First post, by mpe
Everybody knows the P75 is better right?
Most benchmarks are biased in favour of the P75 by running it with a mature P54C chipset, such as the Intel 430FX (Triton). In fact the Triton chipset was a huge hit. It introduced pipelined-burst cache to the mainstream significantly improving performance. Also there was EDO support and deeper post write buffer noticeably helping memory performance. Don't forget vastly superior IDE with DMA support. Hard to compete with that. There is no surprise the P75 often came on top in almost all benchmarks I've seen so far.
But what if we do the comparison on a level ground?
I have these two almost identical motherboards. The first is the popular Batman's Revenge Socket 4 board. It sports the first Intel's Pentium chipset - 430LX (Mercury). It is by no means Triton, but still was a competent board back in its days.
And then it's almost identical twin - Intel Plato. Based on 430NX (Neptune). One would be pushed to find more than 10 differences between the boards 😀. The Napture is practically identical to Mercury as far as performance is concerned. Essentially a 3.3V of the same.
So we have Pentium 66 MHz @ 66 MHz bus with PCI @ 33 MHz on 430LX board against the 75 MHz @ 50 MHz bus with 25 MHz PCI on 430NX. Same RAM, same cache, standard Intel (neither slow nor aggressive) timings. Is 9 extra internal MHz enough to maintain P75's lead when considering 16 MHz less on the bus bus and slower PCI?
Which one you think would win this (standard DOS benchmarks from Phil's Pack + Winstone 95 in Win 3.1 using a high-end 1993 PCI card to make it more interesting)?
The thing is that the Dallas chip on the plato board is dead - so it is not POSTing. So until I desolder and replace it to be able to run benchmarks everybody is invited to put some educated guess here 😀