From the PCGuide you can read the following (written about the time of release) on the topic of the pricing: "Intel surprised the industry a bit in releasing not only these two but also a 300 MHz Pentium II in May 1997. However, the 300 MHz chip was originally more of a marketing routine than anything else; availability was non-existent and the pricing insane (when the announced initial price of $1,970 was first released, a hot argument ensued about whether or not this was obviously a typo--it wasn't!) In later months Intel improved its production process further, and the 300 MHz chip dropped rapidly in price and became much more "mainstream"."
I remember I was in grade 10 and Intel brought out the 333mhz chip. My friend said that there will never be a faster CPU because 333mhz "is the speed of light". I still remind him about that prediction.
lol. It reminds me of High school in late 90's when my friend claimed that video games would stop being produced after the millennium because every conceivable game had already been thought about.. It sounds a bit crazy now! :)
Fupa Lord that and we don't know where Mor's law will take us For all we know we could be using Quantum computers in 20 years and who says something.like a economy will exist in 20 years
@@Trick-Framed I was talking about 3950x, there's still many more years to go. By that time you will get a zen5 Ryzen 5 which will have same performance as the 3950
Back in '98 I had picked up the PII 333. I used that computer for more than 12 years before I absolutely had to replace it with a more modern chipset. I loved that I was able to run it as dual core. I hated upgrading from nt4.0 to Windows 7 Pro after the end of support. I'm really glad that Intel went with slot 1. In future years, I truly believe the past experience with close proximity cache to core architecture gave us all the ultra compact dies that we use today. I'm loving the retro vids. It's got me thinking of firing up one or two of my old door stops just to remember where I've been.
The reason that Duke Nukem and Doom run best on the Pentium MMX 233 is because some 16-bit instructions from the x86 instruction set achieve much higher performance on the older P5 microarchitecture than the newer P6 microarchitecture on which the Pentium Pro and subsequently the Pentium II is based, the P6 being optimized for 32-bit code. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_Pro#Performance This (rather curious) behavior can only really be observed if you benchmark a P5 and a P6 CPU with relativly similar clock speeds. Or, if you are a gamer living in 1996 and you just upgraded from a Pentium 150MHz to a brand new Pentium Pro, hoping that Duke Nukem will run so much better. :)
Yes, when Pentium Pro first came out people complained that older instructions are slower than Pentium, and Intel defended that by saying Pentium Pro is really for server and workstation instead of home and office machines.
I know I do a necromancy here 😉 But with retro stuff, time doesn't really matter anymore... You're correct, but both Doom and Duke Nukem 3D are... 32 bit apps. Yes, they run under DOS, but they're using 32-bit extenders so they actually run 32-bit code. There still may be some differences here - but I think it's not related to this particular case 🤔
I believe they were also measured in micrometers back then too.. so it would have been listed as .35µm. I remember having a CPU over 3 volts at one time. I guess older than this one.
I remmeber a year later, the Pentium II 450 hat the same price-tag. Intel got competition with the K6-2 and 3 but basically, in the high end segment, they still ruled and could sell it for any price they wanted to. another year or so later that changed when AMD got the Athlon out and was competitive, if not even a bit better than the pentium III chips. oh, and the Ghz Race was on. turbulent and good times :)
I dug up some "price cut" articles from those years, man it was a price war. AMD did well and Intel cut prices very aggressively. If you got a Pentium II on launch day, half a year later you would have been pissed.
Celeron 300A@450 came out earlier than the K6-3, cost around the same and also flat out murdered any K6-X in gaming, and 440BX is also far better than any of the flaky Super7 chipsets. While Athlon vs Pentium III/4 in 1999/2000 was exciting, it's also mostly irrelevant to the wallet because Duron was the true value champion until 2002.
K6-2 was on par with Pentium II in games and even outperformed Pentium II in Quake II and Quake III Arena. Also, it was easy to overclock even on older mobos because for this CPU 2x multiplier worked as 6x. And almost every single 266 MHz processor was able to achieve 450 MHz this way (6 x 75).
@Ivan Zaitsau the K6-2 (and the often very...buggy chipsets, primarily on terms of AGP performance, as well as driver issues) were a double sided sword. it had the potential to performance on par with a P II of the same clockspeed, but often it was simply murdered. with a pentium, you had a much more stable and constant plattform. it got much better with the Athlon (VIA KT133 was still horrible) and as AMD started to make their own chipsets with the A64, the problem was gone.
I've used my K6-2 on older Intel 430tx based board and had no problems at all. There were a lot of PCI based cards even in top segment back in the day. Both Voodoo 5 and GeForce 256 had PCI versions released. And while they performed slightly worse with PCI running on 33 MHz, on 37.5 MHz difference was negligible compared to AGP versions. Quake 3, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, Unreal - all these games performed well on K6-2. Basically, I had no problems with running any game until NFS: Underground was released.
Back in '90s I had in my studio a PII 300 workstation that cost around $10K in today's money. Windows NT, 256MB RAM, SCSI hard drives, ZIP and dual CD-RW, HP scanner, Diamonth Stealth VGA (replaced by Matrox and then by Nvidia), SB AWE64 Gold, MPEG accelerator card for video editing, Wacom tablet, 21" Mitsubishi Diamontron and a beast A3 Lexmark Printer that had its own HDD and CPU. A true workhorse. I miss that machine :(
Intel just can't make CPUs that much better anymore. They're down to billions of transistors on this tiny chip, Traditional electronics break down when you get down to about 4nm. Not to mention, the reason why CPU manufacturers went core crazy in the 2000s is because you can't really get rid of heat from the CPU after about 6 5-6Ghz, they couldn't clock the chips any higher so they had to just add more CPU cores.
Yes, but now they hit another limit... as they cannot increase frequency, and most of people is happy with 4c or 6c CPU, that they dropped to low-end/mid range seqment, most of people buy them ,and will be happy with it. Increasing cores above 6C is interesting only for heavy content creators. So increasing cores will dont help them anymore to attract many customers, that are happy with 4C or 6C systems. So they cannot push frequency, they cannot push more cores, they will profit less and less from new CPU's this decade. They need to find something new, otherwise, their income comes down... also not to mention, that there are two equal competitors now, AMD and Intel.
My PII 350 unlocked a world of PC gaming to me. I started with PCs with cheap, used gear. I was leary of PC until Voodoo truth be told. However when the PII came out, Windows 98 and SE, and it ran so many great games from the past and right then. I remember watching the Unreal demo loop on it and it was so amazing. I'd just leave it on when friends came over to play Tekken 3 on the PS1. Fun part was emulating that game on that same PC. Sure, it was slow, but it ran and that in itself was amazing.
as far as I remember the main reason for the incredible price at the release was that Intel had some issues with the cache getting the chips running at 150Mhz
Does anyone here or is there anyone old enough to remember when the Intel Celeron 300 Slot one came out...had to be from Costa Rica... you could overclock the freak out of that ship as it was actually a Celeron 450 or something like that but they could not sale them enough so they rebranded them 300's. Was one of the most amazing CPU's I've ever owned....
The Celeron 300A Mendocino. The 266 and 300 Covington were basically the same die as the then-current P2s (around 400-500 was what the process could do), but without external L2 cache chips (it had 512kB at half speed), and without any L2 at all it was slooooow. It was even slow when overclocked by 50%, by running the FSB at 100 (as P2s did) instead of 66 (as Celerons did). Mendocino changed everything by keeping the same process node and adding 128kB full speed cache on-die. So a quarter the size of the P2’s cache but twice as fast. The 300A and 333 up are Mendocino (until you get to the 533A that is based on Coppermine). The process would easily run 450 and with effort 500. The nice thing is that 300A is 4.5 (locked multiplier) times 66MHz, and running the motherboard at the fully in spec 100 instead of 66 makes everything faster, but it also puts the celeron 300A, cheapest in the range, at an easy 450, and it was almost as fast as the P2 450, at the time fastest and around €500.
It costed 2000 dollars because it was the BEST processor ever created Pentium 2 was the PEAK of intels creativity Everything after P2 went downhill Intel is finished in terms of creativity and soon money wise too
When it first arrived, I bought a Pentium II-400 for 1400DM. Yes, I was that guy. But that PC (with an ASUS mainboard) lasted me for several years and monstered all new games. Fond memories.
they were quite difficult to obtain. My employer was looking at replacing their mainframe based training with PCs and did an exhaustive real word comparison of all the processors available, and not one supplier could supply a 300 for testing for at least two months, so after testing they ended up buying MMX 233's, which were a quarter of the price, not that price mattered to them
My Dad bought me a Pentium 2 PC from Micro Center after I was discharged from hospital after an eight month stay from a traumatic brain injury (TBI) when I was nine. It couldn't play many games, including Final Fantasy 8 and Black & White. We knew nothing about computers and I had no Internet until 2003 so it was a paperweight. I had that PC until 2004 when we bought a Compact which was tenfold better, but it also couldn't handle the hottest games. Replaced the integrated GPU with a GeForce FX 5200 and was riotously blown away! Six years later had a new PC with a GTX 295 and GTX 750. Times have evolved--bittersweet.
