Building a 1996 Dual Pentium Pro NT Workstation PC!

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

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

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

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

"this is not a gaming system" proceeds to install and play games

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

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!

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.

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.

The taller the case the more powerful the computer.

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

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.

That talking BIOS is really something

This era is one where I started my tech career. First recommendation, SCSI hard drive to boot off of however make sure you have working SCSI drivers first as they’ll be needed in the boot process probably. Workstations of this era and especially that Mobo would have done IDE as an afterthought, hence the weird CD issues. Also during this time, removeable media came around and I suspect NT4 didn’t consider that thus that could also be the above problem if it is treating IDE as non-removeable storage but isn’t clearing the cache before it powers down. That could also relate to the USB driver install. But I’d suggest SCSI boot drive. Also, while I love the big foot drives, they couldn’t compete with SCSI in performance. Also, I’m surprised no one has made a website to spit out 3D printed IO shields for the back of the case. Drag and drop your ports in place, save as a specific model, etc. I am not talented enough to make but can’t be THAT complex.

This takes me back 25 years. I was floundering academically in college and took a break in 1999. I didn't know crap about computers and I decided to jump right into a MCSE program ("MCSE's earn on average more than $80k/year!") in NT 4.0. I was a little out of my depth and then Windows 2000 was right around the corner making the course near obsolete. By the time I got into the workforce, seeing a NT 4.0 machine was like seeing a unicorn. Never did get that MCSE credential. Not being diagnosed with ADHD until your mid-30s, folks.

Machines like these were what I grew up on at home. We never had pre-packaged, personal computers. We always built our own professional rigs. This is the way.

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!

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.

I was lucky to score a PR440FX with dual Pentium Pro 180’s in 1998 or so for pretty cheap. This machine served as a server (running Solaris/x86 and eventually FreeBSD) and as a workstation (running Windows NT 4 and 2000) for many years. I think i finally took it out of service in 2008 or so. I have many fond memories of this motherboard — it is rock solid, flexible, and quite performant for its time.

@18:40 I used to work at a Harbor Freight, and indeed, "I don't need one, but you know..." was what everyone said when they bought one of those knives.