I don't believe there was a P54CS version of the P75 (as soon as it is not a mobile chip or something) .Btw the tech was 0.6μm (not nm that would be way too cool). There is no way for these tools to detect the transistor size, so they need to assume it from the CPUID response and likely got it wrong.

Not sure if the Millenium is too fast. It is period correct, but probably would be a bit unusual in a P75. That CPU was mostly in mainstream or budget PCs. Those high-end cards tend to come in faster systems. The S3 968 is likely a card from the same price range as the Matrox Millenium. Riva128/Mystique are both newer designs. Let alone 3dfx. I'd keep the Matrox.

I'd install Windows 3.1, but it is just me. Depends what you want to run.

IT really depends on what your expectations are.

For a higher end Pentium I'd get myself a P100 or even 133 if the motherboard support it. The higher bus speed would complement the graphics card.

For a more basic system based on your P75 I'd get a S3 trio or 864, with just 1 or 2MB. Still good, not spectacular. Also with great support for DOS, Windows 3.11, 95 and 98.

A Trident 9440 may also be a nice basic card. Nice for DOS/win again, but clearly less powerful. That was sold often while advertising "a real Pentium!" Over an "old" 486 and keeping costs down.

In 1995 a lot of systems still were sold with Windows 3.11 and DOS 6.22 so I'd stick with that (and add a IDE to CF adapter for sure). Win95 was still new and unknown, people hesitated about it.

Windows 95 was late 1995, so if you want early 1995, go DOS 6.22 + Win3.11.

As for the questions:
2) Matrox Millennium was a 1995 card, so it's period-correct. It's rather less suited to a P75- someone with the budget for a Millennium would have paired it with a P100 or P120, not a P75. An alternative would be a DRAM-based S3 868 (which would actually be faster in DOS than the 968 VRAM cards)
3) Win95 would run fine on this, certainly with 32MB RAM, but application software (games) that need Win95 will generally want a more powerful machine. Unless you want to stick to 1995 games only, don't do Win95 let alone Win98.
4) OPTi 82c295 is a 386 motherboard chipset, not an audio chipset. I'd re-check your ID there. It sounds more like an 82C925 chipset (which was generally paired with that AD DAC). There are most definitely DOS drivers for it, quite good ones too.

dionb wrote on 2020-06-02, 14:18:

Windows 95 was late 1995, so if you want early 1995, go DOS 6.22 + Win3.11. […]
Show full quote

Windows 95 was late 1995, so if you want early 1995, go DOS 6.22 + Win3.11.

As for the questions:
2) Matrox Millennium was a 1995 card, so it's period-correct. It's rather less suited to a P75- someone with the budget for a Millennium would have paired it with a P100 or P120, not a P75. An alternative would be a DRAM-based S3 868 (which would actually be faster in DOS than the 968 VRAM cards)
3) Win95 would run fine on this, certainly with 32MB RAM, but application software (games) that need Win95 will generally want a more powerful machine. Unless you want to stick to 1995 games only, don't do Win95 let alone Win98.
4) OPTi 82c295 is a 386 motherboard chipset, not an audio chipset. I'd re-check your ID there. It sounds more like an 82C925 chipset (which was generally paired with that AD DAC). There are most definitely DOS drivers for it, quite good ones too.

Thanks to the all the answers.
I felt the same things about the Millennium, back then I'd not even imagine that a video card would cost almost 1000$, I still had the OTi37C on my 386SX20. And the whole second hand 386 costed almost a third of that back then.. 😁 So when a friend of mine bought a 486SX I thought that's a beast but after a while I understood there was already the Pentium outside.. but here in europe many computer in my country were mostly still 386, 286, some 486. In the 1997 friends still had 486DX machines and I still had the 386. 😁
I may go for the Pentium 120 SX994, these if I remember could be both 0,60um and 0,35, how can I be sure about it?
I'd go for W3.11 but I don't have it. About the Opti you're right is 82C925 sorry, strange thing it seems to work ok in the o.s. but no sound outside the 3,5mm jack. No capacitor seems faulty.
At the end I was trying to build a very similar 486 machine so low-end, but I'm surprised this machine is not as fast as I expected in fact I was expecting higher scores in Quake too.. the P-75 with the Millennium was still not enough, incredible. At first I also thought about using an high end ISA video cards, I suppose some Socket 5 board had it once the early Pentium came out considering they could not have the VLB cards? Or PCI cards were already out there?
But I'd expect to upgrade this machine step by step it until the P-MMX 233mhz.. 😁

386SX wrote on 2020-06-02, 12:54:

Some questions:
1)Syspeed and others tools tells me the cpu is a 0,35nm one, how is that possible?

