Compaq DeskPro Identity Crisis
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- Опубліковано 14 вер 2021
- In this video we're going to be taking a look at my Compaq DeskPro tower ..... or desktop ?
A nice Pentium 2 based system that I am going to use for my Viper V330 and Matrox M3D tests.
Enjoy
#Compaq #Intel #Pentium - Наука та технологія
We had one of these back when I was a kid. It brings back so many memories, _especially_ that ridiculously loud hard drive! I put one together a few months ago using a case and motherboard I bought, as well as some parts I had lying around, but this one is in much better condition. I did notice that there isn't a speaker mounted to the back of the case. If you look at the sound card, it's got a speaker output above the CD audio connector that was supposed to go to a 10-W speaker mounted at the back of the case that gave you all of your sound! Dunno if that was just not installed on that system or it's gone missing at some point. Anyway, I love this system.
Love these! I remember selling them when they were brand new!!! Worked for one summer during college as a Compaq repair tech.
I've never seen a heatsink that large on Slot 1. Wow!
I Absolutely Love this Case Style... Wish somebody would do something like this today, because I absolutely love(d) the Desktop formfactor. And with this case, you could choose what you wanted, so everyone was covered. Don't know if I would describe such a marvel of ingenuity as having a 'crisis', to be honest. I feel more like all others have one, if I must say.
This is pretty much one of my dream setups. The monitor really tops it off.
Back in 2000 i was tasked to install 200 of these to two 14 storey buildings on my own. These SOB’s are heavy when you include 19” CRT screens. So much bulky packaging. This was one hell of a job that I don’t look back on too fondly 😂 Was a good machine but this video gave me a nervous twitch 😂😂. Lost weight that summer. 😂
Ah the 19inch CRTs. Moved a couple of those when I was a teenager going to LAN parties. Fun times.
Back in the late 90's, my school district got a millage that included technology upgrades to all the schools. This is the model computer that they went with. All the computer labs and each classroom were outfitted with them. I'd say 95% were in setup as desktop, and the librarian, main office, and I.T. tech computers were setup as towers.
That’s a pretty nifty concept to be able to switch from desktop to tower.
OTOH, I’d argue that a CRT monitor would make it more period specific, though.
The Deskpro EP series was actually available with a flat-panel monitor called the TFT5000. But yeah, I think most people would have opted for the CRT option.
@@eddiehimself ok but people can almost never buy any thin monitor for insane high price or for unreleased.
That’s a cool system, Compaq machines are always interesting to see! Can’t wait for more!
To bad HP took them over :(
That’s a neat case! I would have named it the “DeskTower” or “FlexTop” if I where Compaq’s marketing department. I’ve never seen such a transformable case before, it’s pretty intriguing to see. Obviously they had to make the hole in the front a perfect 5.25” square in order to make this work. It’s a cool piece of industrial design.
FlexTop sounds really good to me. They might have picked that one if you had been working in there!
They need to bring the transformable case idea back.
I'd buy the HP flextop ...sounds pretty fancy haha
From the front it really looks like a CRT! But if I remember well the image quality of these is not great
USB ports are 1.1, at least on my Deskpro PII 400MHz they were, if recall correctly
I just picked up a cheap and MUCH newer HP Z420 workstation that still does this tower to desktop conversion without removing screws. I wonder if some of the original Compaq engineers still work at HP...
Some of the old HP workstations even had a case that looks a lot like that Compaq. For example HP xw4000 which is from the same series as your Z420 but a decade older
Ah, the DeskPro sound! Even better when you get two hard drives in there so they harmonize!
Thank you for this very nice video on a great Compaq computer ! Perhaps you could do also a review on a legendary workstation of the mid/late 90s : the HP Kayak. Those are absolutely great in terms of external and internal design, are often equipped with dual-CPU (usually P2 or P3)... That would be a great show on your channel !!
I've had one of those, from 2006 to 2020. Got rid of that because the plastic frames started to fall apart. Very nice machine indeed! Thanks for keeping that in such a fine state!
I'd totally install a couple of case fans in that system. Nice looking case actually. Those old Compaq Deskpros are built like tanks. :)
I had this deskpro in my office around 2001, they were 2nd hand. You could use them as a tower or as a desktop
Love these DeskPro CMT “Convertible MiniTower”s but had a couple that the psu blew up on me when powered up after having been kept in storage for a few years. The rubber feet like all old rubber turns to goo too over the years.
