Reply 40 of 44, by sirnephilim
wrote:I take this opportunity for something I have in my head for a while. What is the benefit of using 5x86P75 instead of DX2? Aside from a benchmark talk, it's not as fast as a pentium so you earn some frames in heavy games like Doom but you lose the fact of having the legendary DX2 in your computer. Although slower it is still interesting to try the games in the cpu which was the standard (pre pentium). Not know if i explain. There is neither a 486 nor a Pentium. At the time it could be interesting to upgrade a 486, but now ?? If you need the speed of the pentium better get a pentium
The 5x86 gives you an extra bit of overhead while still working on a Socket-3 board. There's also the Pentium Overdrive 83MHz which was actually a Pentium slotted to Socket-3 if you want Intel's ultimate offering for the platform. At any rate, I believe the popularity is due to the fact that most people building 486 rigs are (speaking for myself at least) going back to the time when they wanted that bit of kit but could not afford it or justify the expense at the time. (Let's be honest here, a lot of this hobby is deferred wish fulfillment.)
Quake was the hard breakpoint between the 486 and what came after, and if you want to run Quake era games well you're better off going a bit beyond the original Pentium. I'm planning a K6 as my next true build but that's not going to be for a while yet.