The best solution, Pentium 2 overdrive. DEAR LORD, these chips are quick! ^.^

luckybob wrote:

The best solution, Pentium 2 overdrive. DEAR LORD, these chips are quick! ^.^

Wasn't there an adapter that could put a socket 370 Celeron into a Socket 8 system? That would be even faster.

Sometimes u guys are pretty clear with answers, but this time I'm actually more confused then before asking the question. Maybe I wasnt clear enough... The question is, would ppro perform better in games of that era? K6 had a terrible FPU and if it got paired with GF/GF2 the performance was just plain terrible. I bet PII 233Mhz performs much better then the lame K6.

...so, if ppro is comparable to PII 233, it should be better then k6, right?

Pls dont make me build yet another retro rig just to test this 😜

Yeah I think a PPro 200 might be similar to a K6-2 300-350 in 3D games. Some games will complain about the lack of MMX though and this probably has a speed impact. Unreal will run low quality audio by default when it doesn't detect MMX.

Also, PPro 200 can frequently be run at 233 because motherboards sometimes have a 3.5x multiplier setting (sometimes unlabeled). Some 200s aren't stable at 233 of course.

Another consideration is that PPro is a hot chip, especially the 1MB L2 PPro (>40W CPU). They typically consume 3-4x the power of a K6. Some Socket 8 boards do not even officially support the 1MB chip perhaps because of VRM concerns. My VS440FX hasn't burned up yet tho!

elfuego, if you can wait until about Christmas, I should have every CPU concievable between 60-600 MHz benchmarked with 23 different benchmark programs. With respect to 3D, Quake 1, Quake 2, Doom 1, MDK, 3DMark99Max, 3DWinbench 97, and Final Reality are in the mix.

I shouldn't say every CPU, NexGen's and Slot 2 Xeon's probably won't make the tally because I either cannot find them, cannot find them cheap, or cannot find someone who has them and is willing to run the benchmarks. I'm particularly looking forward benchmarking the Cyrix MediaGX CPUs as well as the VIA C3 Samuel, Samuel-2, Ezra, and early Nehemiah. These I am saving for a rainy day.

K6-2 is really underwhelming- I had a 500mhz K6-2 and it did little to impress me. The Ppro on the other hand, considering it has only 200mhz, blew my mind.

PPro certainly was built with few compromises. It was Intel trying to defeat all of the specialty low-volume, high-performance RISC CPUs of the time. PPro was a pretty nice start on that.

K6 on the other hand was a budget design built to work on the limited Socket 7 platform. If only they could have put some L2 on-die sooner.

When the PPro arrived I read a rather technical article in the german magazine c't and was quite impressed about all the new ideas intel had realized. I never owned one though because it was incredibly expensive.
K6 scored in this area as cheap upgrade of existing S7 / SS7 mainboards, so I went this way. I still think a K6 was a good deal at this time considering price/performance ratio. This changed when AMD introduced the Athlon and Intel had to lower their P2 prices.

the pentium pro is not that fast according to this review

http://www.anandtech.com/print/296

and the k6-2 is not that bad neither.

from what i have seen, the k6-2/3 where very close to the pentium 2/3 in glide

the k6-2+ was quite better than pentum II

sepultribe wrote:

and the k6-2 is not that bad neither.

from what i have seen, the k6-2/3 where very close to the pentium 2/3 in glide

the k6-2+ was equal if not better than pentum II

You are right, its not that bad, its terrible. Please take a look at the graphs again, you must have missed the fact that P2 being 100 Mhz slower brings 30% more FPS then overclocked K6/3 in Glide.

Thats the pure definition of terrible if you ask me 😊

Edit: K6/3 @ 500Mhz actually has the performance which can compare to P2@266Mhz according to the anandtech artice. But we still miss the comparison between P2@266 vs PPRO in glide, which would enable us to see the real difference between PPRO vs K6/2-3 😀

Just became a member... Never been a member of a forum before... I joined just to reply to this subject...