Interesting video, Phil :) All this seems like a distant memory now, but I do remember that back then this was THE thing to get your hands on, least until the AMD K6-2 hit the shelves. And as this video shows, 33 MHz increments meant a lot back then.. I mean, could you imagine saying to a PC enthusiast today 'hey, I got my i7 to go 33 MHz higher!'? But you felt like a king back then if you could do just that, either through over-clocking or just going out and getting the model that gave the desired speed. And I think that Wipeout game still looks cool even today. Also saw Jedi Knight II: Dark Forces in there, another awesome game with loads of atmosphere including awesome sounds. And GLQuake. That teeny little file really opened my eyes to hardware-acclerated rendering (using the Open GL API) vs. software. GPU-based rendering. At the time I had a Cyrix PR200+ that was dire at running Quake at 640 x 480. Got GLQuake off a magazine cover-disk I think, and let it rip on a Riva 128ZX (with a massive 4mb VRAM!). So instead of the CPU doing both the geometry and rendering, the latter was suddenly offloaded onto the GPU and the result was 640 x 480 silk-smooth game-play throughout that not only played better, but also looked better. Loads of other great titles to choose from that that era too.
IIRC, Pentium II is basically a pentium pro with mmx instructions and different socket. As pentium pro technology will allow "predictions" of what instruction to run next, hence it is way faster than socket 7 pentium processor (read it on pentium pro marketing ads material, I remember they put a picture of octopus to visualize it's superior multitasking capability).
Haha. I remember the days when my Aunt was bragging about getting a Gateway 166 Mhz CPU. Then our family felt all happy to get the Compaq Presario 200 Mhz PC. It was all about the clock speed then but now it's just about the Cores mainly. Seems like Technology has slowed compared to how fast it was exploding back then though.
I have my Pentium II 350 MHz and VGA PCI SiS 6636 8 MB with the latest Bios installed, and both are ok. And a lot of sticks of RAM PC 100 and 133 MHz... 128 mb, 256mb, etc. PD: i have a beautiful Heat Sink SiS for the SiS 6636 that i found. I have played Need For Speed III Hot Pursuit, MAME 2000, Colin McRae Rally, Moto Racer I, etc... all max setting
I built & sold a lot of computers right before the PII 300 MHz. Around the newYear 1997 I built a computer with a *Pentium Pro 200 MHz with 512 KB L2 cache* and it outpreformed PII 233 & 266 because it's L2 cache was cast in and, opposite PII, ran at full processor speed. I have a wish for you Phil: Find one and test it against PII 300 MHz :)
This is a great video. Makes me happy to own an old Gateway G6-300. I knew it seemed like a pretty peppy little machine running Win98 (what was installed when I tried it out) I am planning to add an IDE to SD adapter soon. I will probably stick to Win98 First Edition for the sake of legitimacy. But who knows, I may cheat & use SE again.
I forgot to tell you Philscomputerlab, I was very lucky here a few weeks back. I work as an electrician and sometimes I have work in schools. lately I've been asking people working in these schools if they have old PCs standing around. And I really scored a big fish. A white Midi tower, a screen, mouse and keyboard. When I opened the machine after I got home it contained a Asus P2B 440BX motherboard, Intel Pentium 3 600 Coppermine slot 1. 256MB SDRAM, a Voodoo3 3000!!!, PCI network card, a Soundblaster 128 PCI card, a 10GB Seagate harddrive, one DVD reader and one CD burner. It was in excellent condition and so was the 17 inch CRT screen! All this for free! Also got a nice 486 DX33 desktop model with 8MB RAM from another school which was also in excellent condition. So had quite some luck!
I just pulled some parts out of my scrap pile and built a retro-ish machine, thanks in large part to the motivation provided by your videos. I do this perodically, but never really dedicate a case to the build or anything, but this time, I thought it would be better for the life of all of the parts to just keep it permanently assembled (I bought almost all of the parts new, and it would be sad to see them die while in storage!). I managed to scare up a bootable Win98SE disc (none of my 9x CDs were bootable, but one turned up, hidden in a drawer at work). That, combined with your amazingly helpful review of China DOS Union, I've got a fun little machine going. I was kind of bummed that my PII Klamath had, in fact, died. Back when it was my main processor, I split the case to try to beef the cooling to attempt an overclock-- it never took (mainly because of the heat issues you mention), so I'm running a PII 350 instead on a BX mobo. I have a 1.4ghz celeron on a daughter card, but I think that is just too fast! Also running a VooDoo 3 3000, an Orchid Righteous (just because), an AWE-32 piggy backing a SCB-55, an SW60XG, Roland MT-32, all with 512mb RAM. Now all I need to do is find my GeForce 3 that has DVI out. Then I'll pop in my VooDoo2 for my Glide Needs (the Orchid Righteous is just a lot of fun to have in there-- I love hearing the relay click for some reason). It's been a nice distraction, that's for sure! Thanks for all the great videos, Phil!
I worked at a place that built computers from 96 to 03 and loved it. I always got deals on the latest gaming setups. I remember getting a Celeron 300 slot 1 and we could overclock it to 450! We just had to install these refrigerator sinks on them to keep them cool. Great video man!
It is amazing how well the stock cooler for the Klamath Pentium II actually does, considering how basic the heatsink is. It is also why IMO it wasn't really necessary to use an aftermarket heatsink on the Deschutes Pentium II when it is using the same cooler as Klamath.
that model of processor was the first one I had after I made the jump out of a 386 pc back in 1998. It was THE TITS! I could run anything I wanted. That pc endured around 7 years of heavy gaming use. I totally love your videos, keep'em coming
I remember my dad bought a Pentium II 266Mhz powered IBM Aptiva around christmas of 1997. ATI Rage Pro and 32MB. For himself of course. That was like one of his proudest moments because he was the same age I am now (36) and he had 3 kids by then. He bought that damn thing on some kind of credit card I'm pretty sure. Dad grew up in eastern Kentucky and Had them Bose speakers in the monitor and was a really nice machine. I wish I would have snapped it up in 2002 after he replaced it. He was making real money after I moved out and moved to a notebook.
Btw, unless you have physical CPUs Pentium II 266 and 233, the test is not correctly made. The reason for this is, that PII 300 uses faster cache, but with higher timings. They are not equal to PII 266 and PII233, when underclocked. So underclocked PII 300 performs WORSE than PII 266 or PII233. Differance is not big though, but it is not correct test. Anandtech warned about this, that those slower Pentium II cannot be simulated by higher ones, because of different cache latency. At the same clock speed, downclocked PII 300 will performan worse than PII 266 or PII233. It can be used only to simulate Celerons, when you disable L2 cache. Then it will perform same as adequate Celeron, even if it is Pentium II and downclocked. However, you need to decrease FSB from 100 to 66, to have equal processors as Celerons. But for Pentium II with L2 cache, downclocking higher model cannot be used for simulate of lower Pentium II models.
I had the PII266 when it came out and overclocked it to PII300 levels. For some reason a few months later it could easily overclock to 337Mhz. Used it that way till the Athlon600 came out, which ran at 660Mhz. After that I skipped the Athlon700, 800 and even 1GHz, before I bought a pretested Thunderbird 1GHz@1.2GHz, which unfortunately overheated all the time in my too small case.
I actually bought one back in 1997. I had a good job in banking and just wanted high end once in my life. Forked out 5000 Deutschmark for the whole System and all the bragging rights taht came with it. Not sure I ever spent that much ever again, especially adjusted for inflation.
I bought my pentium 2 333mhz back in 1998 and had to buy voodoo 2 separatively, because these weren't yet in the shop. It was the only time I bought cutting edge computer, but there was no real choice at that time for gaming computer. It was worth it, because when you just added more ram and bought new graphics card every couple of years, it was relevant until about 2002 before cpu started bottlenecking too badly. Of course system requirements for games were already asking 700mhz p3, but you shouldn't take them seriously, because improving directx was really decreasing cpu requirements, but increasing gpu requirements. As a general rule directx 8 games would be mostly playable on 333mhz p2, but directx 9 games wouldn't. I don't remember this wrongly, because I still have that p2. I kept it, because I realized new computers wouldn't be backwards compatible with old games.
