philscomputerlab wrote:

I remembered wrongly, under DOS, at least 3dbench2, the Pentium 200 is in front of the MMX 166.

This is a very important statement and although it supports my skepticism it doesn't show the whole picture. So basically, it can be possible for the MMX at 166 to be faster than the classic at 200, depending on how the programs are affected by the MMX hardware enhancements. From a software perspective it is also possible that code and compiling have a big influence on which will become the winner. This is why i was so skeptic about the "MMX at 166 is quite a bit faster than the classic at 200" argument, because i know there are to many variables that can influence end result.

Surely we can find DOS applications that will benefit from larger cache and run better on the MMX, and we can find others that might be not so sensitive to cache and more to operating frequency and/or pipeline stalls for instance. The latter has a bigger penalty loss on the MMX.

I should get more Socket 7 CPU's for my build, they could be handy from time to time.

For the thread purpose however i think the MMX is the logical choice.

I guess the real question is MMX 200 vs Pentium 200. I'd bet on the MMX, and worst case scenario, just get an MMX 233. My MMX 200 is already fast enough to trigger the Runtime error 200 anyway.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pentium-m … tations,19.html here is an old review of the 166mmx.

was wondering how a Pentium Pro 200/1Mb would compare to these results from the P200. PPro isnt really "practical" in alot of cases, but its a nice system to have for a mid 90s system, and I was interested to see how it would perform against a Pentium (or an MMX) of the same clock speed.

these were ran on an ATI Rage Pro 8MB and 128MB 60ns EDO.

3dbench2- 205.9
Speedsys- 209.01
Doom- 80.13
Quake- 50.3

seems to do very well against even a P233 MMX , with the exception of Doom , guess its the 16 bit code weakness showing.

Is that with FASTVID enabled?

leileilol wrote:

Is that with FASTVID enabled?

FASTVID was indeed enabled.

Quake's results were done in Demo1 by the way. 320X200 full screen.

Should I downgrade to EDO RAM 32-64MB 60ns?

eFatal2ty wrote:

Should I downgrade to EDO RAM 32-64MB 60ns?

I dont see any advantage in downgrading

I don't know why a PPro would be recommended for DOS. The best part about the PPro is the SMP support and running pure 32-bit code. Although, other than being exotic, there's no reason to run a PPro over a PII. The PII is all around a better processor, and if you want exotic, there's always the Xeons with 2MB cache!

Oh, and if you want a high-end P5 build, you'd have to go with the 430HX chipset or something non-Intel to get around that crippling 64MB RAM cache limit.

?
"Unlike previous chipsets, the 440FX didn't have the problem of a cacheable memory area being limited, since the Pentium Pro's internal L2 cache and the Pentium II's on-card L2 cache takes care of all RAM caching, instead of the chipset."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/72/8

EDIT: Ah! You said P5. My morning-brain was still thinking P6 and I just couldn't figure why you'd be saying that about P6. Classic-d'oh.

manbearpig wrote:

I don't know why a PPro would be recommended for DOS. The best part about the PPro is the SMP support and running pure 32-bit code. Although, other than being exotic, there's no reason to run a PPro over a PII. The PII is all around a better processor, and if you want exotic, there's always the Xeons with 2MB cache!

Oh, and if you want a high-end P5 build, you'd have to go with the 430HX chipset or something non-Intel to get around that crippling 64MB RAM cache limit.

While I wouldnt necessarily recommend a PPro build over a Pentium MMX , there are benefits to using a Pentium Pro . if what youre going for is pure DOS machine then a normal Pentium is great, but for a combo DOS/Win95 system , meant to play games from 1994-1997 , the Pro will generally do better in my experience . It also doesnt suffer from the 64MB RAM limit, which nice (although to be fair, 64MB is all you need for early Windows games)

the one advantage I would say a PPro has over a PII in this context is that it generally plays nicer with speed sensitive games , particularly those from Sierra and Lucasarts, which Ive found to have issues even on a PII 266.
best way to describe it is that it works well as a jack of all trades.

Like I said , I wouldnt necessarily recommend one (if only for the fact the boards are harder to find, and more expensive), but I would say they are very nice systems to have

Yes, I agree that the Pro would do better in that situation, I think the price and rarity of those systems make them less attainable for most people. Not saying they aren't nice systems, that they are. But you could build both a Pentium/MMX system and a PII/PIII system for less than the price of one PPro system. So unless you get lucky and get a system cheap or free, I'd avoid the PPro and go for an HX triton or third party P5 chipset, if you want to break the 64MB barrier.

It's just too bad that scrap broken PPros have higher prices than working PII systems.