Back in the days (97 or so) when PII started to become mainstream here in Italy, I worked in a computer dealer franchise shop and, I can still remember it clearly as it was yesterday, the franchise gave us for selling a PII 233 PC that run SO HOT, after ten minutes or so you could not touch the metal frame of the case for long anymore. Tried EVERYTHING to make it run cooler. Didn't work. But the even more staggering fact is, we sold that PC with all its drawback (it was a veritable stove, thing that in Naples is not really required even in winter, most of the times) and we didn't hear from the buyer anymore. The warranty here in Italy back then was a year (today is two) and for all I know that PC never gave the buyer any annoyance, beside running hotter than a full throttled V8 with a faulty radiator (thing that I'm sure wasn't appreciated in summer, back then especially, since in those days AC was a rare commodity).
30 seconds in. OMG, this video is going to be my jam. This exact processor with its funky case was my first PC after my 386, and I haven't seen a video reference it yet. My grandmother bought it for me going into my first year of college. Can't believe now how expensive that PC was (I was young and don't know if we got ripped off), but that UFO game in the intro, damn, I remember that.
Similar here. But you jumped high. I went to 486 66 and then 100 MHz. Pentium 100 then Pentium MMX on 133, celeron 333 and finally this ugly piece of love :D
Wow, that's a lot of interations in between. The jump from 386 to PII was huge for me. I remember going back at some point and asking my father where the old 386 was, because I couldn't find it anywhere, and he told me he took it to the dump. Without asking me! That was all my teenage years stuffed into that 150 megabytes. I did thankfully have all my old MODs/S3M's I had made, but some things are gone forever now. Sigh.
The 386-DX40 I had didn't have a floating point unit, and I wanted to run the early DOS version of 3D Studio (pre-max), so I had to run a floating point emulator, which as you can imagine just made things painfully slow. I might have even used one of those early "ram doublers", lol. Wish I had more records or memory or files from that early time in my computing life (although I did have a C64 and Vic 20 before that).
This was the second machine I had, too. Before that my father brought an old 486 from work, which I may still have somewhere. It ran Windows 95 after we removed DOS and re-partitioned the drive (split into five or six tiny partitions) but couldn't run many games, although my young self managed to get Theme Hospital running. After we got the new 233mHz machine, I bought 'Unreal', got stuck on the single-player and fell in love with the offline multi-player. Also, Quake II was one I played over and over again! Half-life, Final Fantasy VII, Total Annihilation, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Theme Park, etc. Awesome!
Awesome stuff man. This again takes me back. After my mom bought me my first PC for Christmas back in 96 when I was 14, I've been building my own PCs ever since following that Cyrix-based PC, exclusively from AMD starting with the K6-2 running at 350Mhz, upgrading later to a 550Mhz K6-III, then an Athlon Slot A running at 1Ghz which shares a similar design to the Pentium II showcased in this video. That CPU was my first and only Slot A, but I always found it quite unique in the design and pretty cool at the time. All of my purchasing was done through TigerDirect magazines as the internet was still rather fledgling in those days. After the Athlon Slot A I moved on to a Thunderbird Socket A Athlon running 1.4Ghz, then an Athlon XP 2000+. Following the 2000+ I ended up with the dual-core Athlon 64 X2 (Toledo) running at 2Ghz. I believe I still have the XP 2000+ and 64 X2 in my closet somewhere. I still use the upgrade from the 64 X2 in a secondary desktop that contains a Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition running 3Ghz which I used for a considerable amount of time before transitioning to Intel for the first time with an i7 3770k which is what I use in my main desktop currently. AMD CPUs, as you're probably aware, fell off in performance considerably to the point where I felt no choice but to make the switch. Hopefully following the upcoming Zen-era of CPUs I'll be able to move back to AMD, but not for quite some time as I imagine my 3770k lasting for many years. The name of the game for me at the time was Everquest. I still remember the scaling of performance over the years as I upgraded my system specifically for that game as it was the hottest thing on the market in terms of online gaming for the time period. Those were the days man. Did you ever play Everquest back during its peak? Also, I assume from your accent that you're also German - though in the video you mention Australia so I reckon a bit of both? I detect some German influence on your accent, maybe I'm wrong. I don't really speak any because I was born in the U.S. but my grandfather on my father's side was born in Germany. I bare the German last name of course. Sprechen Sie Deutsch? That's about all I remember that my grandpa taught me, heh. P.S. - I also had Incoming. It was a pretty fun game and showcased the upgrade to my first Voodoo2 quite well. I was very impressed.
I upgraded to a Pentium II 300MHz system directly from a 486 ISA system that was maxed out on upgrades, skipping entirely over the Pentium CPU generation. The leap in performance for me was outstanding! I ended up getting an 440LX chipset, unknowingly shortly before the release of the 440BX and 100MHz FSB speeds. Still, I wasn't upset considering what I upgraded from. My system was solid as hell and performed more than adequately for my needs at the time.
I had a PII 233 mhz proc in 1998, 32 MB RAM and 2 GB HDD, it was a beast back in the day! Sweet sweet times when I was about to enter college, your video made my day
Fairly low 233mhz? The CPU was lightning fast relatively speaking back in the day...EDIT (because I was pinged) I had one, a P2-233 32mb ram, and an ATI rage pro 4mb on one of the then new AGP ports...my friend was very jealous as he was still rocking a P180 although he had a fantastic orchid righteous 4mb Voodoo 1 in his machine...
The BX platform was pretty amazing back in the day. It is arguably the most upgradeable platform ever produced. Most systems can handle a 1.4ghz with an adapter or 1ghz without. When I finally upgraded to an Athlon I had gone through 3 video cards, 2 CPUs and countless sticks of memory. My final configuration was a Radeon 8500, 1.3ghz Celeron and 756mb of RAM. The only real headache was the hard drive limits, at least once the IRQ issues were resolved.
One thing to note is that the 440GX chipset is another option for a motherboard, since its really the workstation/server version of the 440BX. Not really necessary of course, but its a potential option.
Love the channel! I used to be in the PC industry, brings back a lot of memories. This processor was one of the last that had character. By the time we got beyond the P2 it all seemed to go soul-less. I think part of the problem was when Windows took over completely and PCs evolved into a blur of modern technology, where differences in games and performance became nothing more than FPS differences.
Thank you! Compared to what's happening now, any of these older parts are so much cooler :D I scratch my head when I realise it's been like 20 years, so I have a lot of parts ahead of me :D
Did you ever have problems running Screamer 2 on a PII? It's the only game I cannot get working - gives a 2001 error in DOS4GW. Tried quite a few things - disabling sound, changing memory config to use XMS or EMS, even tried different DOS4GW.EXE versions. I wonder if its just a CPU incompatibility?
I got past that problem - just bought an original copy of the game and it works fine on the PII. Although I now have a new problem now with CD audio slowing the game down - I need to play with the CD drivers I think lol. I thought I would post this update because I have seen other people looking for a solution to the DOS4GW crash problem - it was related to the hacked version of the game.
Great video. I was waiting for a Pentium 2 vs K6-2 benchmark :). I hope you will also test a CeleronA Mendocino against the Pentium 2 and K6-2. Back in 1998-1999 everyone wanted to see benchmarks with those cpus. The first cpu with full speed cache was the CeleronA not the Pentium 3.
if you review the original "celery sandwich" you have to overclock it. There was a huge gain from the 233MHz model I believe some people could reach 400MHz with the stock cooler. It was the only cpu I could afford at the time and it got me through university and counter strike LAN parties!
The 300A had half the cache but it ran at the CPU clock (IIRC this was before the P3 did that unlike what was stated in the vid) and often overclocked to 4.5 x 100 witch combined with the faster chache often resulted in a faster processor than a P2@450 (the fastest P2) and on par with the P3@450 (the slowest P3)
@3dfx Voodoo - Actually you're both wrong. The first CPU with a full speed cache was the Pentium Pro back in 1995. From what I understand Intel had serious yield problems, which is why they went to the half speed cache on a card system in the Pentium 2. Later when the manufacturing technology got better there was a return to full speed on die L2 cash with the Celeron A leading to the eventual abandonment of the cartridge format.