I suspect it's a bug in Syspeedm my code is as below and see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium

1      if( cpu->sk_n < 125000 )                                                  // pre 133 MHz ?
2          cpu->technology = smb->slb.tec_600,                                   //
3          cpu->codename   = TEXT( " (P54C)"  );                                 //
4      else                                                                      //
5      if( cpu->technology = smb->slb.tec_350,                                   //
6          cpu->codename   = TEXT( " (P54CS)" ),                                 //

red-ray wrote on 2020-06-02, 14:49:

I suspect it's a bug in Syspeed and my code is as below and see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium […]
Show full quote

386SX wrote on 2020-06-02, 12:54:

Some questions:
1)Syspeed and others tools tells me the cpu is a 0,35nm one, how is that possible?

I suspect it's a bug in Syspeed and my code is as below and see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium

Copy code to clipboard

1      if( cpu->sk_n < 125000 )                                                  // pre 133 MHz ?
2          cpu->technology = smb->slb.tec_600,                                   //
3          cpu->codename   = TEXT( " (P54C)"  );                                 //
4      else                                                                      //
5      if( cpu->technology = smb->slb.tec_350,                                   //
6          cpu->codename   = TEXT( " (P54CS)" ),                                 //

Still is a great tool for testing these machines! But the confusion maybe even deeper with the Pentium 120 that I think was the latest built @ 0,60um but also 0,35 if I'm correct. Cpu-world says that but I can't understand which core stepping refers to the older architecture vs the newer.
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium/I ... -120).html

Even the earliest P120 were 0.35 μm with unique P54CQS process. IMHO the P120 is a perfect CPU for the Millennium.

The P75 isn't that slow in Quake. In fact your 21fps is well above whats possible for any 486. No matter how much you overclock it.

Socket 5 with VLB was very unusual. There were VLB boards in some low-end OEM systems early early on but it was a stop-gap solution. Pentium = PCI. Also virtually no one used ISA VGA cards (no matter if high-end) in any normal Pentium system.

Except for me as I spent al my budget on P75 + MB + 16MB RAM in late 1995 and had to use my ISA CL-GD5422 from my 386 until I bought a PCI card shortly after 😀

386SX wrote on 2020-06-02, 14:35:

[...]
Thanks to the all the answers.
I felt the same things about the Millennium, back then I'd not even imagine that a video card would cost almost 1000$, I still had the OTi37C on my 386SX20. And the whole second hand 386 costed almost a third of that back then.. 😁 So when a friend of mine bought a 486SX I thought that's a beast but after a while I understood there was already the Pentium outside.. but here in europe many computer in my country were mostly still 386, 286, some 486. In the 1997 friends still had 486DX machines and I still had the 386. 😁

I still clearly remembering buying my first 'own' PC in late January 1995. The cheapest Pentium 60 you could get in the Netherlands. Only upgrade over base config was a crappy noname S3-868 1MB. That cost me DFL 350 (~USD 175) on top of base price. Things were NOT cheap back then. Oh, that and a GUS Max 😉

[...]

I'd go for W3.11 but I don't have it.

Take a look at winworldpc.com, it's a museum site.

About the Opti you're right is 82C925 sorry, strange thing it seems to work ok in the o.s. but no sound outside the 3,5mm jack. No capacitor seems faulty.

Another reason to avoid Win95: drivers, particularly sound drivers, can be hell. Test the card in pure DOS, it's probably fine.

Drivers:
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?file … &menustate=36,0

At the end I was trying to build a very similar 486 machine so low-end, but I'm surprised this machine is not as fast as I expected in fact I was expecting higher scores in Quake too.. the P-75 with the Millennium was still not enough, incredible. At first I also thought about using an high end ISA video cards, I suppose some Socket 5 board had it once the early Pentium came out considering they could not have the VLB cards? Or PCI cards were already out there?

PCI - and PCI VGA cards - has been around since 1993, so Pentium systems could use them from day 1. There were rare Pentium VLB (or EISA-only) systems, but very hard to find and not recommended for a beginner. The big problem with P75 is that cache, memory and PCI bus are all running at 25% slower than ideal because of its 50MHz bus speed. There's a reason Intel didn't introduce this until they needed a 'budget' Pentium and discontinued it before the older P90 and P100 CPUs. It's crippled and that i430VX motherboard deserves better.

