I think the really big leap in FPU performance came with the PPro. Thats why I think it's not very reasonable to build a Pentium based retro PC:

• -games using a 3D accelerator will usually run much faster on a Pentium II/III based system
  -games for which the Pentium II/III is too fast will also run too fast on a Pentium
  -there is a generic patch for games written in Pascal which don't cope well with clocks over 200 MHz
  -on a 430TX you can only cache 64 MB of SDRAM, a 430HX will do more, but the board will accept only EDO SIMMs, it is usually in AT form factor, the controller is only WDMA

Is there a really good reason to build a Pentium 1 system?

GL1zdA wrote:

I think the really big leap in FPU performance came with PPro. Thats why I think it's not very reasonable to build a Pentium bas […]
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I think the really big leap in FPU performance came with PPro. Thats why I think it's not very reasonable to build a Pentium based retro PC:

• -games using a 3D accelerator will usually run much faster on a Pentium II/III based system
  -games for which the Pentium II/III is too fast will also run too fast on a Pentium
  -there is generic patch for games written in Pascal which don't cope well with clocks over 200 MHz
  -on a 430TX you can only cache 64 MB of RAM, a 430HX will do more, but the board will accept only SIMMs and is usually in AT form factor

Is there a really good reason to build a Pentium 1 system?

A PPro isn't a good chioce since it lacks MMX instruction set

I agree what you that a Pentium II, early PIII or an AMD K6 is a better chioce for later DOS games since you benefit from the extra speed and not many games have speed problems fro that era

Amigaz wrote:

A PPro isn't a good chioce since it lacks MMX instruction set

Thats why I like the PII/PIII so much 😀

Amigaz wrote:

I agree what you that a Pentium II, early PIII or an AMD K6 is a better chioce for later DOS games since you benefit from the extra speed and not many games have speed problems fro that era

The K6 FPU is slower than the PII/PIII's, so i think Intel processors would make a better gaming retro PC.

I'm building a Pentium 1 mmx system ... for windows 3.1 🤣

Yeah the FPU portion of the code goes up in very rare cases to 30%, in most cases it is lower, maybe 5%. So the average speed gain due to faster FPU of the P60 has no major impact.

About Pentium I boards:
It really depends what you are up to. If you want to have 3D accelerated graphics you go better with a P3 or Athlon system.
I also got two Pentium I systems running.

I chose a P166MMX on a HX board. It's not about speed but overall comfort.
P166MMX does not show the TP speed bug already and also DoTT sound does not bug. On the other hand it has MMX, a good PCI performance for graphics intense DOS games. The board has 4 ISA and 4 PCI slots, IDE, fast serial already onboard. Though IDE caps with Busmaster DMA at 15 MB/s, if you need more plug a UDMA controller like the Highpoint 372N.
On the other hand you have 6 memory slots and can upgrade upto 512 MB or at least beyond 128 MB. So a windows for data transfer (network, amiga, atari, c64 etc.) runs very well, even with USB mass storage devices.

It's good for all the demanding DOS games and can even run NT4 as 32 Bit OS for some of the more modern application. It can also be used for low end 3D accelerated games using Riva128 or Voodoo1.
You can plug all of the common ISA soundcards and got a rock solid stable system.

You can't do more demanding 3D games. But then again these run at most even on a current PC platform under Win XP f.e.

Ofcourse you can take the step from a 486DX4-100 with local bus to a P3 system. Though I think a pentium board is a more versatile platform in this performance range.

Amigaz wrote:

This CPU is pure POS, a 486DX4 100 is as snappy as the Pentium 60 in everything I've tried.
So my conclusion is: Pentium 60 = waste of time....just produces alot of heat for nothing

Shoot... I could have told you that! I remember when they came out. Everyone I knew skipped right over it until the P90.

retro games 100 wrote:

I'm building a Pentium 1 mmx system ... for windows 3.1

I'm doing the same, even though a Pentium isn't ideal. But 486 parts, especially era appropriate storage, are so archaic. DOSBox does well for those games on my C2D.

elianda wrote:

I chose a P166MMX on a HX board. It's not about speed but overall comfort.
P166MMX does not show the TP speed bug already and also DoTT sound does not bug. On the other hand it has MMX, a good PCI performance for graphics intense DOS games. The board has 4 ISA and 4 PCI slots, IDE, fast serial already onboard.

