First post, by vetz
- Rank
- l33t
This is an area that I stumbled upon while benchmarking different Socket 5/7 chipsets for this thread.
When pipeline cache started to appear in 1995 on the Intel 430FX chipset I don't know how many knew how much this would improve performance? It certainly paved the way for the popular Pentiums in 1996-1997 to take over from 486 platforms. Up to this point early Pentium systems didn't perform that much better compared to fast 486 machines. I really understand why Intel marketed the Overdrive as a Pentium 75 equivalent, which it really is when you compare against an early 430NX system with normal DIP asynchronous cache installed.
Tested with Matrox G200 PCI - See below for memory settings.
Later chipsets as VX, HX and TX all had pipeline cache.
That is generally a 10 to 15% performance increase, making the Pentium 90 on pipeline cache faster than the Pentium 100 on older async DIP cache. All tests done on same motherboard (Unisys PT-2003 which supports both COAST cache and DIP modules) and same hardware.
Complete results:
Pentium Overdrive @ 100mhz and Pentium 66 on Socket 4:
Pentium 90
Pentium 100