What is odd was that my dad got a whole Dell system with that chip for $3300 when it came out. Including 17 inch Trinitron monitor, STB Velocity 4MB, 64MB ram and 500MB hd, in Canada. Must have given OEMs very good pricing.
Hadn't thought about Moto Racer (6:38) for a long time. I remember getting it from a bargain bin at a Hastings video store. I think at the time I was playing it on a P3 based computer on a PCI video card with a CRT. I really loved it because of its arcade like FPS. I remember my eyes drying out from staring at the screen trying to mentally keep up!
Not really... the progression in cpu computational power has slowed down a lot in the past 10 years. 5ghz is reaching the limit of silicon based cpu tech... gpu power isn't slowing down as much though...
yea 8 ghz is with liquid nitrogen and the cpu won't last very long. That's just a dumb argument... I never said that we have reached the limit... reaching means getting close. More cores require more power, which produces more heat... so yea we're getting to the limit now. Go away, I don't like you.
+Person 8ghz? been done 10 years ago www.engadget.com/2007/01/24/pentium-4-overclocked-to-8ghz-lets-see-your-fancy-core-2-try-t/ and no, you can't just increase the clock speed. that's why the pentium 4 died. intel had plans for a 5ghz (stock) pentium 4 but they couldn't even get them to run at 4ghz reliably. so they turned to their mobile division and took over the pentium 3 / core design e so the core2 was born. much lower clock speeds, but much faster anyways. that 5ghz barrier is still there.
I paid $239 from newegg back in 1999 for mine. Probably 4 minths after it came.out. Ran the 66mhz fan at 100mhz ...easy overclock to 450mhz. Just changing a jumper on the board
Imagine my delight as a high school kid, when I found the K6-2 300mhz for like $100 at a MarketPro Computer Show here in the US (wish they still did those...got some crazy good deals). I didn't know or care back then that Intel CPUs were quite a bit faster. The chip still kept up with me for several years and never disappointed....might have been a little sad if I ever saw benchmarks back then, though.
that was the last unlocked multiplier CPU, for nearly a decade coming from Intel, another fun fact is that you could run the FSB speed on this model up to 133MHz on later motherboards but you need to under-clock it because internals lockup above 450MHz.
IIRC, you can change multipliers on a Slot 1 CPU just by blocking certain "pins" on the edge connector. Back when they were new the Celeron 300a was *the* overclocking CPU. And I'm pretty sure I tested 450 MHz just using a piece of black electrical tape before cutting a trace to make it a permanent change.
Wow. I just went digging and I still have the retail boxes for my Celeron 266 and Celeron 300a. Unfortunately the 300a box didn't contain the CPU. It must've been gotten rid of with the computer back in the day. The 266 was still in the box, sans heat sink, though. It has a sharpie mark along the edge that I put there to designate which trace I should be cutting to overclock it. And you can see the copper trace was cut through to finalize that setting. I'd post a picture of the trace I cut if TH-cam had that capability. I'll throw it up on the oh-so-popular google+ service so it should be easy enough to find. Hehe
At home we had PII 233 MHz and after the warranty period had passed, I overclocked it to whooping 266 MHz. Still the price for it was insane back in the days, especially in Czech...
That last bit about the performance increase with each upgrade was very on point. I have been running my i5 3570K since 2012 and haven't felt the need to upgrade. Even after getting an Oculus Rift, I don't feel any upgrade pressure (it would be a lot of money for relatively small performance boosts to go to a newer processor). I used to get a new processor with relative frequency leading up to the C2D. There are even processors in there that are just now coming back to me, but they all seemed to nearly double the performance of what came before. Now, though, i imagine that because of the speeds involved, steps are becoming much more incremental. Also, I would bet that the P233MMX outperforms the PII on games like Doom and Duke because they are less reliant on the FPU, which is the strength of the 686 line. I'm surprised that the raw mHz of the 300 doesn't push it ahead, though. Really weird. I wish I knew enough about the architecture to understand why this might be!
The PII was heavily based upon the Pentium Pro (otherwise dubbed the P6 architecture), which featured a translation layer to translate x86 instructions to micro-ops. Three decoders were featured, though two were limited to very simple instructions which limited the P6's ability to run multiple instructions simultaneously. Floating-point performance was also a weak point of the P6 architecture (until the PIII which added SSE). The architecture also apparently had trouble running 16 bit code and mixed code, which is due to a peculiarity of it's Out of Order register. So long as purely 32-bit code is run though, this will not pose an issue.
MMX instruction set allowed multiple operations to be performed in the same instruction, if the variables could be fit into the registers or something. So if you had a game engine that used 8 bit variables, you could work on four of those at the same time if the cpu had 32 bit registers, roughly but not always translating into a four times increase in performance for those operations. Some game engines took advantage of that, but most didn't bother. I think the modern compilers for programming languages automatically optimize code if that option is available. But these days, games are typically rendered using graphics APIs instead of cpu bound software renderers, so the performance boost might be lesser.
Have you ever done or thought of doing a video on Intel's Itanium CPUs? They almost completely failed in the consumer market fairly quickly due to not having x86 compatibility, but did well in the enterprise scene, in fact they are still being produced for certain applications (enterprise users can still buy the Itanium 9300 series CPUs new).
I have a PII 300 in a Dell XPS machine, (running a 440LX chipset) , its quite fast , and I would say its even ok with some of the speed sensitive DOS games like Warcraft II (you do have to set the scrolling to slowest, but its otherwise fine, certainly better than running on a PIII) pairing it up with something like an ATI Rage and a Voodoo1 or 2 would make for a very nice early Windows machine.
Slot 1 coolers? I have a box of them somewhere. Processors too. The only thing I don't have a lot of are DIMMs. I tried to get rid of it all four years ago. No takers. I'd gladly part with about anything I have if it's even worth the postage. . .
Ok, I found the box I was thinking about. Bigger box than I remember. No loose coolers. Probably in a different box. Anyway this is what I found: 1 Plextor Plexwriter 24/10/40 1 Pioneer Slot load DVD-ROM Slot A Athlon maybe 750 P-III 600 Passive P-III 500 Passive P-III 550 Active P-II 400 Active cooler P-II 400 Bare Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320 GB (Pretty sure I have another. . . somewhere) Maxtor DiamondMax 10 200 GB (Might be deceased, I;m not sure) 2 x Western Digital CaviarWD600 3 x Western Digital Caviar WD800 (I also have a J drive-- that's the one with 8 MB cache-- somewhere) IBM DTLA-307030 (75GXP @ 30 GB) 3.5 Floppy (Mitsimi)
My first self build PC was based on a Asus P2L97 and a Pentium II 333(Deschutes). That CPU was however MP unlocked downwards, I bought several motherboards to run 100+ MHz FSB's with that CPU. As far is I can remember I ran it near 400MHz.
So maybe early Deschutes are also unlocked? Might be worth mentioning in a future video :D Deschutes was the much smarter buy, it cut power draw in half basically.
I bought a Pentium II 300 back in August/September of 1997. It was around $700-800 at that time. The total cost of my machine was $3,000, mostly because I spent a ridiculous amount for 128 MB of RAM. Great gaming machine for a time. Less than 2 years later, I was able to build a superior gaming machine for less than $1,000.
No its not ... there is Gold in there and also the heat sink itself is worth money. try to buy some heat sinks on ebay. been doing electronics since i was a kid, i still dont understand why heatsinks are so expensive (non-anodized).
Because heatsinks are alot of raw metal...with chips you gotta work to get the gold out of them, but heatsinks are just a slab of pure metal, I believe typically aluminium, so you can just melt them down as they are and not bother with bullshit plastics or other metals in there, messing it up.
***** You mean....they CNC Machine a solid block of metal into a heatsink... Cause that´s what they do. They don´t make tiny fins and then weld them in place, dude. Also, we are talking about Pentium 2 era heatsinks. images.esellerpro.com/2131/I/450/29/scalebvr%20014.jpg These mofos...they are expensive compared to the chip because they are a solid block of raw metal most of the time (he was talking about non-anodized)...so they go like crazy because they are easy to melt down and repurpose.
I found the editing style in this video very confusing. I get what you were trying to do, but it just didn't work for me. I would have first dumped all the info on the processor, preferably along with some illustration images/videos of the processor and marketing materials, and then at the end showed how the various games ran. Another thing you can do to organize your videos is add "informative text boxes" summarizing what you are talking about. For example, if you start talking about the price, then you could add a pretty box at the bottom of the screen with the text: "Launch price: 1981$". Just some thoughts.
