Re: K6-3+ 550 vs early Athlon/Duron

Posted on 2016-03-02, 12:48

by

by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'm wondering how you'd do a fair office productivity responsiveness benchmark, to test Red Hill's claims that the K6-3+ at 5x112 was somewhere between the performance of an Athlon Thunderbird 1000 and a Athlon XP Palomino 1700+. (Then again, there's a lot of crap on Red Hill's site, like the bit …

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Re: K6-3+ 550 vs early Athlon/Duron

Posted on 2016-03-02, 09:52

by

by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

No way. Don't trust synthetic benchmarks or speedsys. Just run GlQuake at 640x480 and watch the difference in performance. Or better yet, try some other, more relevant benchmarks/games! While GLQuake consistently favors the P6 architecture, Quake's software renderer seems to oddly P5 chips and also …

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Re: K6-3+ 550 vs early Athlon/Duron

Posted on 2016-03-02, 03:32

by

by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Well, synthetic INT/FPU performance is not the only thing affecting the actual application performance. Memory bandwith is also important... and all socket 7 chipsets are terrible compared to i440BX or Athlon chipsets. In my tests K6-III+ @ 577 on average is 2% slower than Celeron 433 and 27% …

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Re: The Ultimate 686 Benchmark Comparison

Posted on 2016-03-02, 01:53

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by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have seen Quake 2 benchmarks with the Athlon cpu loosing performance when 3DNow! is enabled (not sure what GPU was used). http://web.archive.org/web/200102030623/http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/k623d/drivers.html Forgot to comment on this before, but the inclusion of GLQuake tests there seems to …

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Re: The Ultimate 686 Benchmark Comparison

Posted on 2016-02-29, 13:46

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by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Further clarification on the Quake 1 vs 2 performance oddities: P6 CPUs (other than the PII overdrive) and all 3 versions of the VIA C3 core run Quake 2 significantly faster than the same processors do Quake 1 (in 640x480 software mode), while P5 and all other Socket 5/7 processors perform …

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Re: The Ultimate 686 Benchmark Comparison

Posted on 2016-02-27, 09:46

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by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It was suggested that enabling fastvid would help the P6 CPUs in comparison to the P5 chips. fastvid was not enabled. Is fastvid only useful for DOS? If so, then having it enabled or not would not alter the GLQuake P5/P6 comparative nature. Fastvid basically enables write-combining for the VESA 2.0 …

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Re: K6-3+ 550 vs early Athlon/Duron

Posted on 2016-02-26, 14:32

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by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I was never a fan of the K6 line. I recently pulled a K6-2 300MHz (512K L2) system out of the trash and found that the performance was well below that of my PII-300. One of the first things I noticed about the K6-2 system was that the Windows GUI got a little choppy when I tried playing MP3 and AAC …

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Re: The Ultimate 686 Benchmark Comparison

Posted on 2016-02-20, 08:38

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by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Somehow I'd failed to notice the odd performance distribution in the Quake 1 tests before. The oddly high performance of the Pentium II overdrives was noted early on after the results were posted, but there's other oddities all over the range too. I know Quake is hand-optimized for the P5 …

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Re: Cyrix appreciation thread

Posted on 2015-12-11, 10:56

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by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Heh, for a moment I thought this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-ThinkPad-701C-701CS-FRU-41H7180-NEW-mainboard-with-AMD-X5-5x86-DX5-133MHz-/401037860660?hash=item5d5fb81f34:g:IDwAAOSwnH1WZDXM Was using an IBM 5x86C ... then I looked closer and noticed the obvious AMD in the description (and on the chip …

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Re: Optimize Quake and GL_Quake for a 486?

Posted on 2015-12-11, 08:49

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by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Well no, the perspective division is done every 16th pixel, so this scales up with resolution as well. Right, right, I'd forgotten how computationally intensive the perspective correction aspect of Quake was. 3D vertex calculation wasn't an issue as things scale up, but textel and pixel fill rate …

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Re: Cyrix appreciation thread

Posted on 2015-12-11, 07:11

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by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Ah wait, there's another obvious possibility I'm overlooking. 686MX and early (maybe anything prior to the 180 nm NS ones) only came with 2x 2.5x 3x and 3.5x multipliers, so 66x4 wouldn't be possible at all, thus making 75x3.5 the closest you'd get. (though 75x3.5 is probably faster for pretty much …

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Re: Wing Commander III + 386 motherboard

Posted on 2015-12-11, 06:42

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by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I believe Wing Commander 4 adds 16-bit color depth. Maybe only for the FMV. Only for FMV yes, it uses a YUV lookup table conversion for that but still a variant of Origin's RLE compression scheme, not block based like Cinepak or earlier Indeo variants. (or that thing Activision used for a few games …

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Re: Optimize Quake and GL_Quake for a 486?

Posted on 2015-12-09, 04:37

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by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Just stumbled on this old thread yesterday: http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsgs.aspx?subjectid=1160&msgnum=11532&batchsize=10&batchtype=Next There's a decent explanation of the oddities of Quake's P5-specific assembly language optimization that I hadn't seen before. Apparently, Quake uses the …

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Re: Wing Commander III + 386 motherboard

Posted on 2015-12-09, 04:09

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by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Unless you use some sort of virtual CD program, I'm pretty sure you need a physical CD-ROM (or DVD) to run the game, just like most CD-ROM based games of that era ... or quite a bit later too. Even with maximum installs, the game has to be booted from CD-ROM. (I learned that many years ago with the …

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Re: Cyrix appreciation thread

Posted on 2015-12-09, 03:48

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by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

By the way, was there a standard (2.9 V) version of this Cyrix? You mean 66mhz x 4.0? I don't think there were any commercially sold (non ES) parts at 2.9V that went beyond the 75 MHz PR333's 262.5 MHz, and my extension, no parts shy of 180 nm NS manufacturing that broke that. (some 250 nm parts …

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Re: The Ultimate 686 Benchmark Comparison

Posted on 2013-10-11, 08:54

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by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It's kind of interesting to compare these old CPU scaling game performance figures on Tom's Hardware: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/3d-accelerator-review-step,51-17.html The 6x86MX and (especially) K6-233 seem to fare better against the P55C and PII in those games (Turok, GL Quake, and Quake …

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Re: The Ultimate 686 Benchmark Comparison

Posted on 2013-09-21, 00:41

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by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

A bit off topic, but more in line with the Cyrix comments above about relative performance and such, and the National Semiconductor mess. I hadn't really thought about it before, but aside from the whole management mess and shift in R&D priorities after the Cyrix/NS merger, they also lost the IBM …

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Re: The Ultimate 686 Benchmark Comparison

Posted on 2013-09-13, 08:38

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by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

man, Pentium pro overdrives are AWESOME chips... Something doesn't sit right with me on the quake 1 results though. I'm going to run that once more and double check. for some reason not only are those chips WINNING but beating chips 2x as fast in mhz. honestly i'd expect to see them just under the …

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Re: The Ultimate 686 Benchmark Comparison

Posted on 2013-02-25, 09:06

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by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Really cool to see this completed! 😀

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Re: Cyrix appreciation thread

Posted on 2012-12-12, 07:29

by

by kool kitty89

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'm not going back through 8 pages to see if anyone posted it yet... Neither am I, but I think it was brought up here; I know I've read through that link once or twice. The Ultimate 686 Benchmark Comparison includes data for a Cyrix MII up to 400 MHz as well as a Celeron at 300 and 400 MHz. Yes, it …

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