I can't recommend those SD IDE adapters enough. They perform very well, they have lower and more consistent latency compared to a spinning drive. Drives from that era of machine are getting VERY long in the tooth, so you're just gambling with time that a spinning disk is going to last. It's very easy to remove and back them up if you're going to play with different configurations, and if you have the bracket version like Phil, it means you could easily swap between a DOS, windows98 or windows 2k/XP install without opening the machine.
you should underclock that voodoo3 to about half speed, so it wont wear out so much. Even at half speed, it is fast enough to that processor. It needs around 500-700 Mhz Pentium III, to fully utilize it, so it is not bottlenecked by CPU.
1st PC was based on a Celeron 400 (Mendocino) CPU and a Gateway motherboard with onboard 8MB Rage 128 VR graphics and Sound Blaster PCI 64 audio, running Windows 98se. Great for playing games like Wipeout 2097 and Tempest 2000. Eventually moved on to an Athlon XP 2000+, which was great in other ways, but ran way too fast for Wipeout 2097.
Wow man, something up with the build there. I used to run quake 2 and half life on my MMX with no dips below 75fps. Then again I was also running a voodoo banshee.
Will you also make a video using various socket 370 FPGA to slot 1 converters? I used to love playing with them. My fave was the tualatin-based ones... Drool...
Great video..! I heard you mentioning in a few recent videos of yours, that you were growing quite fond of the SD -> IDE adapters as to compared to CF -> IDE. I have two old laptops here (Compaq Contura 400C / 486DX40) (Toshiba Satellite 200CLS / Pentium 100) that both still have their original 2.5" harddrives (Quantum 250MB / Seagate 810MB respectively). Though both of them are still working I was thinking about what to do when they start to cease doing it. Is the option of going SD -> 2.5" IDE for possible HDD replacements as viable as going CompactFlash? I was wondering about compatibility. Also it would make a monitary difference, considering that CF cards are quite a bit pricier...
KilgoreOnDrugs Huh. I looked it up and sure enough it wasn't released until 2000. So must have been a different one, since we never upgraded that computer to my knowledge. But I do remember it saying Nvidia and geforce on the card and it had a single vga output.
It was probably a Riva 128 which was nVidia's first successful graphics card and it came out in 1997 too.I purchased a Gateway 2000 G6-233 model on eBay last year which came with a Pentium II 233 Mhz Slot 1 processor and a Gateway 2000 branded STB Velocity 128 AGP (nVidia Riva 128) graphics card.It also came with 128 MB of RAM. It could have been the same make and model as your first family computer.
m9078jk3 I've now found out it was a Dell Dimension XPS D233. Yes, that graphics card seems to have been it according to multiple sources. Not much info on this machine online though. Best I could find was this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Dimension#XPS_series
Good video. Just want to add that for people who want the unlocked multiplier, the fastest CPU to reliably have that was the P2-300 (which still uses the Klamath core). The 233/266/300 are all the same Klamath CPUs as discussed here, but it's nice to have one that's officially rated to handle a higher speed. Since the multiplier is unlocked, you can clock them however you want. I'm not sure about the 333 - I think those might have been Deschutes cores which tended to be locked. The P2-350 and above are really a different tier since they require a 100FSB capable motherboard. I have a bunch of P2 Deschutes CPUs (got them in an eBay lot many years ago). Some of them are unlocked when setting the multiplier lower, but they won't let you set it higher. Others are fully locked. When browsing eBay, be careful with the heatsinks that are provided. A lot of eBay listings sell slot-1 CPUs with heatsinks that are little more than crinkled tinfoil. They probably got liquidated from fleets of rackmount servers that had the CPUs sitting in a wind tunnel. In a normal desktop case those heatsinks are not suitable for use and will get very very hot.
Thanks. I believe I tested all those CPUs, there should be individual videos and I mentioned if I found the multiplier to be unlocked. I once forgot to plug the fan back in, and did the entire benchmark run with a Pentium II 300. No issues, but man that thing was hot when I realised...
Just bought an old IBM Optiva with this processor. I didn't actually know of any other processor design then what I had in my 486 and what I've had in all the computers after. Can't wait to get my hands on it and check it out.
Very enjoyable review, looking forward to the new videos. This brings back memories of overclocking with the 440BX chipset. I still have this exact CPU but it isn't being used at the moment. I also had the Abit BF6 - basically the BH6 with a few additional features. Unfortunately the mobo was stolen while I was in college. Now I have an Asus P3B-F slot 1 system with a PIII 500MHz for some Win98 gaming. I really miss the Abit board, loved that thing. It's difficult to get a good 440BX board for cheap these days.
PCs have come a long way, it is nice to see some appreciation for the older roots of modern pc gaming. wow. My first pc was an acer, I was such a noob, I didn't even pay attention to it's specs, I wish I could remember. oh well. :(
Now were in the era of computers that I've fiddled the most with. This is going to be good!!! And I hope you'll cover the "Slotket/Slocket" adaptors, I thing they would make a good little video for you to make :)
I don't think Incoming ever ran that smoothly on my machines back then. They sure loved their colored lighting, didn't they? Thanks, Unreal! I have a loose Celeron 300 in a slotket adapter sitting around that I used in an Asus P3B-F motherboard, but I have a fully-assembled machine of that vintage with: Dual Slot-1 Pentium II 400s Creative Labs DVD drive w/ DXR2 decoder board 1x Voodoo 2 Matrox G-series card w/ Rainbow Runner video capture box (can't remember if it's G200 or G400) With all the video boards, the back of the machine is a mess of pass-thru cables. I really should switch over to a tiny SSD or one of those SD-IDE adapters you used here. I used an HDD from that time, but boy is it loud. I think I'm out of free slots in that machine, though. It would be fun to crack it open to optimize the innards with all these new converters and adapters.
love the slot 1 boards trying to get together some atx cases going to build multiple systems for retro gaming and a hole lot of other old software I have.
I found one of those Abit BH-6 from electronics trash some time ago. Haven't tried if it works yet. I also have one ABit BE6-II which is a bit unstable, most likely needs recapping. BTW. How would have a 100 MHz bus K6-2 done against the Pentium II? Can you do a 66 MHz vs 100 MHz K6-2 test? What SD to IDE adapter are you using? eBay link?
6 years later going through reviews again as a reference for the Pentium ii 350 I intend to run at 233MHz (or the OG 233 with an 80mm fan strapped on), still have no idea how the stock active cooler as able to handle the heat output. Also, unlike my first PII 350 (bought as a 233 due to seller using a 440LX board) - upon removing the heatsink, my particular 233 has 4x cache chips instead of the 2 found on Deschutes PII. And they definitely are the higher latency chips that might not handle being overclocked to 266MHz (something that the Intel SE440BX-2 allows). I was also wrong 6 years ago, the Celeron 333/500 actually isn't fully stable (still gets into windows for CPUID) - and none of my Slot1 boards allow the voltage to be adjusted. The 450A is rock solid however (although in a Slotket my Celeron 500 manages to edge it out occasionally).
Fun Fact: The Pentium II 233 and the Pentium II 266 are actually identical except the label on the box. You can run every PII 233 at 266 Mhz just by setting one jumper. In some cases the setting can be done within the BIOS setup. Back in the days my mainboard was supporting an uneven bus speed of 68,5 Mhz. So I managed to set the Pentium II 233 to 274 Mhz. That system was running perfectly without any issues.
Great video. Funny thing, a couple hours ago I bench tested a PII 233 mhz on a"bboring" oem mobo. It was on a Gateway GP7-550 paired with a PIII 550. The PII worked at 133mhz, no option to change the multiplier on the mobo. Thinking on making a DOS Win 3.11 rig. Back in the day these costed an arm and a leg so had to settle with Cyrix then later with Celeron.