Thanks swaaye for the info... I bought my P-Pro SL259 because you showed it does work with the VS440FX. Just got it today & dropped it in. MoBo sees all 1MB of cache.
I may also try 233MHz overclock in the near future.

Anyway I just built a P-Pro system to play my old games on. All parts in system could have been bought in 1997. I started with a Gateway 2000 G6-200 system. It was $2800 new, & included a monitor, speakers, keyboard, mouse, & printer. After all the upgrades listed below, this machine would have costed about $6500 - $7000 new in '97. That's an awsome rig - back in '97 anyway.

Here are the current specs after the upgrades:

Pentium Pro 200Mhz 1MB SL259
Intel VS440FX ATX mainboard - Gateway OEM
64MB EDO RAM
ATI Rage II 4MB SGRAM - Gateway OEM
3dfx Voodoo Graphics 4Mb (Diamond Monster 3D)
Creative SB Awe64 Gold - retail version
Seagate Barracuda 4LP ST34371W
Seagate Cheetah 4LP ST34501W

Next payday I will add:

another 64MB EDO RAM
an Adaptec AHA-2940UW
a 4-port USB 2.0 card

I would probably go with 256MB of RAM, but the VS440FX auto switches to slower memory timings if using 64MB SIMMs. This will cause performance hit I do not want.

I boot from the Seagate Cheetah 4LP ST34501W. For those that don't know this was the fastest HDD in the world in '97, the first 10,000RPM HDD, & was easily 50% faster than most mainstream HDD's at the time. From the time the last SCSI HDD detects, it takes about 6 sec. to fully boot into Win 98SE. Far faster than other HDDs I used back then...

I 'm planing to do a dual-boot install of Win 95 OSR2.5 & Win NT4 SP6a. All games that don't need DOS or Direct3D to run I will use with Win NT4.

Games that know now that I will be playing on this system are Tomb Raider, Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, Quake, Quake II, & Turok: Dinosaur Hunter

I'll tell how everything goes in the near future... Later...

Nice setup! It's always fun to set up a period authentic machine, especially when the original sale price of the hardware was extreme. I haven't put together my VS440FX in a couple of years.

@Tetrium you still use the VS440FX that I mailed you?

swaaye wrote:

Nice setup! It's always fun to set up a period authentic machine, especially when the original sale price of the hardware was extreme. I haven't put together my VS440FX in a couple of years.

@Tetrium you still use the VS440FX that I mailed you?

I did test the board when I got it, even trying out the 233Mhz option, but the board never made it into a rig. I still plan on doing so though (I happened to think about that board only a week or 2 ago) but I'd rather wait till winter is over before I touch anything and destroying it with my ESD fingers of death 🤣

swaaye wrote:

K6 on the other hand was a budget design built to work on the limited Socket 7 platform. If only they could have put some L2 on-die sooner.

You do realize that the PPro L2 cache wasn't on die, it was just on package? (That's what made it so expensive.)
The first Intel CPU with on-die L2 was the Celeron 300A, and the first Intel CPU with 256K L2 on die (like the K6-III) was the Pentium III Coppermine which was officially released on October 25, 1999. The K6-III was released on February 22, 1999 (although I don't know if it really was available in quantities soon after that) which seems to be quite an accomplishment to me.

idspispopd wrote:

You do realize that the PPro L2 cache wasn't on die, it was just on package? (That's what made it so expensive.)

Yes of course.

I think the first Intel CPU with on-die L2 was actually the Pentium II "Dixon" for notebooks and has 256K L2. It was initially a 250nm chip. Mendocino may have been the same chip but with cache disabled.

swaaye wrote:

Yes of course.

Sorry, I didn't mean to insult you, I wasn't sure from your wording what your point was. It sounded a bit like AMD introduced on-die L2 cache years after Intel did which would imply this.

swaaye wrote:

I think the first Intel CPU with on-die L2 was actually the Pentium II "Dixon" for notebooks and has 256K L2. It was initially a 250nm chip. Mendocino may have been the same chip but with cache disabled.