Depends on the storage condition. These type of rubber really dislike heavy variations in Temperature and Humidity.
Yes! I had a few at the time in my studio, with added SCSI2 HDD, 3Com NIC and Matrox video card, pretty awesome workstations!
I supported a ton of these back in the day. Really was fond of the Compaq erase eaze keyboards with the split space bar.
Nice one, I have almost exactly the same in my collection (6400 instead of 6350)
I like a lot those green "easy to take/pull out" brackets on the Compaqs and HP computers. Great system!
We used to have these at school :) Not much can go wrong. Nice LCD monitor fits well with this setup. I think I have original 17" monitor from this system in storage. If you are interested I'm happy to ship it to you!
This was the first computer i built as a kid and got me into computers. Found one of these completely disassembled near a dumpster in 2009. I took it home and rebuilt it successfuly but the sound card and graphics card were missing. Put in a Geforce 4 MX440 i had laying around,had a 4GB Maxtor hard drive and 64MB of RAM with a 400mhz Pentium 2 and used it to play Max Payne 1 and Hitman 2 on it
I have one of those cpu coolers, now I know where it comes from. Definitely remember these inside and out, they were common. Thanks for the video
I really LOVE this Channel
I will say back then some people who upgraded a part at a time may end up with a new cpu sitting with an older graphics card. So you could potentially see odd combinations.
Hp continued this basic system all the way until the 8400 series, with the 8200 being a 2nd gen I core series. Typical Compaq fashion, very awesome vintage.
@Rita 25 y.o - check my vidéó I still got a Prosignia and presario 8000 series tower in my garage. I saved it from my childhood, works last I checked. But I had to "deyellow" thr cases a few years back.
440bx is such a great motherboard! Mine does up to 133mhz fsb and 768mb of ram :). That desktop/tower hybrid configuration is quite interesting!
I've seen a ton of these in my lifetime. They used this excellent design up to the Pentium 4 era (at least) when HP bought them out. Depending on if the bus speed is a bottleneck, you might be able to upgrade it to a 1ghz Pentium 3 or 4 if you use a Slotket.
Motherboard is limited to 100MHz FSB, but the slotket would allow one to upgrade to Pentium III. They also made Slot 1 Pentium III's as well, up to 1GHz, but you have to watch the bus speed when buying lest your 1000Mhz chip only get clocked at 750Mhz. On the flip side of that, back in the day I had a board that would run FSB at 133 so I had a P3-700 (100MHz nominal FSB) on a slotket that easily hit 933... paired with a GeForce2 GTS and 256MB of RAM, it made quite the 2000-ish gaming rig... Ah, the era when I stayed just a step behind the cutting edge... Good times. But I digress. "Upgrading" (LOL) to a P4 wouldn't be possible without a motherboard swap; that's a completely different architecture (NetBurst). They made P3's in socket 370 up to 1.1GHz and Celerons went up to 1.5GHz.
That's probably not what he's trying to do with this system, and if he was he'd probably want different GPU pairings... A GeForce 2 or 3 would be a period-appropriate card for a 2001-ish processor, but then there's the question of BIOS updates for the 1998 board to get it to play nicely with the processor.
I had such Compaq Deskpro back in the day which I outfitted with a VooDoo Banshee. Good times with that machine both at home and taking it with me to LAN parties.
This machine is such a candidate for an IDE2CF adapter and have the machine boot from a CF card. That would make it a super quiet machine.
I remember that we still had those Deskpros back then at my high school's library back then, between ~2005-2011. Except that they had Pentium 3 733/800MHz (can't recall which one), 128MB RAM and integrated graphics
What a lovely Machine ;)
Those noisy whining hard drives drive me nuts. They are just horrid! I have a 40GB I used with my Athlon XP 3000+ years ago... recently reused it for a retro Pentium 4 build. When the drive is unplugged, everything is very quiet, even the GPU. Once the drive is plugged in, the entire system is unbearably loud. Perhaps I've just gotten spoiled over the years with silent HHDs and SSDs.
ES1869F is my favorite retro sound card chip. Most of them have a waveheader not populated on this variant (shame). ESSFM is very nice.
4:20 that sound got me. Sounds like someone(or a cat) got above your roof
Amazing!
That Samtron is a perfect compliment to that DeskPro.
True, but I prefer a Compaq CRT monitor from the same era.