Another great video Phil, good job. I'm looking forward to watching the next part. In the comparsion, I would prefer to have K6-2 running at 4x100, at least the more demanding games should use the faster FSB. Did you try the QuakeII patch for AMD 3Dnow! instructions? Back in the days, it was massively advertised by AMD and brought more fps, especially in software rendering mode (which is unplayable, but good for comparison), but also added a little performance boost in openGL accelerated mode. And congratulations for getting such great board in top condition, you're now free to use everything from slot1 CPUs to 370 PPGA and FCPGA cpus :)
Entertaining as always, thank you very much for this video. I got myself a pentium III-450 including a 440bx-mainboard and a voodoo3 (agp) a few weeks ago on ebay. I remember the time i got the p2-300 from my dad. Together with the voodoo3-3000 it was mindblowing comparing to my old p1-100. Later i used a socket 370-to-slot 1-adapter for a 1GHz Celeron. Which wasn't the best idea retrospectively... Oh, and i can remember pronouncing me the word cache like "cash" or "cage" back in the days here in germany... :O
I actually have one of these-but the fan on its cooler died so its useless until I manage to remove the heatsink and replace it-not an easy task when its rusted on. Though with contact B21 severed on my Celeron 333A I haven't got a use for anything else slot 1-it runs at 500MHz on *any* motherboard that supports a 100MHZ FSB. And I'm glad that my SE440BX-2 automatically detects the voltage as the Celeron 333A reuires a bit of a voltage jump unlike my 300A, which at 450MHz runs on its stock voltage.
I have a P2/3 dos box that I just have a hard time getting slow enough! I was even looking for a socket 370 to underclock on a slocket, and for some reason, just kept forgetting that this processor exists (I have a PPro lying around, and it was a search for a socket 8 board that made me say "duh" and order one of these on ebay). The price hasn't come down much since you made this video, but I hope it will be easier to slow down for old DOS games than the 450 that is in there now. I'm pretty excited to give it a shot at 133. It's funny how hard I used to try to squeeze performance out of my BX boards in the past, and now I'm trying to squeeze performance out of it... but... you know, the other way :D (I still deeply regret that I got rid of my socket 3 and my Tomcat III motherboards. WTF was I thinking?!)
@@philscomputerlab Oh, I know, I have a kajillion socket 7 CPUs but the prices on motherboards have gone insane. I'm also surprisingly light on PCI graphics cards, so having AGP for my Voodoo3, while not a must, goes a long way to having a good working systems. I still have my Orchid Righteous 3D and a V2 card, so it wouldn't be the end of the world if I couldn't use AGP, but it would just start a cascade of spending that could have gone toward, say an SC-88pro. Hopefully, this $17 cpu will be a good solution, and i'll just keep looking at my unhoused socket 7 CPUs and feel a little sad :D Thanks for the reply on the necropost (though, when you're dealing with retro hardware, is any thread too old??).
My first pc was a windows 98 machine with a 350mhz slot 1 pentium II. I've got so many happy memories playing Incoming, Half-Life, Unreal, Age of Empires and many more. Unfortunately the power supply died and the whole PC was upgraded to a 2.0GHz Pentium 4. Very interesting to see the difference between the original Pentium and the pentium II. Great work as always. I'm really looking forward to seeing your next lot of videos as the slot 1 platform is the first I remember.
The first family computer we had (after the Commodore 128) was a Daewoo with this processor. It also had 32MB of RAM, a Trident TGUI9600 and 4GB hard drive. Motherboard was based in some Intel chipset, I can't remember which one. Nice to see it back again!
Tiberian Sun will actually support any resolution you want. To go higher than the 800x600 in the options menu, open the config file and manually edit the resolution. It supports widescreen with no modifications necessary.
Still have my old Abit BH6, although mine is maxed out with a P3 600E in the slot. It was probably one of their last good boards before the capacitor plague hit the market.
@PhilsComputerLab Great video as always i cant wait for your MS DOS video, i hope u include getting Sound Blaster Live! To work in native dos mode. Your videos have helped me alot.
Looking forward to every new video of yours. My absolute favorite retro rig is built on Asus P2B-DS motherboard with 440BX Chipset. Dual Slot 1 sockets that support 233MHz all the way up to 1GHz. Dual P2 or P3 or Celeron in single CPU configuration. Excellent driver support starting with DOS and all the way up to Windows XP, which will recognize dual CPU's. Non mutli-core operating systems auto-default to the primary CPU slot. There are PS/2 ports, dual first-gen USB, RS232 Serial, AGP, PCI and even a pair of ISA slots all on the same motherboard. Built in Adaptec SCSI chip supporting 3 different drive standards. Much like with SD to IDE adapters you're using, there are SD to SCSI varieties that will make the retro PC run as fast as if it had an SSD. Only difficulty lies in installation of Windows. SCSI driver has to be supplied separately, most likely through the floppy interface. Despite having a USB, the motherboard is unable to boot from it, as that wasn't standard practice at the time. Additionally, back then CPU's typically didn't have built-in temperature sensors. My motherboard came with dual temperature probes one could connect manually in order to overclock comfortably. There was no dynamic control over CPU fan speeds, no core throttling based on tasks and the form factor didn't allow much variety in terms of heatsinks. The best way to overclock processors in those days was to stick a few 60mm fans all over the computer case and hope they pull enough air through to make a difference.
My Slot 1 setup is 440 bx motherboard with the Pentium 3 500mhz. No current hdd isntalled waiting new one this week for it. I mainly use it to test older agp video cards on. Plus it can run old Tomb Raider without emulation using the ATi 3d patch and the 3d rage card with proper driver. That's why I don't list a video card it is always changing depending on which older card I am trying out in it.
I had one of these in 1998. I upgraded it to a Katmai Pentium III a few years later (with the same motherboard). Overclockers of the day preferred the lower-end Celerons because they were easier to overclock.
not while ago i just tried to slow down a Pentium II 233! The lowest megaherz i could get with my Abit BX-20 board was 100Mhz (50x2 multiplier) i wish there we're 1x multi so i could test 50mhz P2 :D
OMG P2 review, this is my first computer CPU i had. Realy brings back nostalgia, i also played Tiberian Sun back then. With 8MB nVIDIA Riva TNT GPU and 64MB SDRAM.
I remember when my dad finally upgraded the home PC from iirc a 486 dx4 100 to a Pentium 2 333 was such a huge difference in performance :) Great times back then felt like every years something new was coming out and then with 3dfx stuff made PC gaming amazing.
Oh man, I remember playing Incoming, it came with my Creative 3D Blaster Banshee that I bought for my Pentium 1 machine back in '99. It was my first 3D card and it blew me away :)
I have a Pentium II at 233 Mhz... one of the first... unfortunately I still don't have a computer to use it on... seeing its performance makes me want to prioritize building one! :D
I have a bunch of these Slot1 CPUs here, both the 233 PII but also other slot1 CPUs, they always been my favorite among processors. good overclockers and very stable but also delivers size for the buck :D
One of the best overclockers are the PII 333Mhz, setting the stock bus speed of 66Mhz to 100Mhz I got a 500Mhz 100% stable computer that worked for many years in most games, I still use the same Abit motherboard and stuff but with a PIII 550 at stock speeds and it still does the trick with my Dos games :)
Still got my Slot 1 PII 400 laying around and a Slot A 900. Good memories. :) Never did it myself, but I was told back in the day that the Celeron 233's were ridiculously overclockable.
This "slot" cpus were cool upgrades back then for those people coming from crappy pentiums and 586's/686's budget cpus, but AMD beat em all when they released their K6-3's, soon after the pentium 3 was released but again AMD beat them with their Athlons, those were the fastest cpus of that time, even ahead of the fastest pentium 3's.
What think you should have done was compare the Pentium II against the fastest processors AMD and also Cyrix had in stores when it was introduced. But I'm impressed with how well the K6-2 400 performed against it.
Great video. Looking forward to seeing more video. Bitten by the bug, looking to build up dos / win98 time machine. Had a PII 333Mhz and 440bx chipset back in the day but sadly got rid of it many years ago.
