First post, by s.mouse
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- Newbie
Hey Guys,
I have tested and documented performance of 5 various elusive socket 4 motherboards I have collected and posted results below. Rocking 3 different chipsets just to make things interesting. As a comparison I have added in Benchmark results from my fastest AMD X5 133Mhz motherboard as well as an Intel DX4 100Mhz. I am yet to get my grubby mits on an Opti based board, but hope to get a hold of one someday; I’m very interested to see how poorly they actually perform, as from what I’ve read they are not especially fast. I do own a socket 7 Opti Viper motherboard and although I love it of course, it benchmarks the slowest of all the chipsets I have tried.
The socket 4 boards I own so far are as follows. It has taken a while to find them for a somewhat "reasonable" price.
-Dell P60/L (Intel 430LX)
-Intel Batman (Intel 430LX)
-Pine Technologies PT-726 (Intel 430LX) Sorry haven't included this board in benchmarks but it benchmarks slower that the other LX boards and marginally faster than the Ali and Sis, i think the default cache timings which cant be adjusted are not that good.
-DFI E586IPE (Intel 430LX)
-ECS/ Elitegroup SI5PI (SIS 501/ 502 and 503 chips)
-Chicony CH1451A (ALi M1451 and M1448 chips)
-Cache and memory timing have been adjusted to fast as possible and stable enough to run through all benchmarks on boards that allow tuning. The Dell, Batman and Pine technologies have no bios settings relating to performance what so ever that can be adjusted I guess they may be OEM parts. Despite this this the Dell and intel batman boards are quite fast, they basically match the DFI 430LX board which has all tuning options as fast as possible. The DFI, ECS and Chicony bards have tuning options.
The benchmarks have been completed with a 60Mhz chip as well as a 66Mhz chip
I also own a socket 4 Pentium overdrive 133Mhz. Let me know if you guys would are interested in benchmarks for that
For benchmarking I have used Phils Dos benchmark pack. Shout out to Phil and thanks for the great information and videos as always
My conclusion is the Pentium 60Mhz and 66Mhz at the time of release (1993) was an absolute beast, The IPC gain was very impressive. Blowing away the fastest 486 DX2 66mhz of the time. It’s between 25% and 100% faster than the DX2 depending what test, excluding quake which is almost 3 x faster on the pentium. Looking at later pentium 1's the performance/ FPS per Mhz is comparable so the chipsets really are not as bad as they general consensus around them is notably the 430LX.
In comparison to the socket 3 platform the 60Mhz Pentium is slightly faster that a DX4 100 but its takes an AMD 5x86 X5 133Mhz to trade blows with the mighty 66Mhz chip. Keeping in mind the X5 is over 2 years newer and twice the clock speed. Taking Quake out of the equation the X5 is marginally faster overall and can beat the Pentium in most tests. Then come the quake benchmark, with the Pentiums powerful FPU and quake optimisations is easily leaves the X5 in the dust.
As for heat and poor stability which these early 5 volt Pentium have bad reputation for, my experience has been quite good. Yes they are somewhat hotter but by the standards set a few years later its really not a big deal. For the time they certainly would’ve seemed a lot hotter as everyone would’ve been use to 486 chips which either didn’t have heatsink/ fan and if they did they were tiny. The intel chipset itself gets a bit warm, I probably wouldn’t run the system on a hot day without a fan blowing over them in fear of something failing. Stability wise all the chipsets seem quite stable. I have used the Dell system quite extensively; playing though Warcraft 2 and beyond the dark portal campaigns under windows 95 from start to finish and the system hasn’t skipped a beat. i am quite fond of the dell
For more photos follow google drive link https://drive.google.com/open?id=1OMbkNdtkSJh … izcHRgZda2xy3_t
Thanks for reading guys (: let me know your thoughts