That's my target too, for the same reasons. I'm doing a P166MMX on an ASUS TX97-L. I only have 64MB RAM for it, so I don't hit the tag RAM issue. If I need to run Windows 9x, it can do it fine. It'll be mainly for DOS 6.22 and Win3.1. It does have decent onboard IDE and a bios patch exists to allow it up to 128GB drives. Finding the AT case was the hardest, but I did manage to snag a new one. I've also got an Adaptec AHA-2940 for it though to play with. I miss the SCSI days. 😉

Here is a good site to go by if you want a shopping list for socket 7 boards.
http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/k6plus.htm

Valnar, you say: "It does have decent onboard IDE and a bios patch exists to allow it up to 128GB drives."

This is really nice. I bought several slot 1 mobos, and tried in vain to attach modern IDE-based HDDs to them. The mobos all "froze" on POST. They didn't like the 300gb drives. But then I found a mobo (super micro) which didn't freeze up like this, and I was so relieved. The bios only saw about 128gb? of the 300gb drive, but at least it allowed me to boot up without any serious problem. Anyway, I was happy/satisfied with that. (I think one solution to this type of problem would be to get a PCI controller card, but I really wanted every PCI slot for other purposes.)

Best regards, Robert.

And if you really want to build yourself a 386 or 486, get a SCSI card anyway. At least then you can dumb down modern SCSI drives to work with it. IDE back then was..... yep.... archaic.

Just upgraded to a 66mhz P1

I recently got a socket 5 mobo from ECS ( SI54P AIO) which was the "de luxe" alternative to the SI5PI AIO according to an old press release from ECS I found on the net.
ECS seem to have hanged on to the Socket 4 design in 1995 😜

As you can see on the pic below the boards are almost identical...same chipset and stuff

Hey, sorry to bring up an old thread, but I don't think this was worth starting a new one for. I recently acquired a Socket 4 motherboard with a p60 on it, but it had some board placed between the socket and the processor. copyright 1994 IBM Corporation. not sure if the mobo is an IBM or not, but I posted some pictures on cpu world.

http://www.cpu-world.com/sspec/SX/SX835.html

In the comments, two by "Jeremy".

Anybody know what this is? Looks like they just added a bunch of resistors.

manbearpig wrote:

Hey, sorry to bring up an old thread, but I don't think this was worth starting a new one for. I recently acquired a Socket 4 mo […]
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Hey, sorry to bring up an old thread, but I don't think this was worth starting a new one for. I recently acquired a Socket 4 motherboard with a p60 on it, but it had some board placed between the socket and the processor. copyright 1994 IBM Corporation. not sure if the mobo is an IBM or not, but I posted some pictures on cpu world.

http://www.cpu-world.com/sspec/SX/SX835.html

In the comments, two by "Jeremy".

Anybody know what this is? Looks like they just added a bunch of resistors.

Weird, never seen such a thing....but interesting 😀

The processor looks to be in excellent condition though! 😉

Why not post on cpu-world itself? They are pretty much the cpu experts hehe 😉

Tetrium wrote:

The processor looks to be in excellent condition though! 😉

Why not post on cpu-world itself? They are pretty much the cpu experts hehe 😉

cpu-world is a great website. 😀

It looks like some sort of interposer obviously but its purpose is a mystery. Maybe it's some sort of hardware issue workaround thing.

Those early Pentiums had a lot of issues. The chipsets weren't much better than what was coming with 486s. They ran relatively hot because they were 5v versions of the P5 and they also were apparently somewhat prone to being unstable.

About the only game that I think would be good on one would be Quake because of how it's so intensely optimized for the Pentium architecture.

430FX and Socket 5 Pentiums were a huge improvement.

Quake demanded a Pentium 75 if I'm not mistaken, so the Pentium 60 wouldn't cut it.
But yes, the first P5 Pentiums were a test, much like the Pentium Pro was for the P6 architecture.
So they only started to take off with the P90 and onwards, much like the P6 started to take off with the Pentium II.

Well Quake's minimum spec wasn't really a consideration for the people who were trying to play it on a 486! 😵 I think a P60 would at least match any 486 because Quake seems to give a Pentium more than a 2:1 advantage.

http://web.archive.org/web/19961223112037/www … gena/quake.html

Pentium Pro was quite popular for servers but it was never a CPU intended for home PCs. The pricing was too high and it had that 16-bit quirk. Pentium II replaced Pentium MMX and Xeon eventually replaced Pentium Pro.

One of Quake's big bottlenecks is the pushing of the screen buffer. Modifying the engine, forcing it to render in 160x100 then stretching that up to 320x200 gives AM5x86 a nice jump from 13.6 to 23.5 on timedemo demo1. The only hitchings at that point are the dynamic lights

Abrash's asm routines made love to a pentium like no other. Coupled with FASTVID on a PPro/PII you've got one hell of a Quake framerate.

Another bad Quake bottleneck for 486s is the floating point timer. Most of the time it doesn't even need the floating point precision since everything almost animates and moves at 10fps anyway.