Still have an oem PIII 450 Katmai around, just nothing to pair it with. Especially since I can just put my 933 Coppermine down to 466 MHz. Just looking for something to pair with my SB 16 and ET6000. Would a DX2 66 be enough for that, or should I go with a Pentium (MMX/Pro) with that? Maybe even a PII? But I'm really looking forward to the next videos.
If you are doing ancient tech could you put together a NT box with a bx chip set dual celeron 300. Used slot 1 to socket 370 adapters with the dual chip pin enables. These were fast and easly ran at a fsb of 100mhz. That is if you could still find a board? One of the early mb hacks and a Trouble free guaranteed %50 over clock.
Back in '98 we had money problems and my parents didn't afford a Pentium II, so they bought me a 333mhz Celeron Mendocino. Back then, we were living in a 2 flat apartment and I had a friend across the hall which his parents bought him a K6-2 400 around the same time. We always argued which cpu was better. I would love to see a Mendocino CPU in your tests and how it fares against the PII 233 and the K6-2 400
My old Pentium II 233 (Klamath) actually overclocked fairly well. Got it from my middle school after they were deemed too ancient for pupil use, but did a very serviceable job as the first computer I could call my own. Back then, I realized that overclocking was unlikely, but it turned out to run perfectly fine at 333MHz - rather useful running Windows XP. 80MB of RAM limited the computer to running Direct Connect, Messenger, Winamp and two-three Opera fans.
I did have a pentium 2 machine around 1997-1999, it was the 266 MHz version on an intel SE440BX motherboard, with 128MB SDRAM and a 3DFx Voodoo2 12MB. It was the machine to have if you wanted to play Quake1/2 and many other games as I did back then. It was an impressive computer about twice as fast as the pentium 166 MHz I upgraded from.
hey Phil, i have a pentium 2 300mhz build, the motherboard is a micro star ms-6111, im running 96mb of pc66 memory and an ATi Rage 128 pro, , just like the one you did a video about, the system has a bit of slow down when running games like quake 3, im thinking about replacing the motherboard, ram, and cpu for a pentium 3 and an ASUS P3V4X, this way i can run a 133mhz fsb, quicker memory as well as a faster cpu, would you do this or would you just keep the PII 300mhz system, i have a creative labs 3d blaster tnt2 ultra ordered and i hope it shows up today to use on this build, awesome review of the PII 233
i just purchased the Asus P3V4X motherboard and a pentium III 650mhz cpu for $42.54 USD, all i need is some memory now, im thinking 256mb or 512mb depends on the pricing and i want pc133
Those graphics cares are too slow. I'm using a Quadro2 Pro, a fast GeForce2 type card. That ATI is a real dog, the TNT2 is ok, but it's also very basic.
In your video review of the ATI rage 128 pro the charts shows it compares to a tnt2. I noticed a huge boost in performance from using a rage 2c and a Nvidia vanta. It should be able to handle quake 3. I'll do some more tests later today to see if the system struggles with any other games
I would not reconment a TNT ultra for just a p2 300 mhz. It will not reach full speed. I think it will bottle neck you even. Try to find a voodoo 3 2000 or 3000 instead. I'm saying this because I used to had a Amd Duron at 1200 mhz with pc133 ram. My voodoo3 ran games beter then the TNT ultra I had. The geforce 1 or 2 ( not mx) is a different story. Those just rule. Even on a p2 system. Edit: Do get more memory. 96 seems a bit low. Even for a p2 system combined with e.g quake 3:P
I have one of these in my IBM! I'm my tests it was a bit faster than my 233mhz pentium 1 , I guess that's thanks to the extra cache? I never tried overclocking one before I wonder how far it could go?
I got a new computer for when I entered high school in 1998, it had this exact CPU. It was a very good cpu, I had it for a little over a year. Which in that era was a long ass time, cpu and gpus advanced so fast. Also mine was easily overclocked to 290, with the FSB 66->83 and a little extra cooling.
Phil, you could also make a video of the Celeron 266, the slowest Slot 1 CPU, and the Celeron 300A, the slot 1 overclocking king. :) A comparison of the Celeron 266 and the MMX233 would be a good idea. My Pentium II 400 from 1998 (the first Deschutes Series) had a unlocked multiplier. The CPU can run with 450 MHz with the standard Voltage of 2,00V. 500 MHz was not stable because of the L2 Cache.
I'm too lazy now to write in english... Так или иначе, меня всегда интересовала эта штука, так как давным давно комп отдали старый и там такой процесоор был. Всегда думал, что для своего времени, он выглядит очень дорогим и крутым так и оказалось. Спасибо за интересный рассказ!
Not the Pentium III was the first CPU to run the L2 cache at full speed. The Celeron 300A (Mendocino) had a full speed cache, (i.e. running at 300MHz) albeit only 128KB.
The Celeron 300A in late 1998 (based off the Pentium II) was the first Intel processor to have the L2 cache integrated into the die at full speed, although only 128KB. if you got a motherboard that supported a 100MHz front side bus and RAM, it also happily overclocked itself to 450MHz without any intervention needed (aside from setting the front side bus speed to 100MHz if not automatically detected from the RAM) and was rock-solid stable. Man I miss that processor.
Back in the days (97 or so) when PII started to become mainstream here in Italy, I worked in a computer dealer franchise shop and, I can still remember it clearly as it was yesterday, the franchise gave us for selling a PII 233 PC that run SO HOT, after ten minutes or so you could not touch the metal frame of the case for long anymore. Tried EVERYTHING to make it run cooler. Didn't work.
But the even more staggering fact is, we sold that PC with all its drawback (it was a veritable stove, thing that in Naples is not really required even in winter, most of the times) and we didn't hear from the buyer anymore. The warranty here in Italy back then was a year (today is two) and for all I know that PC never gave the buyer any annoyance, beside running hotter than a full throttled V8 with a faulty radiator (thing that I'm sure wasn't appreciated in summer, back then especially, since in those days AC was a rare commodity).
30 seconds in. OMG, this video is going to be my jam. This exact processor with its funky case was my first PC after my 386, and I haven't seen a video reference it yet. My grandmother bought it for me going into my first year of college. Can't believe now how expensive that PC was (I was young and don't know if we got ripped off), but that UFO game in the intro, damn, I remember that.
Similar here. But you jumped high. I went to 486 66 and then 100 MHz. Pentium 100 then Pentium MMX on 133, celeron 333 and finally this ugly piece of love :D
Wow, that's a lot of interations in between. The jump from 386 to PII was huge for me. I remember going back at some point and asking my father where the old 386 was, because I couldn't find it anywhere, and he told me he took it to the dump. Without asking me! That was all my teenage years stuffed into that 150 megabytes. I did thankfully have all my old MODs/S3M's I had made, but some things are gone forever now. Sigh.
The 386-DX40 I had didn't have a floating point unit, and I wanted to run the early DOS version of 3D Studio (pre-max), so I had to run a floating point emulator, which as you can imagine just made things painfully slow. I might have even used one of those early "ram doublers", lol. Wish I had more records or memory or files from that early time in my computing life (although I did have a C64 and Vic 20 before that).
This was the second machine I had, too. Before that my father brought an old 486 from work, which I may still have somewhere. It ran Windows 95 after we removed DOS and re-partitioned the drive (split into five or six tiny partitions) but couldn't run many games, although my young self managed to get Theme Hospital running.