But I'd expect to upgrade this machine step by step it until the P-MMX 233mhz.. 😁

Does the motherboard support split voltage (2.8V)? If not, you'll need to find a rare/expensive upgrade adapter with built-in VRM, or even more expensive MMX Overdrive.

mpe wrote on 2020-06-02, 14:59:

Even the earliest P120 were 0.35 μm with unique P54CQS process. IMHO the P120 is a perfect CPU for the Millennium. […]
Show full quote

Even the earliest P120 were 0.35 μm with unique P54CQS process. IMHO the P120 is a perfect CPU for the Millennium.

The P75 isn't that slow in Quake. In fact your 21fps is well above whats possible for any 486. No matter how much you overclock it.

Socket 5 with VLB was very unusual. There were VLB boards in some low-end OEM systems early early on but it was a stop-gap solution. Pentium = PCI. Also virtually no one used ISA VGA cards (no matter if high-end) in any normal Pentium system.

Except for me as I spent al my budget on P75 + MB + 16MB RAM in late 1995 and had to use my ISA CL-GD5422 from my 386 until I bought a PCI card shortly after 😀

But what about the cpu-world page saying the P120 was also in P54c architecture @ 0,60? Is an error? So the latest 0,60 would be any P100?
On the vga side, I imagined something like that happened. I could not even afford to change my 386 but if I had to come back then, I'd have immediately changed the vga on my 386 that could not even run Stunts at full fps, let alone Test Drive 3, Wolf3D etc... always reducing details in every games..
Also probably there were drivers for W3.1 back then but I didn't know that and using it with default drivers at low colors. I still had to learn a lot of these operating systems. 😁

They are usually right. But there could be a confusion.

P120's were made using 0.35 μm process but the die size and transistor count is identical to 0.6 μm chips. So pick the number you want 😀

dionb wrote on 2020-06-02, 15:07:

I still clearly remembering buying my first 'own' PC in late January 1995. The cheapest Pentium 60 you could get in the Netherla […]
Show full quote

386SX wrote on 2020-06-02, 14:35:

[...]
Thanks to the all the answers.
I felt the same things about the Millennium, back then I'd not even imagine that a video card would cost almost 1000$, I still had the OTi37C on my 386SX20. And the whole second hand 386 costed almost a third of that back then.. 😁 So when a friend of mine bought a 486SX I thought that's a beast but after a while I understood there was already the Pentium outside.. but here in europe many computer in my country were mostly still 386, 286, some 486. In the 1997 friends still had 486DX machines and I still had the 386. 😁

I still clearly remembering buying my first 'own' PC in late January 1995. The cheapest Pentium 60 you could get in the Netherlands. Only upgrade over base config was a crappy noname S3-868 1MB. That cost me DFL 350 (~USD 175) on top of base price. Things were NOT cheap back then. Oh, that and a GUS Max 😉

[...]

I'd go for W3.11 but I don't have it.

..it's a museum site.

About the Opti you're right is 82C925 sorry, strange thing it seems to work ok in the o.s. but no sound outside the 3,5mm jack. No capacitor seems faulty.

Another reason to avoid Win95: drivers, particularly sound drivers, can be hell. Test the card in pure DOS, it's probably fine.

Drivers:
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?file … &menustate=36,0

At the end I was trying to build a very similar 486 machine so low-end, but I'm surprised this machine is not as fast as I expected in fact I was expecting higher scores in Quake too.. the P-75 with the Millennium was still not enough, incredible. At first I also thought about using an high end ISA video cards, I suppose some Socket 5 board had it once the early Pentium came out considering they could not have the VLB cards? Or PCI cards were already out there?

PCI - and PCI VGA cards - has been around since 1993, so Pentium systems could use them from day 1. There were rare Pentium VLB (or EISA-only) systems, but very hard to find and not recommended for a beginner. The big problem with P75 is that cache, memory and PCI bus are all running at 25% slower than ideal because of its 50MHz bus speed. There's a reason Intel didn't introduce this until they needed a 'budget' Pentium and discontinued it before the older P90 and P100 CPUs. It's crippled and that i430VX motherboard deserves better.