That cartridge style cpu is neat. I have the 233mhz version of the Pentium II
I recently dug out my first computer. A 1997 Hewlett Packard pavilion 8176. Pentium ii 233mhz. Has a ATI 3D Rage II. Pretty mediocre card but 12 year old me sure did love playing need for speed on it and other games back in the day. It was the family's first computer and was passed down to me a few years later. I need a parts case to bring it back into shape. I stupidly threw away the original monitor and side covers etc years ago thinking I would never use it again. I thought I threw the tower away too but I found it in the attic. Still works! The floppy drive however does not. It's also in need of a fresh install of window. Its currently running win98 but I want to put win95 back on it since that's how it was when new. Brings back alot of fond memories and countless hours of entertainment it gave me back in the day.
The school district I attended and later worked for had DeskPro EP 6400; participating in their replacement was one of my earliest tasks as an employee. After the school deprovisioned them, they were auctioned off, and I bought several. I wish I still had one - I’ve been looking for one to buy for *years* now. :( Seems like every DeskPro other than EP is available.
The school district I attended had a number of these Compaq DeskPro towers running Windows 98. Seeing one in action is quite nostalgic indeed. On a side note: The DeskPro computers I remember had an internal speaker.
16:05 I guess that card was made at Tuscon, Arizona.
Yes, indeed, it has an internal speaker. A big one...
Mid 90s is just sweet spot because of 3D haha
It’s quite unusual to see USB ports on a branded motheboard from 1998. USB was still quite rare in early 1998, and started to appare more commonly on consumer PCs in 1999.
I thought USB was standard by the Pentium II. My Pentium PC from 1997 has USB.
@@eDoc2020 not standard, but starting to become so.
As tempting as it is to make fun of the fact that the potentially silent computer design gets foiled by the noisy hard drive, it is instructive to remember that desktop computers of that era typically had noisy power supply units and noisy case fans, and the loud, whiny hard drive didn't overpower the sound output, but just added to the din. So even with that hard drive, this Compaq Deskpro is relatively quiet.
Coisa linda!
Wonderful. Dank u wel.
Love it!
I have seen a ton of those sound cards on ebay and always wondered if they required a proprietary slot to work properly as they have those 3 extra pins on the ISA connector.
I see in your stock machine they just hang over the edge of a standard ISA slot so I guess not.
I've done some research and the consensus is those additional pins are not a problem as long as that section of the motherboard isn't cluttered with components. It seems to have something to do with passing audio from either the mobo beeper speaker to the sound card or from an onboard modem to the sound card.
Ironically enough the PII was *cheaper* to manufacture than its predecessor, the PPro, due to the cache being off-package. It could use slower cache which even with having to manufacture a shroud and PCB, still ended up being cheaper than the notoriously failure prone process where the PPro CPU and cache dies had to be bonded really early on meaning a defect in either resulted in a completely failed chip. Later it was feasible to integrate the cache on-die, so with the Mendocino they introduced Socket 370 and then adapted it for Coppermine.
AFAIK they originally also came with 2 of those badge plates, one with horizontal text and one vertical, so logo always correct way.
i had the exact same pc back then! love it
no wait, mine had a pentium 3 in it!
Removable RAM on GPU's was pretty sweet too! I wish I could upgrade my 3070 to 16gb just by swapping out RAM modules. I mean, you can, but you have to use a heat gun and hacked drivers.
Always appreciated Compaq's execution, but was not a fan of their proprietary hardware in the home space. In the server room, everyone has their special hardware, so you have to live with that.
great video
This case design lasted to the late 2000s, with systems like HP Compaq 7600 and some entry level HP XW workstations of the same era.
I worked in a PC store as a tech during 1997 and 1998. I do remember building machines using those P2 CPUs on BX chipset boards. None were like that fanless model though, never seen one like that before!
I always liked the look of these machines :)
That's a very interesting heatsink! I would guess that the empty fan slot would be filled for higher end versions to pull some air over the CPU heatsink area
Being able to switch the 5.25" drive bays around is a cool feature.
The Rage cards were very common in systems like this, it's how they got a 'bad rep' for being awful video cards eventually. They were alright for their time back in the day, but they continued to get used in pre-built systems long after they were obsolete, and thus, people just assumed they were awful. I've got a system from the 1GHz P3/Celeron age that has built in Rage graphics. They advertised as having a '3d graphics card' and the fact of the matter is, the graphics were years obsolete...so people just rightly assumed they were just terrible.
Just like all the gt 710 prebuilts today.
