H3nrik V! wrote on 2024-05-27, 11:51:

It does not. The factor of how much memory can be cached is the amount of TAG ram.

I have edited my post to respect that. My numbers are for standard equipment.

H3nrik V! wrote on 2024-05-27, 11:51:

Wonder why Intel crippled the newer Socket 7 chipsets in that way - maybe it was because PentiumII was on its way and they wanted to differentiate the platforms ...?

No wonder. Intel just did not want to have people using cheap socket 7 machines instead of their socket 8 Pentium Pro CPUs.

Disruptor wrote on 2024-05-27, 12:02:

I have edited my post to respect that. My numbers are for standard equipment. […]
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H3nrik V! wrote on 2024-05-27, 11:51:

It does not. The factor of how much memory can be cached is the amount of TAG ram.

I have edited my post to respect that. My numbers are for standard equipment.

H3nrik V! wrote on 2024-05-27, 11:51:

Wonder why Intel crippled the newer Socket 7 chipsets in that way - maybe it was because PentiumII was on its way and they wanted to differentiate the platforms ...?

No wonder. Intel just did not want to have people using cheap socket 7 machines instead of their socket 8 Pentium Pro CPUs.

Ahhh, yes. It seems the PPro chipsets came out in late '95, and in early '95 they started "crippling" the S7 chipsets - well, except for the HX, which was still somewhat high-end with SMP support etc.

Try such comparison in 2000/1 with Pentium Pro 200MHz, i440FX chipset, 64MB of RAM, Matrox Mystique 4MB PCI, ISA sound and 6.4GB IDE HDD
Win2K was sooo sloooow while Win98 was more than perfect.

I had a Pentium Pro 200 w/128mb ram and Windows 2000 took a loooong time to boot, but I think I had a slow HDD and was running NTFS. Keen to try again with FAT32.

mwdmeyer wrote on 2024-05-27, 21:38:

I had a Pentium Pro 200 w/128mb ram and Windows 2000 took a loooong time to boot, but I think I had a slow HDD and was running NTFS. Keen to try again with FAT32.

It's not going to make a difference. Tried it both ways back in the day. The spinning drive is the bottleneck, not the filesystem.

Babasha wrote on 2024-05-27, 13:56:

Try such comparison in 2000/1 with Pentium Pro 200MHz, i440FX chipset, 64MB of RAM, Matrox Mystique 4MB PCI, ISA sound and 6.4GB IDE HDD
Win2K was sooo sloooow while Win98 was more than perfect.

Yep same experience I had back in the day. Funny how people using virtualization and "modern retro" solutions don't seem to believe the people that actually used the hardware during that period.

kingcake wrote on 2024-05-28, 00:01:

Babasha wrote on 2024-05-27, 13:56:

Try such comparison in 2000/1 with Pentium Pro 200MHz, i440FX chipset, 64MB of RAM, Matrox Mystique 4MB PCI, ISA sound and 6.4GB IDE HDD
Win2K was sooo sloooow while Win98 was more than perfect.

Yep same experience I had back in the day. Funny how people using virtualization and "modern retro" solutions don't seem to believe the people that actually used the hardware during that period.

I wonder how many retro enthusiasts are old enough to have actually used the machines vs younger folks who just can't imagine how horrible things used to be.

And yes, a lot of the "modern retro" things - SD card adapters, Gotek floppy emulators, BlueSCSI/FloppyEmus on the Mac side, relatively easy networking, etc make life dramatically more manageable. Not to mention the absurdly-low cost of some parts. e.g. you can buy 8x16 megs of 30 pin RAM for a vintage Mac, brand new from OWC, for a total of $95USD. And that seems expensive - for a modern DDR5 system, you could get 32 gigs for around the same price (so 256X more RAM). When that vintage Mac was current, the same amount of RAM could have cost $8-10K USD or something insane like that in 1990-1992 money. Like, that would have been the price of a cheap new car. You could probably buy two 83" OLED TVs, maybe even three, today for the same price as 128 megs of RAM 30 years ago. Similarly, you can buy a BlueSCSI for $50USD plus an SD card. For 50USD back in the day, you got a box of 50 floppies if you were lucky; I don't remember offhand how much, say, a 40-80MB SCSI hard drive would have cost but I'm sure it was at least 10 times that. And your BlueSCSI is effectively the equivalent of an unlimited supply of 80MB SCSI hard drives.

Maybe that's what this comes down to - these 'modern retro' systems are pretty much maxed out in a way that would have been unaffordably insane back in the day.

VivienM wrote on 2024-05-28, 00:35:

Maybe that's what this comes down to - these 'modern retro' systems are pretty much maxed out in a way that would have been unaffordably insane back in the day.

Defiantly and that's 1/2 the appeal doing what we wanted but couldn't afford to do back then.
Plus we install less crap software (ICQ and RealPlayer for example) freeing up a machines resources.
But also we have become spoilt.