After we got the new 233mHz machine, I bought 'Unreal', got stuck on the single-player and fell in love with the offline multi-player. Also, Quake II was one I played over and over again! Half-life, Final Fantasy VII, Total Annihilation, Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Theme Park, etc. Awesome!
same here lol i had 386 sx 25 with a cdrom Those were the days
Awesome stuff man. This again takes me back. After my mom bought me my first PC for Christmas back in 96 when I was 14, I've been building my own PCs ever since following that Cyrix-based PC, exclusively from AMD starting with the K6-2 running at 350Mhz, upgrading later to a 550Mhz K6-III, then an Athlon Slot A running at 1Ghz which shares a similar design to the Pentium II showcased in this video. That CPU was my first and only Slot A, but I always found it quite unique in the design and pretty cool at the time. All of my purchasing was done through TigerDirect magazines as the internet was still rather fledgling in those days. After the Athlon Slot A I moved on to a Thunderbird Socket A Athlon running 1.4Ghz, then an Athlon XP 2000+. Following the 2000+ I ended up with the dual-core Athlon 64 X2 (Toledo) running at 2Ghz. I believe I still have the XP 2000+ and 64 X2 in my closet somewhere. I still use the upgrade from the 64 X2 in a secondary desktop that contains a Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition running 3Ghz which I used for a considerable amount of time before transitioning to Intel for the first time with an i7 3770k which is what I use in my main desktop currently. AMD CPUs, as you're probably aware, fell off in performance considerably to the point where I felt no choice but to make the switch. Hopefully following the upcoming Zen-era of CPUs I'll be able to move back to AMD, but not for quite some time as I imagine my 3770k lasting for many years.
The name of the game for me at the time was Everquest. I still remember the scaling of performance over the years as I upgraded my system specifically for that game as it was the hottest thing on the market in terms of online gaming for the time period. Those were the days man.
Did you ever play Everquest back during its peak? Also, I assume from your accent that you're also German - though in the video you mention Australia so I reckon a bit of both? I detect some German influence on your accent, maybe I'm wrong. I don't really speak any because I was born in the U.S. but my grandfather on my father's side was born in Germany. I bare the German last name of course.
Sprechen Sie Deutsch? That's about all I remember that my grandpa taught me, heh.
P.S. - I also had Incoming. It was a pretty fun game and showcased the upgrade to my first Voodoo2 quite well. I was very impressed.
I upgraded to a Pentium II 300MHz system directly from a 486 ISA system that was maxed out on upgrades, skipping entirely over the Pentium CPU generation. The leap in performance for me was outstanding! I ended up getting an 440LX chipset, unknowingly shortly before the release of the 440BX and 100MHz FSB speeds. Still, I wasn't upset considering what I upgraded from. My system was solid as hell and performed more than adequately for my needs at the time.
I had a PII 233 mhz proc in 1998, 32 MB RAM and 2 GB HDD, it was a beast back in the day! Sweet sweet times when I was about to enter college, your video made my day
Jesus I did not know the performance jump from a Pentium mmx to a Pentium 2 at the same speed was that high like wow
Yes! This guy opened up my childhood. His reviews feels like I'm back in the 90's. Instantly subscribed. 😁
Fairly low 233mhz? The CPU was lightning fast relatively speaking back in the day...EDIT (because I was pinged) I had one, a P2-233 32mb ram, and an ATI rage pro 4mb on one of the then new AGP ports...my friend was very jealous as he was still rocking a P180 although he had a fantastic orchid righteous 4mb Voodoo 1 in his machine...
Great community service you're doing here Phill. This is packed with important historical info!
The BX platform was pretty amazing back in the day. It is arguably the most upgradeable platform ever produced. Most systems can handle a 1.4ghz with an adapter or 1ghz without. When I finally upgraded to an Athlon I had gone through 3 video cards, 2 CPUs and countless sticks of memory. My final configuration was a Radeon 8500, 1.3ghz Celeron and 756mb of RAM. The only real headache was the hard drive limits, at least once the IRQ issues were resolved.
One thing to note is that the 440GX chipset is another option for a motherboard, since its really the workstation/server version of the 440BX. Not really necessary of course, but its a potential option.
Love the channel! I used to be in the PC industry, brings back a lot of memories. This processor was one of the last that had character. By the time we got beyond the P2 it all seemed to go soul-less. I think part of the problem was when Windows took over completely and PCs evolved into a blur of modern technology, where differences in games and performance became nothing more than FPS differences.
Thank you! Compared to what's happening now, any of these older parts are so much cooler :D I scratch my head when I realise it's been like 20 years, so I have a lot of parts ahead of me :D
Did you ever have problems running Screamer 2 on a PII? It's the only game I cannot get working - gives a 2001 error in DOS4GW. Tried quite a few things - disabling sound, changing memory config to use XMS or EMS, even tried different DOS4GW.EXE versions. I wonder if its just a CPU incompatibility?
I don't think so, in fact this is a game that really needs the speed of a Pentium II or III.
+PhilsComputerLab Thanks, I've ordered an original copy - might be a dodgy crack. Can't see what else it might be, other than too much RAM.
I got past that problem - just bought an original copy of the game and it works fine on the PII. Although I now have a new problem now with CD audio slowing the game down - I need to play with the CD drivers I think lol. I thought I would post this update because I have seen other people looking for a solution to the DOS4GW crash problem - it was related to the hacked version of the game.
Great video. I was waiting for a Pentium 2 vs K6-2 benchmark :). I hope you will also test a CeleronA Mendocino against the Pentium 2 and K6-2. Back in 1998-1999 everyone wanted to see benchmarks with those cpus. The first cpu with full speed cache was the CeleronA not the Pentium 3.
that's right, however the cache amount in Celeron was lower than in PII
if you review the original "celery sandwich" you have to overclock it. There was a huge gain from the 233MHz model I believe some people could reach 400MHz with the stock cooler. It was the only cpu I could afford at the time and it got me through university and counter strike LAN parties!
I had one of those CeleronA's. What a beast, 300Mhz out of the box, but overclocked on day 1 to 450Mhz and ran like a champ for several years.
The 300A had half the cache but it ran at the CPU clock (IIRC this was before the P3 did that unlike what was stated in the vid) and often overclocked to 4.5 x 100 witch combined with the faster chache often resulted in a faster processor than a P2@450 (the fastest P2) and on par with the P3@450 (the slowest P3)
@3dfx Voodoo - Actually you're both wrong. The first CPU with a full speed cache was the Pentium Pro back in 1995. From what I understand Intel had serious yield problems, which is why they went to the half speed cache on a card system in the Pentium 2. Later when the manufacturing technology got better there was a return to full speed on die L2 cash with the Celeron A leading to the eventual abandonment of the cartridge format.
PENTIUM 2 WAS (AND IS) THE BEST INTELS WORK
EVERYTHING AFTER IT WENT DOWNHILL
In a parallel universe , pentium 2 type specs are enough to drive a highly efficient software eons ahead of our bloated software offerings.
I can't recommend those SD IDE adapters enough. They perform very well, they have lower and more consistent latency compared to a spinning drive. Drives from that era of machine are getting VERY long in the tooth, so you're just gambling with time that a spinning disk is going to last. It's very easy to remove and back them up if you're going to play with different configurations, and if you have the bracket version like Phil, it means you could easily swap between a DOS, windows98 or windows 2k/XP install without opening the machine.
I have the Pentium II 266mhz cpu with a voodoo 3 agp as my retro pc. Thanks for this video!
you should underclock that voodoo3 to about half speed, so it wont wear out so much. Even at half speed, it is fast enough to that processor. It needs around 500-700 Mhz Pentium III, to fully utilize it, so it is not bottlenecked by CPU.
1st PC was based on a Celeron 400 (Mendocino) CPU and a Gateway motherboard with onboard 8MB Rage 128 VR graphics and Sound Blaster PCI 64 audio, running Windows 98se. Great for playing games like Wipeout 2097 and Tempest 2000. Eventually moved on to an Athlon XP 2000+, which was great in other ways, but ran way too fast for Wipeout 2097.
I have one on my desk now. I use the heatsink as a letter/bill holder.
I still have mine. With the heatsink and fan. I ran it over clocked slightly. It still worked when I shelved it.
Another great video as usual! I look forward to seeing the CPU of my childhood, the mighty Slot A Athlon 700Mhz!
I just came across one of these rare beasts in an lx system with built in scsi, all in a very generic case, sometimes you get nice surprises
Wow man, something up with the build there. I used to run quake 2 and half life on my MMX with no dips below 75fps. Then again I was also running a voodoo banshee.
