Building a 1996 Dual Pentium Pro NT Workstation PC!

Assembling a mid 90s Windows NT workstation computer! Specifically NT 4.0 with two Intel Pentium Pro 200MHz processors, maxed-out RAM, and a Matrox MGA Millennium video card. All in an awesome metal case on wheels. Testing, dusting, building, troubleshooting, games, CAD rendering and more! Most of which I've never done so let's dive in and make some mistakes.

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00:00 what we're making
02:01 the motherboard
06:58 the tower case
11:38 a talking BIOS
12:20 testing the Socket 8
14:16 cleaning the mobo
15:53 upgrading cooling
17:49 swapping casters
20:48 cleaning the case
21:51 standoffs, cables
22:46 Matrox Millennium
23:42 power supply issues
25:02 Quantum Bigfoot HDD
26:15 choosing an OS
27:40 installing NT 4.0
30:50 first NT impressions
32:38 3D Pinball Space Cadet
33:15 NT driver complaints
34:36 MIDI playback
35:38 Photoshop 5.5
36:43 AutoCAD R14
38:23 MS-DOS "support"
39:35 the Duke 3D test
40:21 Quake II and OpenGL
41:46 Age of Empires
42:43 Matrox MGA stuff
43:53 Asymetrix 3D F/X
45:05 ray tracing
46:23 Tandberg SLR50 tape drive
48:37 intake fans, 5.25" infrared
51:11 freezing on boot
51:59 in summary, I'm frazzled

#LGR #retro #computer #building

[LGR]

Lemme know your ideas for upgrades and things to test/tweak on this build! Lots of potential here.

[davenpro]

Glad to see my donation (motherboard, CPU's, RAM) went to good use! Looking forward to seeing the future video covering Windows NT!

[JohnKelly]

That case made me laugh out loud at work. I used to work for Teleflora, I worked at the Oklahoma City office, not Paragould, but I did work with them. I actually have one of those workstations at home. I got one after they were decommissioned. T1 built them for their higher end customers. The hot glue and tape was standard as it was T1's version of "military grade". Basically they were supposed to withstand a drop of a certain height (6 feet, I believe), so hot glue was their solution.

The case was made by Lian-Li, the same company that built the Megaluminum Monster. The one I have at home is the same aluminum case as the said Monster. I've intended to message you to see if you wanted the Tandberg drive and controller card from mine, but I see you have one now.

[branscombe_]

"this is not a gaming system"

*proceeds to install and play games*

[ShredderNAlt]

Blocking out the thermal paste at 16:55 is a brilliant move. This man is a master of avoiding controversy.

[Tom-Bomb]

My older brother was a 3D animator and his first PC that he built specifically for work had dual Pentium II’s and man was that thing a beast! (By like 1996 standards lol).

He then went on to do some work for Zeiss the optics company and he did the 3D for the Pixar logo with the jumping lamp. Unfortunately tho, his life was cut short and he passed away in 1998 but man I’ll nvr forget what a crazy machine that was back in the day and def something he was rly proud of.

[ross-carlson]

I started my career building an NT 4.0 server and a number of workstations - the amount of times I yelled at my monitor during this "don't worry, it'll detected the 2nd processor", "yup, 2GB was the limit", "don't worry it'll convert to NTFS", etc. was SO MUCH FUN. Thanks for the GREAT blast from my past!

[jmickeyd]

The reason keen was so slow is the NT4 fully buffered VGA ram access, so instead of writing to the video card the dos app writes to a ram buffer and then NT writes it out to video. This was done to fully isolate dos apps. It's also why the sound blaster doesn't work.

[lostuser]

Wheels AND a door?!?!? It’s practically a car!!!

[curb]

That case was from MY hometown??? I remember driving by that Teleflora office almost everyday, and I even had a few family friends who worked there! Man, it is truly a once-in-a-lifetime thing to hear one of your favorite YouTubers stumble upon your small town by complete chance!

[boazplays]

I appreciate that you have good subtitles. I have a speech processing disorder and your audio dynamic range is very easy to listen to and your subtitles are absolutely perfect. Thank you for being accessible!

[staticoverlay]

Having a dual cpu setup in the single core days must have made you feel like god

[LonSeidman]

This video brought me back to a summer break from college. Microsoft sent out free beta copies of NT 4 and I scrapped together some parts and built a little PC to run it on. It was familiar but different at the same time! I managed to get IIS working on it and hosted a tiny website that I would dial into from upstairs on a 14.4 modem :).

[livefreeprintguns]

My buddy in high school had a Windows NT workstation running dual Pentium 200's... to say everyone was jealous of him was an understatement lol.

[CrkdLtrN]

I used to work in an IT department in 2000 and built plenty of NT4 systems. When computers started getting much faster, and you logged off of NT account, the system would wait until the log off sound would play entirely before presenting you with the login window. Thought that was pretty hilarious back in the day.

[madvillainelle]

I had a talking bios and I loved it as a kid, felt so scifi. Pentium 4 prebuilt beige box back in 2001, Asus motherboard I believe.

"System completed power on self test, computer now booting to operating system" was its full spiel.

[rexchan]

This really touched me, because many retro enthusiasts usually focus on the 9x series and XP, but NT 4.0 is often overlooked. It has the same appearance as Windows 95, which leads many to mistakenly believe that it works the same way. However, once you actually use it, you realize they're completely different. Just dealing with the drivers and software support separately for 95 and NT 4.0 is enough to drive you crazy. When you get into NT 4.0, you'll discover an interface that's deep and complex, clearly designed for engineers without any "dummy mode." But for hardcore enthusiasts, this makes it even more fascinating to dig into. Keep up the good work!

[therobb]

Seeing Asymetrix 3D FX absolutely blew my mind! I had this program on my first computer as a kid, Windows 95, no sound card, no CD drive, but a Lexmark X11 printer and this program!!! I've not been able to find this program anywhere, at least not in a usable form. I was super psyched to see this finally again after all these years. It took ages to fully render and and then print out a full page of whatever I made, but I used to make little CD covers and wall art with this program. One was a truck with a giant TV loaded in the bed, I remember. Thank you so much for showing this! Never knew that it came on a Matrox CD, that's why I could never find it. Also never got a chance to use Windows NT, so thank you for bringing both of these to life for me today!!!

[SuperJCBDigger]

Love that you can lock the smoked plastic door and then pull the entire front panel off 😂

[fonebook]

41:22 This takes me back. My friend's older brother had an NT machine with a Matrox Millennium (and an AWE32) back in '98. He showed us exactly this, Quake 2 in OpenGL running at ~1 FPS and said "Now imagine this ... running smoothly." We were blown away. 😁