I spent some time last week dismantling an old PC for parts, and re-encountered one of my favorite Intel products ever, the PR440FX Motherboard:
The Intel PR440FX Motherboard, circa 1996
I don't know how it happened, but for some reason in the summer of 1998 there were a ton of these motherboards on the market, going for a song. I believe that mine came with dual Pentium Pro 180's and 64 megabytes of RAM. And while I don't remember how much I paid, I believe it was in the $3 - 500 dollar range. I'm not exactly sure where I purchased it, but my best guess is that it came from the Computer Geeks Outlet. But I remember being really excited by the acquisition, because beyond supporting dual CPUs, this board had it all: on-board SCSI, 100Mbit Ethernet, a quality sound chip, and USB (which didn't work in SMP mode due to a chipset bug!).
Nevertheless, from the summer that I purchased it, and installed my PR440FX into a PC Power and Cooling case that I "borrowed" from my dad, it saw daily use for at least 10 years. First as a server, then as a workstation, and then as a server again. As recently as 2006, this was the most reliable machine that I owned, easily besting the Dell Precision Workstation 420 that I bought in grad school (which didn't last nearly as long as the PR440FX). And in addition, this began my love affair with SMP-class computers, which aside from a few errant Macintosh purchases, I have always had since 1998.
This machine did stints in Cleveland, Champaign/Urbana, Wheaton, and California, and ran the following OSes along the way:
- Solaris 2.6/x86
- FreeBSD 3.3 - 6.x (pretty sure I skipped release 5 entirely, though)
- Windows NT 4
- Windows 2000
- Various flavors of Linux
- BeOS (I'm pretty sure!)
My PR440FX machine spent its first several years as a Solaris server, and then around the time that I went to grad school, it got an upgrade to dual Pentium II 333Mhz CPUs (that I also found for cheap somewhere), and became my primary workstation, running Windows. But it spent most of its live running FreeBSD (and powering redefine.dyndns.org), as that is the UNIX-like OS that I settled on for many years, after plenty of experimentation.
In it's final act before retirement, I spent several weeks in the late 2007/early 2008 timeframe attempting to make this machine serve as a MythTV frontend. And while the dual CPUs were fast enough to do the necessary MPEG2 decoding, I just couldn't get the graphics to render fast enough without dropping frames.
And now my PR440FX is officially retired, as part of my permanent collection. On it's way out, I have put up a gallery of pictures on Flickr. Insofar as I can tell, my photos are the only shots of the PR440FX on all of Flickr, which is a shame.
But thinking back, this is clearly the best PC motherboard that I've ever owned, and I think a strong case can be made that this is one of the best that Intel has ever made (it certainly has it's fans). And while there is still some information on the Internet about this board, it's amazing how much has been lost. I remember when Google searches used to return tons of relevant information about this board. Well, while the Internet might have forgotten about the PR440FX, I haven't.
-Andy.