But I'd expect to upgrade this machine step by step it until the P-MMX 233mhz.. 😁

Does the motherboard support split voltage (2.8V)? If not, you'll need to find a rare/expensive upgrade adapter with built-in VRM, or even more expensive MMX Overdrive.

The mobo support from 2,7v to 3,5v cpu voltages and the P233MMX (as the K6 233Mhz) is on the list of jumpers so I imagine I can go there but I think I'll get there as said upgrade by upgrade, one step at time. 😁
At first I wanted to use the "gold" version of the P-75 SX961 that looks so "old" and cool but it has one pin broken (it should be the BF pin on the Z line) so I can't say what would happen, not gonna try and risk the mobo.
Socket 5 mobo anyway looks so "advanced" (for its time) compared to the Socket 7 that sounds already too "modern". I like for example the early 0,80 nm Pentium 60 solution, I prefer always the alternative choice. 😀

Also a thing I wasn't expecting: the "polygon acceleration" option into the Millennium panel but still Final Reality can't see it as hardware accelerator even if I remember the Mystique 220 did run it in hardware. Also dxdiag says Direct3D enabled but failt at some texture error. I know this card wasn't 3D oriented and only had a basic shaded polygons acceleration and only one game supported but I was expecting to act as the Mystique in that bench. 😉

386SX wrote on 2020-06-02, 15:38:

[...]

The mobo support from 2,7v to 3,5v cpu voltages and the P233MMX (as the K6 233Mhz) is on the list of jumpers so I imagine I can go there but I think I'll get there as said upgrade by upgrade, one step at time. 😁
At first I wanted to use the "gold" version of the P-75 SX961 that looks so "old" and cool but it has one pin broken (it should be the BF pin on the Z line) so I can't say what would happen, not gonna try and risk the mobo.

Yes you can, Intel documented it 😀

If BF is left floating , the Pentium processor ( 610\75 , 735 \ 90 , 815 \ 100 ) defaults to a 2 / 3 bus ratio

Pentium Processors and Related Products
Volume 11 of 1995 Product Line Databooks, Intel Corporation

So it's safe, it will default to 1.5x and run at spec.

Socket 5 mobo anyway looks so "advanced" (for its time) compared to the Socket 7 that sounds already too "modern". I like for example the early 0,80 nm Pentium 60 solution, I prefer always the alternative choice. 😀

If the board has a VX chipset and offers split voltage, it's So7

dionb wrote on 2020-06-02, 17:04:

Yes you can, Intel documented it :) […]
Show full quote

386SX wrote on 2020-06-02, 15:38:

[...]

The mobo support from 2,7v to 3,5v cpu voltages and the P233MMX (as the K6 233Mhz) is on the list of jumpers so I imagine I can go there but I think I'll get there as said upgrade by upgrade, one step at time. 😁
At first I wanted to use the "gold" version of the P-75 SX961 that looks so "old" and cool but it has one pin broken (it should be the BF pin on the Z line) so I can't say what would happen, not gonna try and risk the mobo.

Yes you can, Intel documented it 😀

If BF is left floating , the Pentium processor ( 610\75 , 735 \ 90 , 815 \ 100 ) defaults to a 2 / 3 bus ratio

Pentium Processors and Related Products
Volume 11 of 1995 Product Line Databooks, Intel Corporation

So it's safe, it will default to 1.5x and run at spec.

Socket 5 mobo anyway looks so "advanced" (for its time) compared to the Socket 7 that sounds already too "modern". I like for example the early 0,80 nm Pentium 60 solution, I prefer always the alternative choice. 😀

If the board has a VX chipset and offers split voltage, it's So7

That's great! So I think I'm gonna downgrade even more.. 😁

Meanwhile I did some cheap case modding for the switch of the ATX-AT adpater (the hole in the center under the floppy 😁) and the led freqs. I'll study some better looking flat solution for it. 😉 (soon I'll receive the customizable atx back plastic universal plate)

Pentium pc that I built back in 1995 around the time when windows 95 was released was 90Mhz with intel motherboard, 16Mb ram and Diamond Stealth 64 with SDRAM. At least something like that would be something normally you would be building at the time and didn't cost too much.

I recently benchmarked my P-90 with a set of PCI video cards. Of them all, the Millennium was the fastest in the various Phil's benchmarks. It was faster than the Millennium II, a Diamond V330 (Riva128), a Tseng ET6000, and Compaq's own QVision 1280/p, QVision/2000 and QVision/2000+ plus cards. With one exception, every newer PCI card I had, that I tried, would not show a display. That one exception was a Matrox G200 PCI (one of the quad-display models) and it was quite slow in DOS.

