Well simply its just another the PC has to access. It seems so impractical really. No matter what having the cache built into a CPU was always the better route. Im sure others can talk more about all this.

I had two Pentiums with a burst cache module. Never had a problem. Perhaps some boards and/or modules had lousy quality connectors. But mine didn't suffer any problems. It's very similar to a PCI slot, just a tiny edge connector. It's used for tons of hardware, and generally not very troublesome.

Socket 5 & 7 Motherboard VGA Benchmark comparison

Alot of Pentium boards benched with several types of cache. Please note that the benches focuses on DOS gaming.

computergeek92 wrote:

WOW, 50% of a cacheless Pentium 200 is used up playing a single 256kb mp3!!?? I had no idea these computers were so underpowered they can't even play a simple audio file efficiently... Hehe. Did WAV files take any less cpu power?

Depends on the player you use as well.
On my P133, I could play a 128 kbit mp3 with about 20-30% CPU using WinAMP.
If I used Sonique however, it would take 50-60%.
However, Sonique sounded notably better, because it had higher internal precision.

Typically a P75 is sufficient to play a 128 kBit/s MP3. Also on the old machines Winamp was the player of choice as Scali mentioned already.
Cubic Player plays MP3s as well (I think it's based on the MaPlay code?!?) and a newer player is MPXPlay of course.
I am not sure how the current version of XMPlay compares in CPU usage against Winamp (2.95).

Scali wrote:

Depends on the player you use as well. On my P133, I could play a 128 kbit mp3 with about 20-30% CPU using WinAMP. If I used Son […]
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computergeek92 wrote:

WOW, 50% of a cacheless Pentium 200 is used up playing a single 256kb mp3!!?? I had no idea these computers were so underpowered they can't even play a simple audio file efficiently... Hehe. Did WAV files take any less cpu power?

Depends on the player you use as well.
On my P133, I could play a 128 kbit mp3 with about 20-30% CPU using WinAMP.
If I used Sonique however, it would take 50-60%.
However, Sonique sounded notably better, because it had higher internal precision.

In the W95 era I used a little-known audio player called Kjofol for my mp3 needs. I don't recall numbers, but it was giving me the lowest CPU usage of several players I tested on my P75 laptop (Thinkpad 755CX). It was also the first program I used that had a non-rectangular window and at the time the concept blew my mind. 😀

stamasd wrote:

In the W95 era I used a little-known audio player called Kjofol for my mp3 needs.

Yes, I also used that for a while.

I feel remarkably pedestrian in admitting I used Winamp like any other casual on my 95 machine. Of course, at this point I still didn't have MP3s -- I was using it to play audio CDs. This was in, like, 2002 -- I was using a hand-me-down system.

I commited a sin back in win95, I used realplayer for MP3's

elianda wrote:

Typically a P75 is sufficient to play a 128 kBit/s MP3.

Typically we started collecting and playing 128kbps MP3s on 486 DX2/4s and Winamp, but we weren't doing anything else at the same time, not even moving the mouse 🤣 You would move the mouse to prevent the screensaver for appearing and you had a good chance of interrupting playback, depending on what it'd hover

candle_86 wrote:

I commited a sin back in win95, I used realplayer for MP3's

Is self flagellation a sin?

gdjacobs wrote:

Is self flagellation a sin?

only if you enjoy it :>

computergeek92 wrote:

WOW, 50% of a cacheless Pentium 200 is used up playing a single 256kb mp3!!?? I had no idea these computers were so underpowered they can't even play a simple audio file efficiently... Hehe. Did WAV files take any less cpu power?

There was a time when playing back MP3 was a very demanding and CPU intensive activity. It took 2-3x the time to create the MP3, and it takes a lot of CPU to play it back. I remember playing an MP3 on a DX2-66 with a DOS-based player as well as WinPlay3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3). I downloaded a 2-3 MB MP3 file from usenet and was surprised at the sound quality - and that it was the full song! Oh, yes, it took a while to download that file on 14.4k. 😀

GuyTechie wrote on 2016-09-20, 22:37:

computergeek92 wrote:

WOW, 50% of a cacheless Pentium 200 is used up playing a single 256kb mp3!!?? I had no idea these computers were so underpowered they can't even play a simple audio file efficiently... Hehe. Did WAV files take any less cpu power?

There was a time when playing back MP3 was a very demanding and CPU intensive activity. It took 2-3x the time to create the MP3, and it takes a lot of CPU to play it back. I remember playing an MP3 on a DX2-66 with a DOS-based player as well as WinPlay3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3). I downloaded a 2-3 MB MP3 file from usenet and was surprised at the sound quality - and that it was the full song! Oh, yes, it took a while to download that file on 14.4k. 😀

The good old days. How many nights spent on Napster downloading mp3's on a 14.4kbps connection... Not much else you could have done on a DX4-100 while listening to mp3's (Win95), it was that CPU intensive..