Nice, Monitor ken ik niet maar de pc hebben we destijds tig van gekocht en geplaatst. Dit was een beetje de laatste Compaq hierna werd Dell een hype om maar zo te zeggen. Zelfde gebeurde met de de servers (Proliants) maar die hebben nog een tijd gebruikt. Die zijn pas later door Dells vervangen en die later die weer door HP's :)
Definitely worth bumming
This was my retro PC of choice until last year when I sold it to upgrade to a dual P-III system.
Interesting. Assembled in Malaysia. Haven't seen this model before.
awww that's what's so fun about ATI Rage cards though
I prefer Desktop too!
My college pc, Acer Aspire w/ 133mhz Cyrix cpu, fought the hard-drive clickity sound by packing its hdd in a rubber lined, internal case. One can just imagine how hot that li'l guy got in there.
I remember my primary school's office having these in desktop configuration. They had Windows 95 (and I was there in the early '00), but with a badge system to log in and they accessed my country's ministery of education through an intranet connection. Later they dismissed these PCs and they used an unknown brand with windows xp, standard login through username and password, and normal internet. It always seemed a downgrade to me, even as a child
My kind of dream PC back old days...
Exactly
That or IBM Aptiva
I remember those hard drives, that noise is terrible. I would ditch the hard drive and use a solid state drive instead. Yeah, I would prefer convenience and reliability over historical accuracy.
I have one of those compaq at the attic. Bought cheaply from some guy. I tested things but the board and the rest were a bit corroded. I then retested and turned out to end up building another system with it. Another motherboard, 1.44mb floppy, cd-rw, more processing power, ram, almost silent hdd, 9cm fan. I needed to remove everything and disassemble the metallic case and remove corrosion. I wanted to paint the case to protect from corrosion but when I did that, I didn't have the paint. Now I have, I don't want to paint. heheeh
But something I didn't know is that, I could turn the optical and floppy disk that way.
I installed a 3.5mm audio jack at the front of the case because the motherboard has front audio header.
That hard drive was not nearly as loud when it was new. It still made an uncomfortable racket but didn't sound like a deafening wail when it was new. The bearings go bad over time.
Like the Compaq desktop PC it seems pretty 😎
And when I tried to rotate the frame, three of those four corner pins broke. Brittle plastic. Yay, happy me.
Yes, unfortunelly the plastic is brittle. I got this pc case and one corner of the front panel was broken and it was fiddly got glue it. Somehow the superglue was so not so super. So I needed to give it more time to cure and on top of the affected area, I gave some more drops of glue so it could enter into the crack and fill microscopic gaps. Last time, I grabbed the machine, it felt strong.
@@hugosimoes5119 I immediately lost two of those pins, recreated something ugly with baking soda and superglue. It holds, you can't see ti, but I don't like that computer any more :D
@@Edman_79 I must say that these pc cases are clunky. I do keep machines at the attic because I don't have room in my bedroom. I do find it ugly too. I could mitigate the uglyness by painting it. :P You can still sell yours.
I 1998 a customer came into my store and asked if there were monitors that used a laptop screen. And I told him yes but they are very expensive.
The guy reacted somewhat angry telling me the question was if it was possible, not if they are expensive.
We ended up ordering him a 14" LCD monitor that cost 1600 dutch guilders and when it arrived in the store we tested it out, played some hardware assisted dvd's on it and some games. We all came to the conclusion that the future was not here yet :-)
(I could not reliable convert the Dutch currency to euro but it was a lot of money back in the day)
Love the vid but I nearly threw up when that LCD displayed all that motion blur 🤢.
Should have used a CRT 😀👍
I remember runnig one of these as a home DC/file sever in the eary 2000s and running win 2000 server I think, with vld scsi drives 24x7
I must have moved hundreds of these buggers in office moves back in the day. Mind you the desktops were easy mode compared to the 21 inch CRT monitors which were the standard where I worked.
Dude, where did you get this monitor? Why is everything in Russian on its back?:)
You may not be unleashing any fury using those old ATI cards for gaming but you'll sure be unleashing a lot of rage! Hehehe....
Warning: These are NOT ATX.
The power supply and motherboard 20pin "ATX" connector uses a proprietary pinout.
You'll start killing equipment if you don't re-pin the connector when connecting this PSU to other boards.
If this board ends up needing a new PSU, you'll have to re-pin the PSU connector. Also, you can gut the PSU to put a standard ATX PSU inside of it, or use it's backplate to make an adapter.