Banshee rus in 16 bit colour mode which is much faster :) I use the same GPU for these tests and the lowest setting is 1024x768x32.
Holy crap you replied...I didn't know that. I guess I didn't pay attention back in the day.
Will you also make a video using various socket 370 FPGA to slot 1 converters? I used to love playing with them. My fave was the tualatin-based ones... Drool...
Are you planning on doing a review of the P3 1.4ghz in a dual CPU system? Basically the best of the P3 line.
Great video..! I heard you mentioning in a few recent videos of yours, that you were growing quite fond of the SD -> IDE adapters as to compared to CF -> IDE. I have two old laptops here (Compaq Contura 400C / 486DX40) (Toshiba Satellite 200CLS / Pentium 100) that both still have their original 2.5" harddrives (Quantum 250MB / Seagate 810MB respectively). Though both of them are still working I was thinking about what to do when they start to cease doing it. Is the option of going SD -> 2.5" IDE for possible HDD replacements as viable as going CompactFlash? I was wondering about compatibility. Also it would make a monitary difference, considering that CF cards are quite a bit pricier...
They are so cheap. Just buy one and try them out.
Nice to see the old pII at work. When i was at uni i made a duel Celeron cpu monster @ 400mhz for 3d rendering. Was fantastic for that.
This is so nostalgic to me. My first own PC was powered by a slot 1 Pentium III in 2000.
Man I love Slot 1! It felt like the future!
Bring back the future, Intel!
Looks like Intel is kinda doing that! www.theverge.com/2020/1/7/21054602/razer-tomahawk-desktop-gaming-pc-intel-nuc-element-design-specs-ces-2020
lol... it looked like intel were are a bunch of morons... they still are... losing badly to AMD today
@@mclaine33 you guys are clueless to present hardware... this is OLD hardware
I think we had this in our first family computer back in 1997 with 128 mb ram (a lot for the time i know) and a geforce 2
Pidde Bas I guess the geforce 2 was put in your machine later.
KilgoreOnDrugs Huh. I looked it up and sure enough it wasn't released until 2000. So must have been a different one, since we never upgraded that computer to my knowledge. But I do remember it saying Nvidia and geforce on the card and it had a single vga output.
It was probably a Riva 128 which was nVidia's first successful graphics card and it came out in 1997 too.I purchased a Gateway 2000 G6-233 model on eBay last year which came with a Pentium II 233 Mhz Slot 1 processor and a Gateway 2000 branded STB Velocity 128 AGP (nVidia Riva 128) graphics card.It also came with 128 MB of RAM.
It could have been the same make and model as your first family computer.
m9078jk3 I've now found out it was a Dell Dimension XPS D233. Yes, that graphics card seems to have been it according to multiple sources. Not much info on this machine online though. Best I could find was this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Dimension#XPS_series
Finally! web.archive.org/web/19971008001233/www.dell.com/products/dim/xpsd/indepth.htm
awesome video, thanks!
Good video. Just want to add that for people who want the unlocked multiplier, the fastest CPU to reliably have that was the P2-300 (which still uses the Klamath core). The 233/266/300 are all the same Klamath CPUs as discussed here, but it's nice to have one that's officially rated to handle a higher speed. Since the multiplier is unlocked, you can clock them however you want.
I'm not sure about the 333 - I think those might have been Deschutes cores which tended to be locked.
The P2-350 and above are really a different tier since they require a 100FSB capable motherboard. I have a bunch of P2 Deschutes CPUs (got them in an eBay lot many years ago). Some of them are unlocked when setting the multiplier lower, but they won't let you set it higher. Others are fully locked.
When browsing eBay, be careful with the heatsinks that are provided. A lot of eBay listings sell slot-1 CPUs with heatsinks that are little more than crinkled tinfoil. They probably got liquidated from fleets of rackmount servers that had the CPUs sitting in a wind tunnel. In a normal desktop case those heatsinks are not suitable for use and will get very very hot.
Thanks. I believe I tested all those CPUs, there should be individual videos and I mentioned if I found the multiplier to be unlocked. I once forgot to plug the fan back in, and did the entire benchmark run with a Pentium II 300. No issues, but man that thing was hot when I realised...
Your videos are fun to watch!
Thanks!
Just bought an old IBM Optiva with this processor. I didn't actually know of any other processor design then what I had in my 486 and what I've had in all the computers after. Can't wait to get my hands on it and check it out.
Very enjoyable review, looking forward to the new videos. This brings back memories of overclocking with the 440BX chipset. I still have this exact CPU but it isn't being used at the moment. I also had the Abit BF6 - basically the BH6 with a few additional features. Unfortunately the mobo was stolen while I was in college. Now I have an Asus P3B-F slot 1 system with a PIII 500MHz for some Win98 gaming. I really miss the Abit board, loved that thing. It's difficult to get a good 440BX board for cheap these days.
PCs have come a long way, it is nice to see some appreciation for the older roots of modern pc gaming. wow. My first pc was an acer, I was such a noob, I didn't even pay attention to it's specs, I wish I could remember. oh well. :(
Great material. You are planning the film with Pentium Pro ?
Now were in the era of computers that I've fiddled the most with. This is going to be good!!!
And I hope you'll cover the "Slotket/Slocket" adaptors, I thing they would make a good little video for you to make :)
I don't think Incoming ever ran that smoothly on my machines back then. They sure loved their colored lighting, didn't they? Thanks, Unreal!
I have a loose Celeron 300 in a slotket adapter sitting around that I used in an Asus P3B-F motherboard, but I have a fully-assembled machine of that vintage with:
Dual Slot-1 Pentium II 400s
Creative Labs DVD drive w/ DXR2 decoder board
1x Voodoo 2
Matrox G-series card w/ Rainbow Runner video capture box (can't remember if it's G200 or G400)
With all the video boards, the back of the machine is a mess of pass-thru cables. I really should switch over to a tiny SSD or one of those SD-IDE adapters you used here. I used an HDD from that time, but boy is it loud. I think I'm out of free slots in that machine, though. It would be fun to crack it open to optimize the innards with all these new converters and adapters.
love the slot 1 boards trying to get together some atx cases going to build multiple systems for retro gaming and a hole lot of other old software I have.
Nice! I went to get lunch and there in my 'subscription' area is another Phil's vid!
Thank you for the Video! It is very interesting to see how the Pentium MMX / P2 / K6 compares when they all run with 66 Mhz FSB.
This guy has tapped into my childhood games.
I found one of those Abit BH-6 from electronics trash some time ago. Haven't tried if it works yet. I also have one ABit BE6-II which is a bit unstable, most likely needs recapping.
BTW. How would have a 100 MHz bus K6-2 done against the Pentium II? Can you do a 66 MHz vs 100 MHz K6-2 test?
What SD to IDE adapter are you using? eBay link?
6 years later going through reviews again as a reference for the Pentium ii 350 I intend to run at 233MHz (or the OG 233 with an 80mm fan strapped on), still have no idea how the stock active cooler as able to handle the heat output.
Also, unlike my first PII 350 (bought as a 233 due to seller using a 440LX board) - upon removing the heatsink, my particular 233 has 4x cache chips instead of the 2 found on Deschutes PII. And they definitely are the higher latency chips that might not handle being overclocked to 266MHz (something that the Intel SE440BX-2 allows).
I was also wrong 6 years ago, the Celeron 333/500 actually isn't fully stable (still gets into windows for CPUID) - and none of my Slot1 boards allow the voltage to be adjusted. The 450A is rock solid however (although in a Slotket my Celeron 500 manages to edge it out occasionally).
Fun Fact: The Pentium II 233 and the Pentium II 266 are actually identical except the label on the box.
You can run every PII 233 at 266 Mhz just by setting one jumper. In some cases the setting can be done within the BIOS setup.
Back in the days my mainboard was supporting an uneven bus speed of 68,5 Mhz. So I managed to set the Pentium II 233 to 274 Mhz. That system was running perfectly without any issues.