All of the games shown, apart from Tomb Raider, are actually rendered on the GPU and that's why they're running so fast. The CPU still does some of the preparation work for the GPU, that's why you can see a drop in FPS on the older processors. But at the level of PII the performance is capped by the graphics card, so there's really no difference between 233 vs 300 CPU model. Some office- or photoshop-like application would highlight the difference much better.
I reviewed the 233 and 266 in previous videos. There is a clear difference between these CPUs across all the games. You can check out the videos on my channel page.
I had a PII 333 mhz back in the days with a mild overclock to 350 mhz... the best part was jumping from 66mhz to 100mhz bus... got like a 20% boost in framerates :-)
My first family computer had one of these in it but by the time we got to it the price was under 500 dollars for the CPU. We bought a 3000ish dollar computer at the time
in 2017 the i7 4770k with a little bit off overclocking can perform like a 6700k at stock, and at the same frequency the 6700k and the 7700k performs the same, but coming back to the pentium 2 they vere some of the best cpus ever made by intel, very reliable and powerful for their time, way better that cpus from other producers of that period
I dunno, My PII 350 had the faster 100 mhz FSB. This 300 Mhz was stuck on 66 Mhz. It doesn't seem huge now but at the time there was a difference. I made sure to get the PII 350 for that 100 Mhz FSB. As it was the fastest out at the time. This was before the PIII launched and after the first PIIs were out.
The first PC I've bought with my own money was a used PII 300 in the late 99, 14" display and 48MB of ram, but only 4GB of hard drive. So many memories
The Hard Drive space was so little, but thanks to a Savage4 as GPU Tomb Raider, Quake and Duke Nukem used to run nice at 640x480. I have so many memories with that, Grim Fandango, Age of Empires, Need for Speed 2. And of course Alyssa Milano as wallpaper cause i was a kid in love
That's how Intel roll.. We should be glad that we have AMD. Otherwise Intel would be selling i3 for a 1000 dollars.... Back then i got K6-2 instead of paying Intel Overpriced prices... Today i do the same Amd over Intel, don't like to pay overprice.
This reminds me of me foolishly spending over 1000 Dollars on a 1GHz Athlon Slot A when it came out in 2000. I was a teen very much into PC gaming and happend to have a fair bit of money to spend so I needed to have the first 1GHz CPU in my neighborhood. I recon a couple of weeks later it was at least 200 bucks cheaper and I ended up upgrading the machine pretty soon. Never bought a CPU that expensive ever after.
I got my MMX around 2000, given how long the P2 has been out at that point already I feel somewhat trolled. Still a nice CPU, no doubt, just not as powerful as one might hope when it comes to gaming.
According to the redhill Cpu guide (redhill.net.au/c/c-b.html), the PII 300 was indeed the fastest x86 available at that time, but that was the only reason of such price: any normal user could get decent performance out of the other PII's or the competitor chips, which were only some percent slower. Intel was used to that marketing strategy, for many reasons, also outlined in the guide.
Multiplier for 300MHz is 4.5x not 4x. I actually had the Pentium II 266MHz in 1998 and I tinkered with it quite a bit, so I remember that multiplier quite well. BTW, at some point I overclocked that P2 the only way possible, by increasing the FSB to 75MHz which was probably faster than a true P2-300, but I never compared. It ran overclocked for 7 years or something like that before I eventually sold it.
Hmm, I wonder which multiplier and FSB I had chosen back in the day. My PII266 first ran at 300MHz, but after a few weeks time it could hit 337MHz all of the sudden.
No wonder nobody wants to conquer Australia. The place is five meters from the sun, and everything that breathe is capable of killing you in a plethora of delightfully painful ways. Apart from that it's a lovely place :)
Strait BS form intel modern day $2000 gives you vast computing power enough to virtualize 3-4 gaming machines, way more than any DEsktop user need. DAt difference between cosumer grade cpus and 7980xe is huge.
PhilsComputerLab it surely was... towed it to a lot of lan parties and it never complained.... well until Chernobyl (cih.95) virus. that killed effectively the hard drive and motherboard.
yeah... back in around 1996 when Intel released their top end cpu the Pentium Pro 150 mhz Dell released a few desktops with it and they cost somewhere around 7k USD or more here in Europe
I long ago gave up on having a separate machine to play older games. These days with things like Dosbox being available it just doesn't matter anymore. You can take your modern PC and run the old stuff just fine. Sure, old hardware can be nostalgic and fun to mess with, but there's no real practical reason for it anymore, unless you just really enjoy messing with it.
true. you build that one pc you had dreamed about but could never buy, then you put it to play the games of the era and suddenly you're saying to yourself "shit i wish this was faster", then you realize you could have built a much faster old machine for the same price, or even less, but you choose not to. meh
Yeah like I said, if you just really enjoy tinkering with old hardware and that's your thing, go for it. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. I'm just saying, that if your only goal is to run old games, you'd be better served by using something like Dosbox on a modern PC.
A friend of my fathers was a cartographer for the government and he got access to a lot of random computer stuff that they'd "dispose of" He had the first pc server I had ever seen it had multiple pentium ii xeons and sounded like a leaf blower when he turned it on xD. I think he wound up renting it out to people for websites or something across those lines and made a ton of money off of it.
From the PCGuide you can read the following (written about the time of release) on the topic of the pricing: "Intel surprised the industry a bit in releasing not only these two but also a 300 MHz Pentium II in May 1997. However, the 300 MHz chip was originally more of a marketing routine than anything else; availability was non-existent and the pricing insane (when the announced initial price of $1,970 was first released, a hot argument ensued about whether or not this was obviously a typo--it wasn't!) In later months Intel improved its production process further, and the 300 MHz chip dropped rapidly in price and became much more "mainstream"."
Ah, thanks for sharing this! I struggled to find anything as interesting as this article :D
Yes, that's correct :)
Thx.. Time to visit it again :)
The price on these must have rapidly declined. I remember buying a dual mobo and two of these processors for around 300$ US in August of '97.
+Eon Guipagho That's pretty much what happened. It was a very competitive time with tons of price cuts left, right and centre.
I remember I was in grade 10 and Intel brought out the 333mhz chip. My friend said that there will never be a faster CPU because 333mhz "is the speed of light". I still remind him about that prediction.
lol. It reminds me of High school in late 90's when my friend claimed that video games would stop being produced after the millennium because every conceivable game had already been thought about.. It sounds a bit crazy now! :)
"640 K ought to be enough for anybody" -Bill Gates
@@RuruFIN That's not a quote from Bill Gates.
3 x 10^8 Ms^-1 is a velocity and 3 x 10^8 Hz is a frequency. They are two seperate things. The speed of light is a velocity not a frequency. Lol.
@@jtveg and speed of light is not about light, but causality limitation.
So basically, instead of waiting for the kaby lake extreme, I should just wait twenty years to get it for twenty dollars. Best deal
Fupa Lord that and we don't know where Mor's law will take us
For all we know we could be using Quantum computers in 20 years and who says something.like a economy will exist in 20 years
I've heard reports that we might have reached the end of Moore's law in respect to CPUs.
Or just wait 6 more years for 3950x to get down to around 20$.
@@Trick-Framed I was talking about 3950x, there's still many more years to go. By that time you will get a zen5 Ryzen 5 which will have same performance as the 3950
@@klyplays Didn't see the date, you posted 1 year ago, there is still 4 more to go. My apologies.
Back in '98 I had picked up the PII 333. I used that computer for more than 12 years before I absolutely had to replace it with a more modern chipset. I loved that I was able to run it as dual core. I hated upgrading from nt4.0 to Windows 7 Pro after the end of support. I'm really glad that Intel went with slot 1. In future years, I truly believe the past experience with close proximity cache to core architecture gave us all the ultra compact dies that we use today. I'm loving the retro vids. It's got me thinking of firing up one or two of my old door stops just to remember where I've been.
The reason that Duke Nukem and Doom run best on the Pentium MMX 233 is because some 16-bit instructions from the x86 instruction set achieve much higher performance on the older P5 microarchitecture than the newer P6 microarchitecture on which the Pentium Pro and subsequently the Pentium II is based, the P6 being optimized for 32-bit code.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_Pro#Performance
This (rather curious) behavior can only really be observed if you benchmark a P5 and a P6 CPU with relativly similar clock speeds.
Or, if you are a gamer living in 1996 and you just upgraded from a Pentium 150MHz to a brand new Pentium Pro, hoping that Duke Nukem will run so much better. :)
Great post, thank you for sharing, I was really wondering why this was happening :D
PII specifically was designed to fix that shortcoming. Only PPro were affected by 16-bit performance degradation.