Somewhat related to the topic was when I upgraded our DX2/66 from Win95 to NT4. Neither OS was fast but 95 was more useful when it was the main family PC.
It got NT4 when it became the 2nd "homework" PC. upgrading to the full 64MB of RAM improved speed even though it was now above the cache limit. NT versions of windows just love more ram.
Back then waiting a good 2-3 minutes for it to boot was no big deal, no way would I do that now.

And then it goes ... 😎

Disruptor wrote on 2024-05-26, 19:54:

I'm just wondering because the Pentium Pro did not work well with 16 bit code still being used in Win98SE. But the Pentium Pro s […]
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kingcake wrote on 2024-05-26, 17:16:

I ran Windows 2K on a Pentium Pro 166 and it felt slow as a dog compared to Win98SE.

I'm just wondering because the Pentium Pro did not work well with 16 bit code still being used in Win98SE.
But the Pentium Pro should run well with any full 32 bit system like Windows 2000.

But perhaps the RAM is insufficient for Windows 2000 then.
Or you're talking about a Pentium MMX 166.

the 16 bits thingy is a "myth" created by the media on that time, the samples sent to the media had some faulty chipsets that made 16 bits code slow, but it didn't happen on end user products.

And Windows' own boot manager is sufficient for this ... Actually great that W2K per default installs to C:\WINNT rather than in C:\Windows

ibm5155 wrote on 2024-05-28, 16:41:

Disruptor wrote on 2024-05-26, 19:54:

I'm just wondering because the Pentium Pro did not work well with 16 bit code still being used in Win98SE. But the Pentium Pro s […]
Show full quote

kingcake wrote on 2024-05-26, 17:16:

I ran Windows 2K on a Pentium Pro 166 and it felt slow as a dog compared to Win98SE.

I'm just wondering because the Pentium Pro did not work well with 16 bit code still being used in Win98SE.
But the Pentium Pro should run well with any full 32 bit system like Windows 2000.

But perhaps the RAM is insufficient for Windows 2000 then.
Or you're talking about a Pentium MMX 166.

the 16 bits thingy is a "myth" created by the media on that time, the samples sent to the media had some faulty chipsets that made 16 bits code slow, but it didn't happen on end user products.

Plus isn't Win98 SE 90% 32 bit? Correct me if I'm wrong, but Isn't the only 16 bit component of Win98 the DOS 7.1 env that doesn't even do anything when the GUI is running?

H3nrik V! wrote on 2024-05-28, 17:17:

And Windows' own boot manager is sufficient for this ... Actually great that W2K per default installs to C:\WINNT rather than in C:\Windows

And you can add bootsector links to BOOT.INI (for example from primary partitions with FAT16 and FAT32)

Disruptor wrote on 2024-05-28, 18:08:

H3nrik V! wrote on 2024-05-28, 17:17:

And Windows' own boot manager is sufficient for this ... Actually great that W2K per default installs to C:\WINNT rather than in C:\Windows

And you can add bootsector links to BOOT.INI (for example from primary partitions with FAT16 and FAT32)

Yeah, probably, I'm just not invested enough to find out the syntax etc 🤣

65C02 wrote on 2024-05-28, 17:32:

Plus isn't Win98 SE 90% 32 bit? Correct me if I'm wrong, but Isn't the only 16 bit component of Win98 the DOS 7.1 env that doesn't even do anything when the GUI is running?

But don't forget your application software. The Pentium Pro comes out fall 1995, that's a few months into Win95's life. Taking just, say, office suites as an example, if you had the money, sure, you bought Office 95. If you were still a fan of WordImperfect, well, my recollection is that the first 32-bit version was version 7, which came out in May 1996. I don't think there was a ton of 32-bit application stuff in the second half of 1995 except the Very Serious Stuff that was already 32-bit for NT 3.5/3.51. Apparently Corel had CorelDRAW 6 for Win95 ready on Win95's release date... which, rather ironically, didn't do them much good since they lost their leadership place in Windows graphics to Adobe somewhere around that time.

Similarly on the gaming side - I'm pretty sure, say, CivII (release March 1996) is 16-bit only, then they quietly recompiled it for 32-bit with the Multiplayer Gold Edition in late 1998. Lots of people were still shipping DOS games in 1996, e.g. the first Quake.

Also, thinking about Pentium Pro for Win98 is... getting your timing wrong. Pentium Pro is forgotten about shortly after the release of the Pentium II, and that's in mid-1997, so a year ahead of Win98 FE.

Add the pricing, and I think it's obvious why Pentium Pro was largely limited to the nascent x86 workstation/server market running NT, some commercial x86 *NIX (I doubt the kind of people who could afford Pentium Pros would run RedHat 3.0.3 with kernel 1.2.13...), or maybe NetWare or similar.

(And actually, I remember at school we had a donated Pentium Pro server... or at least I'm pretty sure it was a Pentium Pro server... showed up running NT, people wanted it to run Linux, and... well, let's just say a multiprocessor box prior to kernel 2.2 was a challenge, that box gave people who were quite skilled at Linux a lot more trouble than your generic single-processor non-server hardware.)