Amazing 🤩
Great video. Funny thing, a couple hours ago I bench tested a PII 233 mhz on a"bboring" oem mobo. It was on a Gateway GP7-550 paired with a PIII 550. The PII worked at 133mhz, no option to change the multiplier on the mobo. Thinking on making a DOS Win 3.11 rig. Back in the day these costed an arm and a leg so had to settle with Cyrix then later with Celeron.
Another great video Phil, good job. I'm looking forward to watching the next part. In the comparsion, I would prefer to have K6-2 running at 4x100, at least the more demanding games should use the faster FSB. Did you try the QuakeII patch for AMD 3Dnow! instructions? Back in the days, it was massively advertised by AMD and brought more fps, especially in software rendering mode (which is unplayable, but good for comparison), but also added a little performance boost in openGL accelerated mode. And congratulations for getting such great board in top condition, you're now free to use everything from slot1 CPUs to 370 PPGA and FCPGA cpus :)
As always, I love the video. I'd love to see you do a Celeron 300 to 450 overclock video. This was my glory machine, back in the day.
Excellent Phil!
Do you have a Celeron 300A to test too?
hi, great video, I love the retrocomputer world. A question. How do you record signal from vga port of old pc? which capture device use?
Entertaining as always, thank you very much for this video. I got myself a pentium III-450 including a 440bx-mainboard and a voodoo3 (agp) a few weeks ago on ebay. I remember the time i got the p2-300 from my dad. Together with the voodoo3-3000 it was mindblowing comparing to my old p1-100. Later i used a socket 370-to-slot 1-adapter for a 1GHz Celeron. Which wasn't the best idea retrospectively...
Oh, and i can remember pronouncing me the word cache like "cash" or "cage" back in the days here in germany... :O
I had one of those as well as the infamous Celeron 300a paired with the Abit BH6 mainboard
You should do a review of the Celeron 566. Back in the day, I had one of those seriously overclocked a tonne.
I actually have one of these-but the fan on its cooler died so its useless until I manage to remove the heatsink and replace it-not an easy task when its rusted on. Though with contact B21 severed on my Celeron 333A I haven't got a use for anything else slot 1-it runs at 500MHz on *any* motherboard that supports a 100MHZ FSB. And I'm glad that my SE440BX-2 automatically detects the voltage as the Celeron 333A reuires a bit of a voltage jump unlike my 300A, which at 450MHz runs on its stock voltage.
I have a P2/3 dos box that I just have a hard time getting slow enough! I was even looking for a socket 370 to underclock on a slocket, and for some reason, just kept forgetting that this processor exists (I have a PPro lying around, and it was a search for a socket 8 board that made me say "duh" and order one of these on ebay). The price hasn't come down much since you made this video, but I hope it will be easier to slow down for old DOS games than the 450 that is in there now. I'm pretty excited to give it a shot at 133. It's funny how hard I used to try to squeeze performance out of my BX boards in the past, and now I'm trying to squeeze performance out of it... but... you know, the other way :D
(I still deeply regret that I got rid of my socket 3 and my Tomcat III motherboards. WTF was I thinking?!)
Socket 7 is what you want with a Pentium MMX. Watch my video 136 in 1 MMX.
@@philscomputerlab Oh, I know, I have a kajillion socket 7 CPUs but the prices on motherboards have gone insane. I'm also surprisingly light on PCI graphics cards, so having AGP for my Voodoo3, while not a must, goes a long way to having a good working systems. I still have my Orchid Righteous 3D and a V2 card, so it wouldn't be the end of the world if I couldn't use AGP, but it would just start a cascade of spending that could have gone toward, say an SC-88pro. Hopefully, this $17 cpu will be a good solution, and i'll just keep looking at my unhoused socket 7 CPUs and feel a little sad :D
Thanks for the reply on the necropost (though, when you're dealing with retro hardware, is any thread too old??).
My first pc was a windows 98 machine with a 350mhz slot 1 pentium II.
I've got so many happy memories playing Incoming, Half-Life, Unreal, Age of Empires and many more. Unfortunately the power supply died and the whole PC was upgraded to a 2.0GHz Pentium 4.
Very interesting to see the difference between the original Pentium and the pentium II. Great work as always.
I'm really looking forward to seeing your next lot of videos as the slot 1 platform is the first I remember.
The first family computer we had (after the Commodore 128) was a Daewoo with this processor. It also had 32MB of RAM, a Trident TGUI9600 and 4GB hard drive. Motherboard was based in some Intel chipset, I can't remember which one. Nice to see it back again!
Tiberian Sun will actually support any resolution you want. To go higher than the 800x600 in the options menu, open the config file and manually edit the resolution. It supports widescreen with no modifications necessary.
Still have my old Abit BH6, although mine is maxed out with a P3 600E in the slot. It was probably one of their last good boards before the capacitor plague hit the market.
@PhilsComputerLab Great video as always i cant wait for your MS DOS video, i hope u include getting Sound Blaster Live! To work in native dos mode. Your videos have helped me alot.
Looking forward to every new video of yours.
My absolute favorite retro rig is built on Asus P2B-DS motherboard with 440BX Chipset. Dual Slot 1 sockets that support 233MHz all the way up to 1GHz. Dual P2 or P3 or Celeron in single CPU configuration. Excellent driver support starting with DOS and all the way up to Windows XP, which will recognize dual CPU's. Non mutli-core operating systems auto-default to the primary CPU slot. There are PS/2 ports, dual first-gen USB, RS232 Serial, AGP, PCI and even a pair of ISA slots all on the same motherboard. Built in Adaptec SCSI chip supporting 3 different drive standards. Much like with SD to IDE adapters you're using, there are SD to SCSI varieties that will make the retro PC run as fast as if it had an SSD. Only difficulty lies in installation of Windows. SCSI driver has to be supplied separately, most likely through the floppy interface. Despite having a USB, the motherboard is unable to boot from it, as that wasn't standard practice at the time.
Additionally, back then CPU's typically didn't have built-in temperature sensors. My motherboard came with dual temperature probes one could connect manually in order to overclock comfortably. There was no dynamic control over CPU fan speeds, no core throttling based on tasks and the form factor didn't allow much variety in terms of heatsinks. The best way to overclock processors in those days was to stick a few 60mm fans all over the computer case and hope they pull enough air through to make a difference.
My Slot 1 setup is 440 bx motherboard with the Pentium 3 500mhz. No current hdd isntalled waiting new one this week for it. I mainly use it to test older agp video cards on. Plus it can run old Tomb Raider without emulation using the ATi 3d patch and the 3d rage card with proper driver. That's why I don't list a video card it is always changing depending on which older card I am trying out in it.
I had one of these in 1998. I upgraded it to a Katmai Pentium III a few years later (with the same motherboard). Overclockers of the day preferred the lower-end Celerons because they were easier to overclock.
I was NOT expecting a video of the game Incoming! Loved to play that game as a kid
not while ago i just tried to slow down a Pentium II 233! The lowest
megaherz i could get with my Abit BX-20 board was 100Mhz (50x2
multiplier) i wish there we're 1x multi so i could test 50mhz P2 :D
100 MHz? That's very nice!
Still got the familys old Pentium II 233. The good old days playing Incoming all day after school...
OMG P2 review, this is my first computer CPU i had. Realy brings back nostalgia, i also played Tiberian Sun back then. With 8MB nVIDIA Riva TNT GPU and 64MB SDRAM.
I remember when my dad finally upgraded the home PC from iirc a 486 dx4 100 to a Pentium 2 333 was such a huge difference in performance :)
Great times back then felt like every years something new was coming out and then with 3dfx stuff made PC gaming amazing.