Yes, when Pentium Pro first came out people complained that older instructions are slower than Pentium, and Intel defended that by saying Pentium Pro is really for server and workstation instead of home and office machines.
I know I do a necromancy here 😉 But with retro stuff, time doesn't really matter anymore...
You're correct, but both Doom and Duke Nukem 3D are... 32 bit apps. Yes, they run under DOS, but they're using 32-bit extenders so they actually run 32-bit code. There still may be some differences here - but I think it's not related to this particular case 🤔
350nm, 2.8v on the core.
OMG
we have come a very long way lmao
Amarildo Júnior and im here facepalming my laptop with a 32nm processor
The vents on my PII 300 felt like a hair dryer. That thing ran so hot.
And this "archaic" P4 2.8 GHz (Prescott core, 90 nm process) would eat that old P2 and eject its rattly silicon bones.
I believe they were also measured in micrometers back then too.. so it would have been listed as .35µm.
I remember having a CPU over 3 volts at one time. I guess older than this one.
About a year later, I bought a Celeron 300A (300Mhz) for 200 bucks and overclocked it to 450Mhz. Loved that chip!
Water cooled mine with a fish tank pump and a bucket 😅
I remmeber a year later, the Pentium II 450 hat the same price-tag. Intel got competition with the K6-2 and 3 but basically, in the high end segment, they still ruled and could sell it for any price they wanted to. another year or so later that changed when AMD got the Athlon out and was competitive, if not even a bit better than the pentium III chips. oh, and the Ghz Race was on. turbulent and good times :)
I dug up some "price cut" articles from those years, man it was a price war. AMD did well and Intel cut prices very aggressively. If you got a Pentium II on launch day, half a year later you would have been pissed.
Celeron 300A@450 came out earlier than the K6-3, cost around the same and also flat out murdered any K6-X in gaming, and 440BX is also far better than any of the flaky Super7 chipsets.
While Athlon vs Pentium III/4 in 1999/2000 was exciting, it's also mostly irrelevant to the wallet because Duron was the true value champion until 2002.
K6-2 was on par with Pentium II in games and even outperformed Pentium II in Quake II and Quake III Arena.
Also, it was easy to overclock even on older mobos because for this CPU 2x multiplier worked as 6x.
And almost every single 266 MHz processor was able to achieve 450 MHz this way (6 x 75).
@Ivan Zaitsau the K6-2 (and the often very...buggy chipsets, primarily on terms of AGP performance, as well as driver issues) were a double sided sword. it had the potential to performance on par with a P II of the same clockspeed, but often it was simply murdered. with a pentium, you had a much more stable and constant plattform. it got much better with the Athlon (VIA KT133 was still horrible) and as AMD started to make their own chipsets with the A64, the problem was gone.
I've used my K6-2 on older Intel 430tx based board and had no problems at all. There were a lot of PCI based cards even in top segment back in the day. Both Voodoo 5 and GeForce 256 had PCI versions released. And while they performed slightly worse with PCI running on 33 MHz, on 37.5 MHz difference was negligible compared to AGP versions. Quake 3, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, Unreal - all these games performed well on K6-2. Basically, I had no problems with running any game until NFS: Underground was released.
Back in '90s I had in my studio a PII 300 workstation that cost around $10K in today's money. Windows NT, 256MB RAM, SCSI hard drives, ZIP and dual CD-RW, HP scanner, Diamonth Stealth VGA (replaced by Matrox and then by Nvidia), SB AWE64 Gold, MPEG accelerator card for video editing, Wacom tablet, 21" Mitsubishi Diamontron and a beast A3 Lexmark Printer that had its own HDD and CPU. A true workhorse. I miss that machine :(
Intel just can't make CPUs that much better anymore. They're down to billions of transistors on this tiny chip, Traditional electronics break down when you get down to about 4nm. Not to mention, the reason why CPU manufacturers went core crazy in the 2000s is because you can't really get rid of heat from the CPU after about 6 5-6Ghz, they couldn't clock the chips any higher so they had to just add more CPU cores.
Yes, but now they hit another limit... as they cannot increase frequency, and most of people is happy with 4c or 6c CPU, that they dropped to low-end/mid range seqment, most of people buy them ,and will be happy with it. Increasing cores above 6C is interesting only for heavy content creators. So increasing cores will dont help them anymore to attract many customers, that are happy with 4C or 6C systems. So they cannot push frequency, they cannot push more cores, they will profit less and less from new CPU's this decade. They need to find something new, otherwise, their income comes down... also not to mention, that there are two equal competitors now, AMD and Intel.
My PII 350 unlocked a world of PC gaming to me. I started with PCs with cheap, used gear. I was leary of PC until Voodoo truth be told. However when the PII came out, Windows 98 and SE, and it ran so many great games from the past and right then. I remember watching the Unreal demo loop on it and it was so amazing. I'd just leave it on when friends came over to play Tekken 3 on the PS1. Fun part was emulating that game on that same PC. Sure, it was slow, but it ran and that in itself was amazing.
as far as I remember the main reason for the incredible price at the release was that Intel had some issues with the cache getting the chips running at 150Mhz
Does anyone here or is there anyone old enough to remember when the Intel Celeron 300 Slot one came out...had to be from Costa Rica... you could overclock the freak out of that ship as it was actually a Celeron 450 or something like that but they could not sale them enough so they rebranded them 300's. Was one of the most amazing CPU's I've ever owned....
Look here: th-cam.com/video/z5IYxpGc9NU/w-d-xo.html
The Celeron 300A Mendocino. The 266 and 300 Covington were basically the same die as the then-current P2s (around 400-500 was what the process could do), but without external L2 cache chips (it had 512kB at half speed), and without any L2 at all it was slooooow. It was even slow when overclocked by 50%, by running the FSB at 100 (as P2s did) instead of 66 (as Celerons did).
Mendocino changed everything by keeping the same process node and adding 128kB full speed cache on-die. So a quarter the size of the P2’s cache but twice as fast. The 300A and 333 up are Mendocino (until you get to the 533A that is based on Coppermine). The process would easily run 450 and with effort 500. The nice thing is that 300A is 4.5 (locked multiplier) times 66MHz, and running the motherboard at the fully in spec 100 instead of 66 makes everything faster, but it also puts the celeron 300A, cheapest in the range, at an easy 450, and it was almost as fast as the P2 450, at the time fastest and around €500.
@@JasperJanssen Had one myself, awesome time.
It costed 2000 dollars because it was the BEST processor ever created
Pentium 2 was the PEAK of intels creativity
Everything after P2 went downhill
Intel is finished in terms of creativity and soon money wise too
Eh, if you want to say modern Intel is bad I would say the Pentium III was the peak, and that the Pentium 4 is when they started to go downhill.
When it first arrived, I bought a Pentium II-400 for 1400DM. Yes, I was that guy. But that PC (with an ASUS mainboard) lasted me for several years and monstered all new games. Fond memories.
Good work 😎
they were quite difficult to obtain. My employer was looking at replacing their mainframe based training with PCs and did an exhaustive real word comparison of all the processors available, and not one supplier could supply a 300 for testing for at least two months, so after testing they ended up buying MMX 233's, which were a quarter of the price, not that price mattered to them
My Dad bought me a Pentium 2 PC from Micro Center after I was discharged from hospital after an eight month stay from a traumatic brain injury (TBI) when I was nine. It couldn't play many games, including Final Fantasy 8 and Black & White. We knew nothing about computers and I had no Internet until 2003 so it was a paperweight. I had that PC until 2004 when we bought a Compact which was tenfold better, but it also couldn't handle the hottest games. Replaced the integrated GPU with a GeForce FX 5200 and was riotously blown away! Six years later had a new PC with a GTX 295 and GTX 750.
Times have evolved--bittersweet.
Nice Video! What is that rocket 🚀 race game we can always see in between?
Interesting video, Phil :)
All this seems like a distant memory now, but I do remember that back then this was THE thing to get your hands on, least until the AMD K6-2 hit the shelves. And as this video shows, 33 MHz increments meant a lot back then.. I mean, could you imagine saying to a PC enthusiast today 'hey, I got my i7 to go 33 MHz higher!'? But you felt like a king back then if you could do just that, either through over-clocking or just going out and getting the model that gave the desired speed.
And I think that Wipeout game still looks cool even today. Also saw Jedi Knight II: Dark Forces in there, another awesome game with loads of atmosphere including awesome sounds.