In Windows 98 SE, the Millennium, Millennium II and V330 all had roughly the same performance in WinStone 94 (the only benchmark I've run) but the Millennium II unlocks some crazy resolutions with the right WRAM upgrade. (I'm running 1920x1200 at 24bit color and it's damn snappy at that!). I'm running running the Millennium II right now for the resolution but really ought to go back to the original.

So my takeaway is that for a P90, (a) Millennium is an excellent choice (b) there are slower cards to be had, which suggests it isn't necessarily a poor match for your machine.

PCPlayer 320x240
Millennium - 25.4
Millennium II - 24.8
V330 - 24.8
QVision 2000+ - 8.8
QVision 1280p - 23.7 (interesting)
Tseng ET6000 (STB Lightspeed) - 24.8

Doom max realtics
Millennium - 1465
Millennium II - 1877
V330 - 1901
QVision 2000+ - 7012
QVision 1280p - 2159
Tseng ET6000 (STB Lightspeed) - 1883

I'm currently working on a processor upgrade to the machine to see how the above metrics change with a faster CPU.

Socket 7 on a early 95' build?

Not that it particularly matters I guess. Assuming your going the whole "period correct on everything except for the motherboard/bios date".

I have this debate with myself alot tbh. Period corrext builds are awesome. But then some components like motherboards are often better off being later-editions 😀

Love where this build is heading! Iv been thinking about doing an early 95 build myself.

Don't mind me if I take some notes ;D

The motherboard is a mid/late 1996 board, so definitely the odd one out in the midst of so carefully chosen CPU, VGA and sound.

dionb wrote on 2020-06-03, 07:53:

The motherboard is a mid/late 1996 board, so definitely the odd one out in the midst of so carefully chosen CPU, VGA and sound.

Thanks again of newer opinions. Yesterday I tried the Pentium 100 and 120 but strangely the board didn't boot. I suppose having used a similar reflashed eeprom chip (the original was gone), need some jumper reset combination before using a new cpu because I don't think both the cpu I have are both gone) but magically with the P-75 it works. The board is a Pc Partner VXB820DS and the bios is the latest (I know not necessary period correct Aug-97).
I'm sure I booted it with a P-166 MMX so I expect it to run others P54C too but I was thinking something more similar to a next-generation 486 than the usual Pentium 166 or whatever. At that point I think I'd go for the absolute maximun, or the P-233 MMX or the K6-233 with some Riva128 PCI, maybe step by step I'll arrive there. 😁

Some questions for the future:
-in the manual, it says that both 5v and 3,3v DIMM are supported, I didn't know that 5V DIMM existed at all, the oldest dimm I have are both 32mb old type (fewer chip pins, smaller height, dark pcb etc..) and marked as IBM 13n4649jcd-10t (75H5198-01), but right now I'm using two 16MB FPM simms (I've many ones, the ones I've used have a strange BP44C chip in the middle I don't know what for) just to stay old (bench say the 32MB single dimm were around 69MB/s when the 16MB simm are around 39MB/s.. impressive difference).
-also in the manual there's a JP6 jumper that says (reserved for future K6 cpus.. while the manual already wrote the config for the K6-233. Does it means maybe it'd support the K6-2 66mhz model?)
Anyway I think I'll use mainly dos but I was expecting this machine to be slower in W98 upgraded to 2004 patches. Ok, my concept of "fast" or "slow" may be subjective but I'm impressed anyway. I'm sure the vga really accelerate a lot. I don't want to use a Voodoo card on this it feels already too modern but something older would be nice like a 3D Blaster ISA but I don't have it. Maybe I'll consider some older Mpeg2 accelerator card... or maybe some Mpeg1 decoder.. I want to add something period correct to the PCI bus.. 😁
Or maybe some module for the Millennium card I may look for. I've used a ISA ethernet card that's already too modern around 97 and I don't like it but I have some already still built in 1999.. I'll search for a 95/96 ethernet card for sure.

At first I'd have gone for a Socket 4/5 board if existed in usual AT sizes and not those massive large ones that without case would really be a problem to use. Also I've seen some very early Pentium board still having those Dallas (?) battery I don't even want to see after the time I spent years ago trying to replace it internally.. I don't even want to remember the effort trying that..