You are right, I forgot about the mobile chips. The date I could find for Dixon is January 25, 1999 so this would make it the first Intel CPU with 256K L2 and beating AMD. Still later then the Celeron 300A Medocino which was released on August 28, 1998. The specifications sound similar so they could be based on the same design like you suggest.

Anyway, my point was that the introduction of the K6-3 was not really that late compared to Intels chips.

idspispopd wrote:

Anyway, my point was that the introduction of the K6-3 was not really that late compared to Intels chips.

I was just imagining if they had produced K6-2 with say 64K L2. It would have helped tremendously with the FSB bottleneck that chip suffered from. But I'm sure it crossed the engineers' minds but just was infeasible at the time.

Hard to say. The K6-2+ had 128k L2 cache which made it perform more like a K6-3 than a K6-2.

On the other hand the K6-2 already had 32k L1 data cache and 32k L1 code cache. AFAIK the L2 cache only became a victim cache with the Athlon so the L2 cache would have to be larger than the L1 cache to really help performance. (Compare the Duron with 64k L1 data + 64k L1 code + 64k L2 cache.)

Maybe 128k L2 like the K6-2+ would have been feasible earlier.

whturner wrote:

100% right - have you checked the price on 9 pin dot matrix printers?

I got a 9 pin Okidata 180 for $2 locally. The best part was the people that had it before didn't know there was a protective film on the front. After removal it looks brand new. I also picked up a working Vectra Pentium Pro from a local garage sale for $8. I'm just saying you'd be suprised what you can find at local thrift stores, etc.

I am still using my dual PP computer - albeit much upgraded. It is the only computer in house I can use to convert the old 5.25 floppies to archival form: some are worth saving.
In addition, with the upgrades, the grandchildren can play their games on it, watch UTube and so forth. Further, when I want to, it is quick enough for my own run of the mill stuff. I can't type fast enough to see any real difference between my main rig (I7 with SSD disks) and my PP modified.
But the main point is not to compare the PP with todays gaming computers, but with what was available at the time it was introduced. In my case, it immediately more than doubled the speed of the fortran programs I was developing. It is easy to forget that 16 bit was the standard then, and the PP was early in the move to 32 bit. (No wonder it didn't run 16 bit programs all that well - it wasn't supposed to.) I didn't find a reason to upgrade until the P4.
My current configuration:
Board: Intel PR440FX, but the version without the onboard SCSI or USB v1. (As an aside, does anyone know where or who used this board, my original had onboard Scsi and USB.)
CPU: PP 200 Overdrives
Memory ! GB
Drives: Hitachi IDE 500GB
WD Caviar IDE - Win 2K sp4 (Boot)
Corsair SSD 120 GB - XP sp3 (Boot)
Display: NVidia GForce 6200
PCI Adapter: Silicon Image - 2 port SATA II One used to boot XP, the other external for large Sata II storage.
USB : 4 Port Belkin USB II The original board had on board USB I
CD\DVD drive updated
Floppy drives one each 5.25, 3.5
Network adapter: There are several USB adapters I am trying. A couple I have found work pretty well, even though they are not listed as supporting the Win 2K operating system. In dual boot system the adapter needs to support both XP and WIN 2K.

Performance and othe observations:
On HD Tach, the Hitachi and WD Caviar achieve about 15 mb/s, the Corsair SSD 60 mb/sec.
both on a PCI bus. However, Win 2K in IDE, even compared to the XP on SSD, is still a bit quicker in typical use.
I ran the Win 7 compatibility tool, which reported that Win 7 was not supported by the current configuration.

All in all, I like the upgrades and results in a very "useable" computer, but it appears the board and PCI bus have as much influence as the processor itself.

Cheers
Warren