Oh man, I remember playing Incoming, it came with my Creative 3D Blaster Banshee that I bought for my Pentium 1 machine back in '99. It was my first 3D card and it blew me away :)
I have a Pentium II at 233 Mhz... one of the first... unfortunately I still don't have a computer to use it on... seeing its performance makes me want to prioritize building one! :D
I have a bunch of these Slot1 CPUs here, both the 233 PII but also other slot1 CPUs, they always been my favorite among processors. good overclockers and very stable but also delivers size for the buck :D
I like working with them too. Stay tuned :D
One of the best overclockers are the PII 333Mhz, setting the stock bus speed of 66Mhz to 100Mhz I got a 500Mhz 100% stable computer that worked for many years in most games, I still use the same Abit motherboard and stuff but with a PIII 550 at stock speeds and it still does the trick with my Dos games :)
Aye love that Mudderboard :)
Great vid!
mutterbort and graphics cart :P
Still got my Slot 1 PII 400 laying around and a Slot A 900. Good memories. :)
Never did it myself, but I was told back in the day that the Celeron 233's were ridiculously overclockable.
i have a pentium 2 233mhz with no ecc cache sl28k (i did remove the plastic case) these where the 1º one to lunch before the ecc like that one.
Oh man, I had a PII 333, and it was a beast. 384 megs of RAM, and a 32 MB AGP card. Ran Rainbow 6 flawlessly. It was my daily use PC until 2006.
I love how you explain what Quake 2 is; anyone that doesn't know what Quake 2 is has no business watching this video.
I did have a Pentium II. It was a machine one of my mother's physical therepists gave me back in the day, in a Gateway machine.
This "slot" cpus were cool upgrades back then for those people coming from crappy pentiums and 586's/686's budget cpus, but AMD beat em all when they released their K6-3's, soon after the pentium 3 was released but again AMD beat them with their Athlons, those were the fastest cpus of that time, even ahead of the fastest pentium 3's.
What think you should have done was compare the Pentium II against the fastest processors AMD and also Cyrix had in stores when it was introduced. But I'm impressed with how well the K6-2 400 performed against it.
Looks like that would have been the Cyrix 200 and K6 233. Unreal how early the Pentium II actually came out and how far behind AMD and Cyrix was.
Great video. Looking forward to seeing more video. Bitten by the bug, looking to build up dos / win98 time machine. Had a PII 333Mhz and 440bx chipset back in the day but sadly got rid of it many years ago.
Still have an oem PIII 450 Katmai around, just nothing to pair it with. Especially since I can just put my 933 Coppermine down to 466 MHz.
Just looking for something to pair with my SB 16 and ET6000.
Would a DX2 66 be enough for that, or should I go with a Pentium (MMX/Pro) with that? Maybe even a PII?
But I'm really looking forward to the next videos.
If you are doing ancient tech could you put together a NT box with a bx chip set dual celeron 300. Used slot 1 to socket 370 adapters with the dual chip pin enables. These were fast and easly ran at a fsb of 100mhz. That is if you could still find a board? One of the early mb hacks and a Trouble free guaranteed %50 over clock.
I still have running a p2 233.. and a pentium 3 600mhz.. great machines..
I think its a pentium 2 or 3 that we have... It has a big heat sink on it and looks like it would go into a pcie slot
Back in '98 we had money problems and my parents didn't afford a Pentium II, so they bought me a 333mhz Celeron Mendocino. Back then, we were living in a 2 flat apartment and I had a friend across the hall which his parents bought him a K6-2 400 around the same time. We always argued which cpu was better. I would love to see a Mendocino CPU in your tests and how it fares against the PII 233 and the K6-2 400
Which Modern psu can i buy that has a good 5v an 12v rail. p.s great video :-)
My old Pentium II 233 (Klamath) actually overclocked fairly well. Got it from my middle school after they were deemed too ancient for pupil use, but did a very serviceable job as the first computer I could call my own.
Back then, I realized that overclocking was unlikely, but it turned out to run perfectly fine at 333MHz - rather useful running Windows XP. 80MB of RAM limited the computer to running Direct Connect, Messenger, Winamp and two-three Opera fans.
I did have a pentium 2 machine around 1997-1999, it was the 266 MHz version on an intel SE440BX motherboard, with 128MB SDRAM and a 3DFx Voodoo2 12MB. It was the machine to have if you wanted to play Quake1/2 and many other games as I did back then. It was an impressive computer about twice as fast as the pentium 166 MHz I upgraded from.
hey Phil, i have a pentium 2 300mhz build, the motherboard is a micro star ms-6111, im running 96mb of pc66 memory and an ATi Rage 128 pro, , just like the one you did a video about, the system has a bit of slow down when running games like quake 3, im thinking about replacing the motherboard, ram, and cpu for a pentium 3 and an ASUS P3V4X, this way i can run a 133mhz fsb, quicker memory as well as a faster cpu, would you do this or would you just keep the PII 300mhz system, i have a creative labs 3d blaster tnt2 ultra ordered and i hope it shows up today to use on this build, awesome review of the PII 233
i just purchased the Asus P3V4X motherboard and a pentium III 650mhz cpu for $42.54 USD, all i need is some memory now, im thinking 256mb or 512mb depends on the pricing and i want pc133
Those graphics cares are too slow. I'm using a Quadro2 Pro, a fast GeForce2 type card. That ATI is a real dog, the TNT2 is ok, but it's also very basic.
In your video review of the ATI rage 128 pro the charts shows it compares to a tnt2. I noticed a huge boost in performance from using a rage 2c and a Nvidia vanta. It should be able to handle quake 3. I'll do some more tests later today to see if the system struggles with any other games
ed kazee Those benchmarks are on a Pentium 4 2.8 GHz. Both IMO are underpowered for these games.
I would not reconment a TNT ultra for just a p2 300 mhz. It will not reach full speed. I think it will bottle neck you even. Try to find a voodoo 3 2000 or 3000 instead.
I'm saying this because I used to had a Amd Duron at 1200 mhz with pc133 ram. My voodoo3 ran games beter then the TNT ultra I had.
The geforce 1 or 2 ( not mx) is a different story. Those just rule. Even on a p2 system.
Edit: Do get more memory. 96 seems a bit low. Even for a p2 system combined with e.g quake 3:P
I have one of these in my IBM! I'm my tests it was a bit faster than my 233mhz pentium 1 , I guess that's thanks to the extra cache? I never tried overclocking one before I wonder how far it could go?
I got a new computer for when I entered high school in 1998, it had this exact CPU. It was a very good cpu, I had it for a little over a year. Which in that era was a long ass time, cpu and gpus advanced so fast. Also mine was easily overclocked to 290, with the FSB 66->83 and a little extra cooling.
Phil, you could also make a video of the Celeron 266, the slowest Slot 1 CPU, and the Celeron 300A, the slot 1 overclocking king. :) A comparison of the Celeron 266 and the MMX233 would be a good idea.
My Pentium II 400 from 1998 (the first Deschutes Series) had a unlocked multiplier. The CPU can run with 450 MHz with the standard Voltage of 2,00V. 500 MHz was not stable because of the L2 Cache.
+PhilsComputerLab
4:28
Is that 100% gap, the best number? Or is lower even better?
It's the difference between core clock and cache clock. Lower is better!
Hey Phil, do you think you could do a performance comparison between this CPU and an emulated version of it through PCem?
I doubt it. I would just recommend DOSBox, or actually D-Fend Reloaded because it's easier to use.
I'm too lazy now to write in english... Так или иначе, меня всегда интересовала эта штука, так как давным давно комп отдали старый и там такой процесоор был. Всегда думал, что для своего времени, он выглядит очень дорогим и крутым так и оказалось. Спасибо за интересный рассказ!
Not the Pentium III was the first CPU to run the L2 cache at full speed. The Celeron 300A (Mendocino) had a full speed cache, (i.e. running at 300MHz) albeit only 128KB.
The Celeron 300A in late 1998 (based off the Pentium II) was the first Intel processor to have the L2 cache integrated into the die at full speed, although only 128KB. if you got a motherboard that supported a 100MHz front side bus and RAM, it also happily overclocked itself to 450MHz without any intervention needed (aside from setting the front side bus speed to 100MHz if not automatically detected from the RAM) and was rock-solid stable.
Man I miss that processor.
Thanks for sharing!
I had a couple of these and absolutely loved them(at the time), and ran them into the ground lol
Awesome as always. Thanks for your hard work! BTW my P2-333 is unlocked. 😀