And GLQuake. That teeny little file really opened my eyes to hardware-acclerated rendering (using the Open GL API) vs. software. GPU-based rendering. At the time I had a Cyrix PR200+ that was dire at running Quake at 640 x 480. Got GLQuake off a magazine cover-disk I think, and let it rip on a Riva 128ZX (with a massive 4mb VRAM!). So instead of the CPU doing both the geometry and rendering, the latter was suddenly offloaded onto the GPU and the result was 640 x 480 silk-smooth game-play throughout that not only played better, but also looked better.
Loads of other great titles to choose from that that era too.
How did you enable the FPS counter for the original tomb raider? it looks native to the game
Late 1990s I had a P3 450 mhz playing QuakeWorld and Diablo II. Those were great times.
I got a PII 300 in July 1998. The system cost us 1799 back then. Needless to say it was a miracle jump from the 386 I had before that
wow that is a seeeerious jump in power. hell, even just going to a pentium 60 is a big leap from a 386.
$2000 at launch... three years later i was buying the cpu for my 2nd ever PC build - a used P2-350... for $20.
IIRC, Pentium II is basically a pentium pro with mmx instructions and different socket.
As pentium pro technology will allow "predictions" of what instruction to run next, hence it is way faster than socket 7 pentium processor (read it on pentium pro marketing ads material, I remember they put a picture of octopus to visualize it's superior multitasking capability).
Haha. I remember the days when my Aunt was bragging about getting a Gateway 166 Mhz CPU. Then our family felt all happy to get the Compaq Presario 200 Mhz PC. It was all about the clock speed then but now it's just about the Cores mainly. Seems like Technology has slowed compared to how fast it was exploding back then though.
I talked mad shit to my friend who got a Gateway Pentium 66 when I got my Zeos pentium 90 😂
I have my Pentium II 350 MHz and VGA PCI SiS 6636 8 MB with the latest Bios installed, and both are ok. And a lot of sticks of RAM PC 100 and 133 MHz... 128 mb, 256mb, etc.
PD: i have a beautiful Heat Sink SiS for the SiS 6636 that i found.
I have played Need For Speed III Hot Pursuit, MAME 2000, Colin McRae Rally, Moto Racer I, etc... all max setting
What is the racing game in the background? I remember having one of those weird demos of that :D
WipeOut, and I believe this is the latest iteration, which is a remaster if I've not mistaken.
cheers.
I built & sold a lot of computers right before the PII 300 MHz. Around the newYear 1997 I built a computer with a *Pentium Pro 200 MHz with 512 KB L2 cache* and it outpreformed PII 233 & 266 because it's L2 cache was cast in and, opposite PII, ran at full processor speed. I have a wish for you Phil: Find one and test it against PII 300 MHz :)
Or perhaps a Pentium II overdrive? I wonder how that would stack up against a regular PII 333 using SDRAM...
The performance impact of Cache is also very different in different applications.
+ Mister BluntSA Yes :)
+rfvtgbzhn Yes but that needn't hinder a summary conclusion.
Honestly the Pentium Pros and II OverDrjves aren't really "real" Pentiums and P2s, as that lineup ultimately turned into the Xeon lineup.
This is a great video. Makes me happy to own an old Gateway G6-300. I knew it seemed like a pretty peppy little machine running Win98 (what was installed when I tried it out) I am planning to add an IDE to SD adapter soon.
I will probably stick to Win98 First Edition for the sake of legitimacy. But who knows, I may cheat & use SE again.
I forgot to tell you Philscomputerlab, I was very lucky here a few weeks back. I work as an electrician and sometimes I have work in schools. lately I've been asking people working in these schools if they have old PCs standing around. And I really scored a big fish. A white Midi tower, a screen, mouse and keyboard. When I opened the machine after I got home it contained a Asus P2B 440BX motherboard, Intel Pentium 3 600 Coppermine slot 1. 256MB SDRAM, a Voodoo3 3000!!!, PCI network card, a Soundblaster 128 PCI card, a 10GB Seagate harddrive, one DVD reader and one CD burner. It was in excellent condition and so was the 17 inch CRT screen! All this for free! Also got a nice 486 DX33 desktop model with 8MB RAM from another school which was also in excellent condition. So had quite some luck!
I got a 486 from a school years ago. And last year, a Core 2 Duo HP box, haven't done anything with it yet though.
I just pulled some parts out of my scrap pile and built a retro-ish machine, thanks in large part to the motivation provided by your videos. I do this perodically, but never really dedicate a case to the build or anything, but this time, I thought it would be better for the life of all of the parts to just keep it permanently assembled (I bought almost all of the parts new, and it would be sad to see them die while in storage!). I managed to scare up a bootable Win98SE disc (none of my 9x CDs were bootable, but one turned up, hidden in a drawer at work). That, combined with your amazingly helpful review of China DOS Union, I've got a fun little machine going.
I was kind of bummed that my PII Klamath had, in fact, died. Back when it was my main processor, I split the case to try to beef the cooling to attempt an overclock-- it never took (mainly because of the heat issues you mention), so I'm running a PII 350 instead on a BX mobo. I have a 1.4ghz celeron on a daughter card, but I think that is just too fast!
Also running a VooDoo 3 3000, an Orchid Righteous (just because), an AWE-32 piggy backing a SCB-55, an SW60XG, Roland MT-32, all with 512mb RAM. Now all I need to do is find my GeForce 3 that has DVI out. Then I'll pop in my VooDoo2 for my Glide Needs (the Orchid Righteous is just a lot of fun to have in there-- I love hearing the relay click for some reason).
It's been a nice distraction, that's for sure!
Thanks for all the great videos, Phil!
I worked at a place that built computers from 96 to 03 and loved it. I always got deals on the latest gaming setups. I remember getting a Celeron 300 slot 1 and we could overclock it to 450! We just had to install these refrigerator sinks on them to keep them cool. Great video man!
It is amazing how well the stock cooler for the Klamath Pentium II actually does, considering how basic the heatsink is. It is also why IMO it wasn't really necessary to use an aftermarket heatsink on the Deschutes Pentium II when it is using the same cooler as Klamath.
that model of processor was the first one I had after I made the jump out of a 386 pc back in 1998. It was THE TITS! I could run anything I wanted. That pc endured around 7 years of heavy gaming use. I totally love your videos, keep'em coming
That's awesome :D
I remember my dad bought a Pentium II 266Mhz powered IBM Aptiva around christmas of 1997. ATI Rage Pro and 32MB. For himself of course. That was like one of his proudest moments because he was the same age I am now (36) and he had 3 kids by then. He bought that damn thing on some kind of credit card I'm pretty sure. Dad grew up in eastern Kentucky and Had them Bose speakers in the monitor and was a really nice machine. I wish I would have snapped it up in 2002 after he replaced it. He was making real money after I moved out and moved to a notebook.
Btw, unless you have physical CPUs Pentium II 266 and 233, the test is not correctly made.
The reason for this is, that PII 300 uses faster cache, but with higher timings. They are not equal to PII 266 and PII233, when underclocked. So underclocked PII 300 performs WORSE than PII 266 or PII233. Differance is not big though, but it is not correct test. Anandtech warned about this, that those slower Pentium II cannot be simulated by higher ones, because of different cache latency. At the same clock speed, downclocked PII 300 will performan worse than PII 266 or PII233.
It can be used only to simulate Celerons, when you disable L2 cache. Then it will perform same as adequate Celeron, even if it is Pentium II and downclocked. However, you need to decrease FSB from 100 to 66, to have equal processors as Celerons. But for Pentium II with L2 cache, downclocking higher model cannot be used for simulate of lower Pentium II models.
the 300a Celeron was a quarter of the price and would clock to 450mhz . my be nice to see a comparison between the two.
I've covered that one in a dedicated video 🙂
dam good retro review. thumbs up and keep it up!
Thank you! That was just at the right time, after a tedious day at work :D
I had the PII266 when it came out and overclocked it to PII300 levels. For some reason a few months later it could easily overclock to 337Mhz. Used it that way till the Athlon600 came out, which ran at 660Mhz. After that I skipped the Athlon700, 800 and even 1GHz, before I bought a pretested Thunderbird 1GHz@1.2GHz, which unfortunately overheated all the time in my too small case.
I actually bought one back in 1997. I had a good job in banking and just wanted high end once in my life. Forked out 5000 Deutschmark for the whole System and all the bragging rights taht came with it. Not sure I ever spent that much ever again, especially adjusted for inflation.
I bought my pentium 2 333mhz back in 1998 and had to buy voodoo 2 separatively, because these weren't yet in the shop. It was the only time I bought cutting edge computer, but there was no real choice at that time for gaming computer. It was worth it, because when you just added more ram and bought new graphics card every couple of years, it was relevant until about 2002 before cpu started bottlenecking too badly. Of course system requirements for games were already asking 700mhz p3, but you shouldn't take them seriously, because improving directx was really decreasing cpu requirements, but increasing gpu requirements.
