DEC Alpha Personal Workstation 433a ("MIATA" )

 
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General Technical Information

HOSTNAME ORION
SYSTEM CPU DEC ALPHA "EV56" 21164-P6 @433 MHz
CACHE (3rd, 2nd and 1st D/I) 4 MB, 96 KB, 8 KB / 8 KB
RAM  768 MB, Standard ECC PC-133 DIMMs (Max. 1536 MB)
DATA BUS WIDTH 64 bit
IDE BUS 2 x EIDE (16.6 MB/s)
SCSI BUS
 2 x U2W Compaq/Symbios SCSI adapter
OPTION BUS Standard PCI, 64 bit PCI and ISA
GRAPHICS Matrox Millennium II PCI 8 MB video RAM, MGA-2164W chip, 1920x1440 @75Hz max. resolution for 24-plane.
HARD DISK DRIVE 36 GB IBM U2W SCSI 10K RPM
CD-ROM DRIVE Sony CD-RW 4/2/24x IDE
NETWORK 100BaseT RealTek ethernet PCI card
AUDIO Onboard ESS1887
OS Alpha Core 1 (Fedora Core 3 for ALPHA)
YEAR 1997
SPEED about 500 VAX MIPS
POWER CONSUMPTION (MAX. / MEASURED)
 - / 105 W
COMMENTS All tested OS's runs well on this box (UNIX, Linux  and Windows 2000 RC2 for ALPHA).
ESTIMATED PRICE '97 $22,000

History and other comments

In June 2003, I ordered this machine from Helsinki, it had probably been running Windows NT, and (possibly) later Alphalinux.

A nice feature with the PWS is that it's ROM can contain both AlphaBIOS and SRM firmware at the same time, just like on the bigger servers. You simply switch console if want a "dual boot" system. Actually, this machine will run all (more common ...) operating systems available for the Alpha platform.

This computer was originally PWS 433a, it still has the 433a label on the box. In August 2003 I got CPU upgrades for this system, two 21164-P8's. One of the CPU's could be overclocked to stunning 667 MHz and the other one to 633 MHz, both running Windows without crashing. This screenshot is from that time when I overclocked. There was one obstacle though, once I finally got an L3 cache module, it didn't work while the system was overclocked. I had to put in the original CPU and lower the clock to the original 433 MHz. I could now officially call it 433au, but then I would need to have SRM as default console, and run either OpenVMS or *NIX on it.

It remains unclear whether the issue was related to the non-original-PWS CPU I had used or related to the actual overlocking. After discovering this I can't recommend overclocking a PWS unless you can make sure your L3 cache is working. The system will be slower on some tasks if the L3 cache is not there. The difference is similar to the difference between Athlon vs. Duron or P4 vs. Celeron.

To my suprise this system works with Tru64 even when using IDE devices, the Sony IDE CD-RW is SRM bootable, and Tru64 UNIX could be installed on the IDE drive without any hassle. There seemed, however, to be some size limit concerns (maximum bootable partition <8GB) using the onboard IDE controller. The IDE disk performance is pretty OK, it feels like SCSI-2, or maybe slightly better.

Once Alpha Core 1 became available (in 2005), I installed it on this computer. This way I can have my preferred distro on ALPHA too. Once I got it installed I was quite impressed by all the pre-compiled software that were available for ALPHA (too!).

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Last updated:  11-12-2007