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  • Dual Socket 7 Build

    From Retroswim@21:2/121 to All on Wed Aug 20 11:33:14 2025
    Hey all! In the spirit of mary4's adventures, I decided to revive and refresh one of my retro PCs.

    I have a Tyan S1564D motherboard, dual Socket 7 with Intel HX chipset, and 8 (!) 72-pin EDO slots.

    When I took it out, there was an assortment of various 8 and 16MB SIMMs. So I ordered some 'new' RAM from "Memgate". An eBay store that sells refurbished, tested RAM from 30-pin through to DDR4, ECC, parity, you name it! Guaranteed and covered by a warranty, no less!

    I got two 2x64MB 60ns EDO kits, for a total of 256MB. On a Socket 7 system! And you can go up to 512MB!! My Pentium 3 box doesn't even have that much hahaha!

    Storage is a modern Sandisk 32GB CF card in an adaptor. It and the motherboard support UDMA4, so it's ludicrously fast. I also installed a DVD drive for convenience.

    Video is a Matrox Millennium II 4MB, nothing special, but a quality card with bright, sharp output. Network is a PCI 3C905B-TX, again nothing special, but reliable and well supported.

    Finally, for sound I have something special: A Sound Blaster AWE64 Legacy.

    It's a modern recreation of the AWE64 Gold, using original Creative Labs chips, full compliment of 28MB RAM on board, hardware MPU401 MIDI interface, wavetable daughterboard connector, real hardware OPL3, and high quality analogue stage. They didn't make many, but man it's a nice bit of kit.

    https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=68555

    I added on an NEC XR385 wavetable board, which is an OEM version of the Yamaha DB60XG. Very high quality, General MIDI compatible, and of course Yamaha XG compatible. Latter not so useful for games, but damn it sounds nice just as a GM device.

    For software, it's dual-booting Windows NT 3.51 workstation and MS-DOS. The former for file transfer, and the latter for games, obviously! Windows may eventually be replaced with NT4, or even Windows 2000, I haven't settled on it yet, but apparently there are some cool community things happening to make newer apps run on NT 3.51, so I wanna try that out first!

    Anyway, full specs:

    Tyan S1564D Tomcat IV Dual Socket 7 mainboard
    2x Pentium MMX 233MHz
    256MB 60ns EDO RAM
    Matrox Millennium II 4MB PCI Video
    Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold Sound + Yamaha XG Daughterboard
    3Com 3C905B-TX Ethernet
    32GB Compactflash Storage
    DVD-RW Optical

    And here's a SIV32 screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/GNJWMXl.png

    I'll take some photos when I'm home again and post them in a follow up.

    Happy retro computing everyone!

    Cheers,
    RetroSwim

    --- Ezycom V2.15g1 01FD0295
    * Origin: >> Pool's Open - The RetroSwim BBS (21:2/121)
  • From kirkspragg@21:2/150 to Retroswim on Fri Aug 22 22:35:18 2025
    Hey all! In the spirit of mary4's adventures, I decided to revive and refresh one of my retro PCs.

    I have a Tyan S1564D motherboard, dual Socket 7 with Intel HX chipset,
    and 8 (!) 72-pin EDO slots.

    When I took it out, there was an assortment of various 8 and 16MB SIMMs. So I ordered some 'new' RAM from "Memgate". An eBay store that sells refurbished, tested RAM from 30-pin through to DDR4, ECC, parity, you
    name it! Guaranteed and covered by a warranty, no less!

    I got two 2x64MB 60ns EDO kits, for a total of 256MB. On a Socket 7 system! And you can go up to 512MB!! My Pentium 3 box doesn't even have that much hahaha!

    Wow that is soo cool! Where did you find a dual socket 7 board? Those things a super rare. I love it! 256Mb is huge for socket 7, surely that would be enough for Win2000 which would be cool to see.

    Are you planning to go all the way to 512MB at some
    point?

    Finally, for sound I have something special: A Sound Blaster AWE64
    Legacy.

    It's a modern recreation of the AWE64 Gold, using original Creative Labs chips, full compliment of 28MB RAM on board, hardware MPU401 MIDI interface, wavetable daughterboard connector, real hardware OPL3, and
    high quality analogue stage. They didn't make many, but man it's a nice bit of kit.


    Nice! Who made those? I assume not Creative Labs.....

    For software, it's dual-booting Windows NT 3.51 workstation and MS-DOS. The former for file transfer, and the latter for games, obviously!
    Windows may eventually be replaced with NT4, or even Windows 2000, I haven't settled on it yet, but apparently there are some cool community things happening to make newer apps run on NT 3.51, so I wanna try that out first!

    I was unaware there is a community making new apps run on NT 3.51, thats sounds interesting. How did you find out about that?

    I never use NT 3.51, but I did use NT4 and Win200 back in the day. I have fond memories of both, but particularly of Win2000. For the most part it just worked, and didn't hog memory and CPU like WinXP and newer windows versions do.

    Regarding DOS, is there anything DOS based that can use both processors? I assume that most dos apps will only be able to use one.

    Anyhow thats a really cool retro PC build you've got there, please keep sharing you experiments and adventures with it!

    ... If at first you don't succeed, try something else.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2024/05/29 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbS>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (21:2/150)