As a general rule directx 8 games would be mostly playable on 333mhz p2, but directx 9 games wouldn't.
I don't remember this wrongly, because I still have that p2. I kept it, because I realized new computers wouldn't be backwards compatible with old games.
What is odd was that my dad got a whole Dell system with that chip for $3300 when it came out. Including 17 inch Trinitron monitor, STB Velocity 4MB, 64MB ram and 500MB hd, in Canada. Must have given OEMs very good pricing.
Yea I'm sure they had some deals going on.
Hadn't thought about Moto Racer (6:38) for a long time. I remember getting it from a bargain bin at a Hastings video store. I think at the time I was playing it on a P3 based computer on a PCI video card with a CRT. I really loved it because of its arcade like FPS. I remember my eyes drying out from staring at the screen trying to mentally keep up!
I have no idea why I watched this video, but it was still quite enjoyable.
Hey thank you for checking it out :D
we be saying the same shit about intel i7 and GTX 1080 and calling the iphone 7s a BRICK in 10 years time!
Not really... the progression in cpu computational power has slowed down a lot in the past 10 years. 5ghz is reaching the limit of silicon based cpu tech...
gpu power isn't slowing down as much though...
yea 8 ghz is with liquid nitrogen and the cpu won't last very long. That's just a dumb argument...
I never said that we have reached the limit... reaching means getting close. More cores require more power, which produces more heat... so yea we're getting to the limit now.
Go away, I don't like you.
+Person
8ghz? been done 10 years ago
www.engadget.com/2007/01/24/pentium-4-overclocked-to-8ghz-lets-see-your-fancy-core-2-try-t/
and no, you can't just increase the clock speed. that's why the pentium 4 died. intel had plans for a 5ghz (stock) pentium 4 but they couldn't even get them to run at 4ghz reliably. so they turned to their mobile division and took over the pentium 3 / core design e so the core2 was born. much lower clock speeds, but much faster anyways.
that 5ghz barrier is still there.
I remember saying and laughing that "Man, imagine what the Geforce 10 is going to be like!".. .. back when I had my Geforce 256.
The fastest GPU from 2009 is still great in 2018. Especially with SLI.
I paid $239 from newegg back in 1999 for mine. Probably 4 minths after it came.out. Ran the 66mhz fan at 100mhz ...easy overclock to 450mhz. Just changing a jumper on the board
I had a p2 233 that I overclocked to 292 mhz. It was a BEAST, coupled it with a vodoo2 12meg, the stuff dreams are made of.
SLI?
@@turrican4d599 No I never got SLI for it. I upgraded it to a Geforce at some point.
Imagine my delight as a high school kid, when I found the K6-2 300mhz for like $100 at a MarketPro Computer Show here in the US (wish they still did those...got some crazy good deals). I didn't know or care back then that Intel CPUs were quite a bit faster. The chip still kept up with me for several years and never disappointed....might have been a little sad if I ever saw benchmarks back then, though.
Superb video Phil!
Thank you, really means a lot to me!
that was the last unlocked multiplier CPU, for nearly a decade coming from Intel, another fun fact is that you could run the FSB speed on this model up to 133MHz on later motherboards but you need to under-clock it because internals lockup above 450MHz.
@2:00 If this processor was on a 75mhz bus the multiplier would be 4 to get 300mhz but at 66mhz fsb 4.5 is the multiplier you were looking for Phil.
IIRC, you can change multipliers on a Slot 1 CPU just by blocking certain "pins" on the edge connector. Back when they were new the Celeron 300a was *the* overclocking CPU. And I'm pretty sure I tested 450 MHz just using a piece of black electrical tape before cutting a trace to make it a permanent change.
Wow. I just went digging and I still have the retail boxes for my Celeron 266 and Celeron 300a. Unfortunately the 300a box didn't contain the CPU. It must've been gotten rid of with the computer back in the day. The 266 was still in the box, sans heat sink, though. It has a sharpie mark along the edge that I put there to designate which trace I should be cutting to overclock it. And you can see the copper trace was cut through to finalize that setting. I'd post a picture of the trace I cut if TH-cam had that capability. I'll throw it up on the oh-so-popular google+ service so it should be easy enough to find. Hehe
At home we had PII 233 MHz and after the warranty period had passed, I overclocked it to whooping 266 MHz. Still the price for it was insane back in the days, especially in Czech...
How well I remember these CPU's and their big plastic containers (slot mounting was big back in the day!)
I built my first PC based on the Pentium 2- 300. I paid about $500 for the processor at a pre-Ebay online auction site.
That last bit about the performance increase with each upgrade was very on point. I have been running my i5 3570K since 2012 and haven't felt the need to upgrade. Even after getting an Oculus Rift, I don't feel any upgrade pressure (it would be a lot of money for relatively small performance boosts to go to a newer processor). I used to get a new processor with relative frequency leading up to the C2D. There are even processors in there that are just now coming back to me, but they all seemed to nearly double the performance of what came before.
Now, though, i imagine that because of the speeds involved, steps are becoming much more incremental.
Also, I would bet that the P233MMX outperforms the PII on games like Doom and Duke because they are less reliant on the FPU, which is the strength of the 686 line. I'm surprised that the raw mHz of the 300 doesn't push it ahead, though. Really weird. I wish I knew enough about the architecture to understand why this might be!
The PII was heavily based upon the Pentium Pro (otherwise dubbed the P6 architecture), which featured a translation layer to translate x86 instructions to micro-ops. Three decoders were featured, though two were limited to very simple instructions which limited the P6's ability to run multiple instructions simultaneously. Floating-point performance was also a weak point of the P6 architecture (until the PIII which added SSE).
The architecture also apparently had trouble running 16 bit code and mixed code, which is due to a peculiarity of it's Out of Order register. So long as purely 32-bit code is run though, this will not pose an issue.
MMX instruction set allowed multiple operations to be performed in the same instruction, if the variables could be fit into the registers or something. So if you had a game engine that used 8 bit variables, you could work on four of those at the same time if the cpu had 32 bit registers, roughly but not always translating into a four times increase in performance for those operations.
Some game engines took advantage of that, but most didn't bother. I think the modern compilers for programming languages automatically optimize code if that option is available. But these days, games are typically rendered using graphics APIs instead of cpu bound software renderers, so the performance boost might be lesser.
Have you ever done or thought of doing a video on Intel's Itanium CPUs? They almost completely failed in the consumer market fairly quickly due to not having x86 compatibility, but did well in the enterprise scene, in fact they are still being produced for certain applications (enterprise users can still buy the Itanium 9300 series CPUs new).
I have a PII 300 in a Dell XPS machine, (running a 440LX chipset) , its quite fast , and I would say its even ok with some of the speed sensitive DOS games like Warcraft II (you do have to set the scrolling to slowest, but its otherwise fine, certainly better than running on a PIII)
pairing it up with something like an ATI Rage and a Voodoo1 or 2 would make for a very nice early Windows machine.
Slot 1 coolers? I have a box of them somewhere. Processors too. The only thing I don't have a lot of are DIMMs. I tried to get rid of it all four years ago. No takers.
I'd gladly part with about anything I have if it's even worth the postage. . .
David Wellman which country are you in?
US.
I believe I have one or two PIII 650. Lemme check
Ah ok I'm UK so shipping would likely cost more than they are worth.
Thanks anyway.
Ok, I found the box I was thinking about. Bigger box than I remember. No loose coolers. Probably in a different box. Anyway this is what I found:
1 Plextor Plexwriter 24/10/40
1 Pioneer Slot load DVD-ROM
Slot A Athlon maybe 750
P-III 600 Passive
P-III 500 Passive
P-III 550 Active
P-II 400 Active cooler
P-II 400 Bare
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320 GB (Pretty sure I have another. . . somewhere)
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 200 GB (Might be deceased, I;m not sure)
2 x Western Digital CaviarWD600
3 x Western Digital Caviar WD800 (I also have a J drive-- that's the one with 8 MB cache-- somewhere)
IBM DTLA-307030 (75GXP @ 30 GB)
3.5 Floppy (Mitsimi)
+Mystik al Probably. Postage looks around ~$23 USD
My first self build PC was based on a Asus P2L97 and a Pentium II 333(Deschutes). That CPU was however MP unlocked downwards, I bought several motherboards to run 100+ MHz FSB's with that CPU. As far is I can remember I ran it near 400MHz.
So maybe early Deschutes are also unlocked? Might be worth mentioning in a future video :D Deschutes was the much smarter buy, it cut power draw in half basically.