PCI SATA cards are still easy to find on ebay if you wanted an SSD. (I bought a new one for $9.49) Just need a 4pin Molex to SATA power adapter. Not something I would expect you'd want, but it would make a good comparison video.
I had 8 of these, PII and PIII mix.
Those cases are tanks, built to last.
All thick gauge steel, probably 4-5 times heavier than a modern thin aluminum case.
I ended up giving all mine away.
Even my 2003 Compaq is built like a tank.
Fixed plenty of these as a mobile PC repair engineer.
This case is great I also have here, was a Pentium 3 1GHz installed, unfortunately, the power supply frame is not standardized you have to really cut there. Otherwise super case with DVD fast installation
I like the map of Arizona on the sound card
I miss slot CPU's. They were so easy to install and remove. But obviously with so many pins, a slot configuration is not feasible anymore. 😞
I feel like your ‘room audio’ mic is inexplicably of a higher quality than the kind a lot of ASMR-types use, the sounds always feel like they’re right next to me somehow.
An interesting system, the ATI RAGE card is capable of playing RAGE/CIF API games if you use the early 1999 drivers from ATI which will let you play the 32bit versions of Tomb Raider and Wipeout
bad bearings on the hard drive.. I know that sound all too well. usually I have heard it more on maxtor drives though. I had one of these years ago, I should have held onto it, but I had run out of space. I still have a deskpro EN slimline desktop though.
picked this model up for 5 euros, without the front cover :(( such a bummer, but great pic!
12:24 Why there's a 📡 printed on the mainboard, and why there is the State of Arizona with the Flag at Tuscon printed on the soundcard 16:04 🤔
I believe those were Easter eggs left behind by some engineers and/or PCB layout artists who worked for Compaq at the time those boards were being designed and prototyped, at least from what I can recall from an old "uxwbill" video I vaguely remember.
I remember carrying over 150 boxes of these up 5 flights of stairs to the IT Department, hidden away in the loft of my work building at the time. Pretty sure you could rotate the disk and cd-rom caddy and replace the Compaq badge to put it into tower mode. Or did I just dream it? EDIT: Watch the whole video before commenting next time! I do remember they came with Matrox G200 cards though, which were perfect for King Pin and Carmageddon LAN parties after work!
Memories
I would add some fans to the front and back of the system
i have one like that but think model is deskpro EN, have matching set, machine, crt monitor, mouse , keyboard,, and more recently got a compaq branded lcd monitor that matches it well
i've certainly seen some dell models(and have a small form factor model) that can also be used either desktop flat or upright tower, if you screwed a weird 'foot' stand to it, but you dont switch the drives around, you have to use them sideways on tower mode, plus i used to have an acer acermate that was adaptable like the dell, just had to switch the case feet round, the 3 1/2 floppy was fixed position but cant remember if you could switch round the 5 1/4 bay drives or not..
Good thing they ditched the previous generation proprietary form factor (with motherboard raiser and extention caddy for cards
..I wonder if the CPU Fan can use the Chassis Fan Header...
Why does that ESS sound card have the outline of what looks like Arizona on it? And an "X" with a flag of what could be Tucson?
what’s up with 2.88mb floppy drives how come they never took over computers systems?
They came too late in the game, by the time they came out rewritable discs and even early USB drives were becoming more affordable.
why do i get more excited on old 90's tech then modern tech ?
Put a fan in it, for peace of mind! IT IS MY DUTY... to keep the CPU as cool as possible.
also the harddrive will sound better in a duet. XD
After much consideration I left one of these in the ewaste this week, I considered it the worst of the 15 beige machines they had.... Hopefully it wasn't a large mistake.
thats the one sitting in my room being repaired now! DeskPro missing front cover using a pentium 3. no harddrive but i think it runs at least windows 98
Not really into computers but... I'm pretty sure that my dad was given one of these for free back around 2011-2012 but we had no idea what to do with it! So it stayed in the upstairs closet until today, when I took it downstairs to see if it still worked or not... but I still have no idea what I'm doing!! It doesn't have a keyboard but it powered on, the crt did nothing and it started beeping at me, so I powered it off and unplugged it. Back into the closet you go! I have no patience for this stuff but I'm crazy about game consoles and handhelds, but since I know I'm no good at it, I almost never open any device to fix it... ask a pro, right? Still have no idea what to do with this thing...