that is overclocked to 120MHz. You should check to make sure your 166 CPU is really running at 166.

 

[macrospect]

Actually, NT4 does support ISA PnP, but not by default. There is a folder on the NT install CD that includes a PnP driver that you copy over and modify the system.ini file (I think- I haven't done this in years so I forget the specifics).

/edit: also, as far as I know the P100 was the max socket 5 CPU. I have one that is overclocked to 120MHz. You should check to make sure your 166 CPU is really running at 166.

Actually its kind of strange. I remeber when i first used the 166 chip it ran at 166. Then I installed the 90hmz board and it down clocked by a little bit, so now its at 150hmz.

Someone recommeneded I use linux for this system. Do those of you that have experience with linux, like the way it works?

 

[BigBadBiologist]

Well, the P90 used a 60MHz FSB (x 1.5) and the P166 used a 66MHz FSB (x 2.5), so that may explain why it kicked down to 150 (used the bus speed signal from the P90).

I think NT would run very well on there if you could figure out how to put a little more RAM in.

 

[macrospect]

I think I should be able to find some ram for it for REALLY cheap!

For future refrence how does one overclock a piece like this??? Is it done with jumpers?

 

[BigBadBiologist]

On most Socket 5 boards, everything was set by jumpers. If this board has any jumpers, I'm sure some of them are for setting the FSB and multiplier. You may be able to find some info on Gateway's web site. I think they were the ones that bought ALR.

/edit: Can you find a model # for it (e.g. 7000 or something)? Also, if you ever plan to trash it, let me know. That's the kind of thing I love playing with (I spent last weekend restoring a PPro system) and I don't live too far away.

 

[macrospect]

As mentioned previously I was going to upgrade the 90hmz processor to a 166hmz one. Does anyone know if the 166 I have now is the overdrive version, mmx, or something else? I dont believe it is the mmx one, but I am not sure.

 

[BigBadBiologist]

No MMX, but it does seem to be socket 5! (I'm very surprised by this):
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/80586/Intel-Pentium 166 - A80502166.html

 

[macrospect]

Woah that really helps! Thanks for the linkage!

 

[Lazn_Work]

FWIW: Gateway purchased ALR around the time that server was made.

==>lazn