Someone just gave me 4 Pentium Pro 200 processors ( Matched set for SMP).
I would like to make them into a rip-roaring Quad Linux box. Can anyone
suggest
a good motherboard for this? It looks like I am going to have to special
order it so
I wanna get some info first.
The only open-market Quad-PPro motherboards that I know of are the AMI Goliath
and the AMI Goliath 2. I have a Goliath (1 that is) but I only have two CPUs
in it. The Goliath takes up to eight 128M 60n FPM ECC DIMMs for a total of 1G.
That is what I currently have. You need to put in two DIMMs at a time.
Originally I had four 64M DIMMs. The Goliath 2 takes up to sixteen 256M DIMMS
for up to 4G. The Goliath 2 also has on-board SCSI and video.
The Goliath motherboards are a bit finicky because they were never mass-market
items and didn't have all of the kinks worked out. So not all components work
in them. Currently, I have the following components in mine and I know they
all work:
a. BT-958
b. 8M Millenium (I, not II)
c. SMC 100Mb/s tulip based Ethernet
d. Matrox Meteor/RGB (non-PPB)
e. SoundBlaster AWE32
f. US Robotics 33.6 DSVD modem
At earlier points in time I had a DPT PM2144UW SCSI controller and ISA 10Mb/s
ethernet card and these also worked.
The Meteor (which is a frame grabber for video capture), however, can only do
320x240. It gives FIFO overruns at larger sizes because the PCI bus on the
Goliath (Orion chipset) is buggy.
I've only been able to run AcceleratedX on my Goliath. It runs well at
1600x1200@24bpp. But for some reason both XFree86 and MetroX crash my machine.
I've never been able to track this down. I've heard rumors that X doesn't run
at all when you put four CPUs in a Goliath and that I'm lucky that I only
originally bought two CPUs. I've never had this substantiated so I don't know
if it is repeatable or random flakeyness. I know that we have two other
Goliaths here at NECI both of which have four CPUS and they run fine but the
owners use them only as servers and don't run X on them.
If you get a Goliath and need help you can ask me for guidance. I have a lot
of experience swapping boards into different slots on the primary and
secondary PCI buses (for example, the video must be on the primary bus). And
the BIOS windows for configuring IRQ and DMA assignments are very
counterintuitive and I finally figured them out despite the lack of
documentation. And I have a patch that Leonard Zubkoff gave me for the mid
level SCSI system. Before that patch, I had intermittent recoverable SCSI
errors that would cause failures. I've been running with that patch
(in 2.0.33/SMP) for a year, maybe a year and a half now, and my machine is
rock solid (thanks Leonard!).
That all being said, the Goliath was very expensive when it first came out and
I bought it two years ago. Since it is not open market, I don't know if it
ever came down in price. My machine was a barn burner two years ago when I
bought it. (I even got PPros with 512K L2 which were real expensive.) But
today, you can buy a dual 450MHz PII with 512M or RAM for about $3500 or even
less. Except in rare situations where programs fit in L2 but not in L1, a dual
450MHZ PII will outperform a Quad 200MHz PPro. So unless you get the Goliath
motherboard for real cheap, it may cost you more to use your `free' PPros CPUs
then to just buy a new system.
Jeff (http://www.neci.nj.nec.com/homepages/qobi)
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