amadeus777999 wrote on 2023-09-16, 12:02:

Got my

first Pentium60 system in February 1995 and now I have 4 - unfortunately all in generic cases, not a single one of the nicer OEM based ones of yesteryears.

If a gfx card does not cooperate in Win9x one has to reconfigure the irqs, which was, in my case, needed to get Matrox cards to work(I failed at this back in 95 when trying to run Win95 and a Mystique).
As for the IDE controller - I never had a problem with data corruption but I do not run the systems 24/7.

Only "bad" thing is that the standard 430LX boards do not provide many (BIOS) options for "tuning" performance. But... once you compare them with "better" boards, like the SI5PI AIO, it becomes obvious that these are only faster on paper(marginally in the real world). On top of that it's pretty cumbersome to tune a board like the SI5PI to full performance as many sram chips are needed(I used two 12ns tags to get it stable at the best settings). But, if one puts in the work these boards can be tuned to 2MiB of 2nd level cache which may render the platform in a pretty "exquisite" light.

User "mpe" modded and benched one of his boards in said fashion...
Upgrading Socket 4 L2 cache to 2048k (ECS SI5PI MB)
https://dependency-injection.com/elitegroup-s … -cache-upgrade/
https://dependency-injection.com/2mb-cache-benchmarks/

So, if you want a fancier board, you may look out for one with the SiS501/502/503 chipset(like the SI5PI or R512) but the real world performance won't be (that) much better - e.g. Quake demo3 runs at 16.5fps on the SiS chipset(512KiB cache) and 15.7fps on a standard Intel one(256KiB cache).
I do not know how many alternatives there are but Opti based boards seem to be pretty slow.

Interesting! thanks!

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-09-15, 14:39:

To iterate points already made, yeah you really need to get into P60/66 socket 4 systems

as at least a board combo with motherboard, CPU and heatsink, because tracking everything down separately will take years, and you'll probably overpay for the last thing you get out of desperation.

By 1995, with fast 486es around, and faster Pentiums on the market, they definitely did not look good and that was an era of mass scrappage. They had an edge in CAD and Scientific work early on. But 16 bit windows and mass market games of 1993 and 1994 were not a "killer app" for them. However, if you clung on to one through late 1995 and into 1996, "everything was turning up Pentium" windows 95 runs great on mine, and while the hardcore gamer would not have been satisfied with their performance vs a Pentium 100, they did allow you to play true pentium instructions only games, albeit slower than anything but a POD 63. In relative terms they gained performance again when everything was 32 bit and would have made a bearable office/web/casual gamer box through the later 90s.

I got mine just before/around turn of the millennium, in the "grabbing anything that computes" phase to get more of the fam online and to "unload" mine and my wife's machines. Setup with a 56k modem, the P60 was capable of browsing while playing MP3s with winamp, which the top end 486es could not do... you could play an MP3 maybe, but doing anything else would stutter it, drop it out and make whatever else you were trying to do also painful. So Socket 4 would have turned into a reasonable long term buy, but it took the software catching up to take advantage of Pentium architecture before Pentium was ready for primetime and really pulled away from 486 cores and there was that few years where it looked like a complete turkey. On data available to me at the time, and disregarding the "it'll get better" promises, I went with fast 486 in the mid 90s. I could have scraped up enough for a P75 system maybe and that would have been a better choice. But I was put off by the trash talking of how lame the bus was at 50mhz on Pentiums... and was not aware at the time that P75s by the time they were mass market, would overclock A LOT. So I was fooled by the pentium "dead spot" also.

Edit: POD 63/83 for a "barely a pentium" choice do of course have the additional risk of badly coded check from the programmer that go "This is a 486 so I'm not even going to try to work" due to whatever parameter they looked at to define whether they were on a pentium machine or not.

Wow! thanks!