Subj : Re: Dual Socket 7 Build
To   : Retroswim
From : kirkspragg
Date : Fri Aug 22 2025 22:35:18

 Re> Hey all! In the spirit of mary4's adventures, I decided to revive and
 Re> refresh one of my retro PCs.
 Re> 
 Re> I have a Tyan S1564D motherboard, dual Socket 7 with Intel HX chipset,
 Re> and 8 (!) 72-pin EDO slots.
 Re> 
 Re> When I took it out, there was an assortment of various 8 and 16MB SIMMs.
 Re> So I ordered some 'new' RAM from "Memgate". An eBay store that sells
 Re> refurbished, tested RAM from 30-pin through to DDR4, ECC, parity, you
 Re> name it! Guaranteed and covered by a warranty, no less!
 Re> 
 Re> I got two 2x64MB 60ns EDO kits, for a total of 256MB. On a Socket 7
 Re> system! And you can go up to 512MB!! My Pentium 3 box doesn't even have
 Re> 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?

 Re> Finally, for sound I have something special: A Sound Blaster AWE64
 Re> Legacy.
 Re> 
 Re> It's a modern recreation of the AWE64 Gold, using original Creative Labs
 Re> chips, full compliment of 28MB RAM on board, hardware MPU401 MIDI
 Re> interface, wavetable daughterboard connector, real hardware OPL3, and
 Re> high quality analogue stage. They didn't make many, but man it's a nice
 Re> bit of kit.
 Re> 

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

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

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