I bought a Pentium II 300 back in August/September of 1997. It was around $700-800 at that time. The total cost of my machine was $3,000, mostly because I spent a ridiculous amount for 128 MB of RAM. Great gaming machine for a time. Less than 2 years later, I was able to build a superior gaming machine for less than $1,000.
$20 is a complete rip-off for ANY Pentium CPU today.
1ex1uger except for the new Kaby lake hyperthreaded ones.
No its not ... there is Gold in there and also the heat sink itself is worth money. try to buy some heat sinks on ebay. been doing electronics since i was a kid, i still dont understand why heatsinks are so expensive (non-anodized).
Because heatsinks are alot of raw metal...with chips you gotta work to get the gold out of them, but heatsinks are just a slab of pure metal, I believe typically aluminium, so you can just melt them down as they are and not bother with bullshit plastics or other metals in there, messing it up.
***** You mean....they CNC Machine a solid block of metal into a heatsink...
Cause that´s what they do. They don´t make tiny fins and then weld them in place, dude.
Also, we are talking about Pentium 2 era heatsinks. images.esellerpro.com/2131/I/450/29/scalebvr%20014.jpg
These mofos...they are expensive compared to the chip because they are a solid block of raw metal most of the time (he was talking about non-anodized)...so they go like crazy because they are easy to melt down and repurpose.
not for the Pentium G4560..
I found the editing style in this video very confusing. I get what you were trying to do, but it just didn't work for me.
I would have first dumped all the info on the processor, preferably along with some illustration images/videos of the processor and marketing materials, and then at the end showed how the various games ran.
Another thing you can do to organize your videos is add "informative text boxes" summarizing what you are talking about.
For example, if you start talking about the price, then you could add a pretty box at the bottom of the screen with the text: "Launch price: 1981$".
Just some thoughts.
All of the games shown, apart from Tomb Raider, are actually rendered on the GPU and that's why they're running so fast. The CPU still does some of the preparation work for the GPU, that's why you can see a drop in FPS on the older processors. But at the level of PII the performance is capped by the graphics card, so there's really no difference between 233 vs 300 CPU model. Some office- or photoshop-like application would highlight the difference much better.
I reviewed the 233 and 266 in previous videos. There is a clear difference between these CPUs across all the games. You can check out the videos on my channel page.
I had a PII 333 mhz back in the days with a mild overclock to 350 mhz... the best part was jumping from 66mhz to 100mhz bus... got like a 20% boost in framerates :-)
oh increasing the fsb back then was a huge boost. probably more than the clock speed itself is most cases. FSBs was such a bottleneck...
back in 97 I got my first pc and it was a p166 mmx from the now defunct tiny computers. I would do anything to get that back
Tiny computers? That's UK right?
Yeah, it's very difficult to find anything because searching 'tiny computers' just brings up really small pc's
An extra 20% clock speed getting double the frame rate is incredible, and it goes to show that clock speed wasn't everything, even back then.
2:00 the P2-300 has a FSB 66 MHz a 4x multiplier which gives the core clock of 300 MHz ... you sure the math is correct there?
Obviously not 😅
Nice Guide, Nice Video and Nice Gameplay 😀
My first family computer had one of these in it but by the time we got to it the price was under 500 dollars for the CPU. We bought a 3000ish dollar computer at the time
in 2017 the i7 4770k with a little bit off overclocking can perform like a 6700k at stock, and at the same frequency the 6700k and the 7700k performs the same, but coming back to the pentium 2 they vere some of the best cpus ever made by intel, very reliable and powerful for their time, way better that cpus from other producers of that period
how to enable fps counter in tomb raider? 1:00
6:43 that's a game i used to play and would NEVER EVER remember if it wasn't for this video.
nice
Gamers in the 90s: It's playable at 15-20 fps @ 640x480, but could be smoother
Gamers in 2021: It's unplayable at sub 60fps @ 4K/Ultra settings
I dunno, My PII 350 had the faster 100 mhz FSB. This 300 Mhz was stuck on 66 Mhz. It doesn't seem huge now but at the time there was a difference. I made sure to get the PII 350 for that 100 Mhz FSB. As it was the fastest out at the time. This was before the PIII launched and after the first PIIs were out.
The first PC I've bought with my own money was a used PII 300 in the late 99, 14" display and 48MB of ram, but only 4GB of hard drive. So many memories
Nice! Must have been an awesome machine back in the day.
The Hard Drive space was so little, but thanks to a Savage4 as GPU Tomb Raider, Quake and Duke Nukem used to run nice at 640x480. I have so many memories with that, Grim Fandango, Age of Empires, Need for Speed 2. And of course Alyssa Milano as wallpaper cause i was a kid in love
That's how Intel roll.. We should be glad that we have AMD. Otherwise Intel would be selling i3 for a 1000 dollars.... Back then i got K6-2 instead of paying Intel Overpriced prices... Today i do the same Amd over Intel, don't like to pay overprice.
This reminds me of me foolishly spending over 1000 Dollars on a 1GHz Athlon Slot A when it came out in 2000. I was a teen very much into PC gaming and happend to have a fair bit of money to spend so I needed to have the first 1GHz CPU in my neighborhood. I recon a couple of weeks later it was at least 200 bucks cheaper and I ended up upgrading the machine pretty soon. Never bought a CPU that expensive ever after.
I got my MMX around 2000, given how long the P2 has been out at that point already I feel somewhat trolled.
Still a nice CPU, no doubt, just not as powerful as one might hope when it comes to gaming.
damn dude you brought lots of memories of the games i had the wipeout HD moto racers were my favorite games
Cheers :D
According to the redhill Cpu guide (redhill.net.au/c/c-b.html), the PII 300 was indeed the fastest x86 available at that time, but that was the only reason of such price: any normal user could get decent performance out of the other PII's or the competitor chips, which were only some percent slower. Intel was used to that marketing strategy, for many reasons, also outlined in the guide.
Multiplier for 300MHz is 4.5x not 4x. I actually had the Pentium II 266MHz in 1998 and I tinkered with it quite a bit, so I remember that multiplier quite well. BTW, at some point I overclocked that P2 the only way possible, by increasing the FSB to 75MHz which was probably faster than a true P2-300, but I never compared. It ran overclocked for 7 years or something like that before I eventually sold it.
Hmm, I wonder which multiplier and FSB I had chosen back in the day. My PII266 first ran at 300MHz, but after a few weeks time it could hit 337MHz all of the sudden.
Why do you have a weird sorta German-Australian accent? rofl
sounds nice but weird xD
I travelled a lot when I was younger, UK, Germany, New York, Australia, and ended up staying in AUS :D
May i ask what your birth country is/where you grew up as a kid?^^
***** Idk, i thought his accent sounded German and at the sane time Australian to me xD
No wonder nobody wants to conquer Australia. The place is five meters from the sun, and everything that breathe is capable of killing you in a plethora of delightfully painful ways. Apart from that it's a lovely place :)
I thought exactly the same!
Strait BS form intel modern day $2000 gives you vast computing power enough to virtualize 3-4 gaming machines, way more than any DEsktop user need. DAt difference between cosumer grade cpus and 7980xe is huge.
Reminds me of my old p3 @550mhz. good old slot days.
the first pc we had ran on one of these... felt great to run any game that existed in late 1997
Still have my PII 450 and a couple PIIIs I simply can't part with! Used to have dozens of 486 DX2 and DX4s etc, ended up having to scrap them :(
my first own pc back in summer 98. PII 300, 4MB Ati rage pro, 32 mb ram 4 gig hdd 16x cd drive
Nice, would have been a beast back in those days!
PhilsComputerLab it surely was... towed it to a lot of lan parties and it never complained.... well until Chernobyl (cih.95) virus. that killed effectively the hard drive and motherboard.
yeah... back in around 1996 when Intel released their top end cpu the Pentium Pro 150 mhz Dell released a few desktops with it and they cost somewhere around 7k USD or more here in Europe
i had p350mhz in 2002, picked it up for like 20 euro's, 128mb ram. best deals
Still waiting for this guy to get to slot A one day... I recently manged to get my hands on a board, after about 2 months of intense searching :)
I long ago gave up on having a separate machine to play older games. These days with things like Dosbox being available it just doesn't matter anymore. You can take your modern PC and run the old stuff just fine. Sure, old hardware can be nostalgic and fun to mess with, but there's no real practical reason for it anymore, unless you just really enjoy messing with it.
true. you build that one pc you had dreamed about but could never buy, then you put it to play the games of the era and suddenly you're saying to yourself "shit i wish this was faster", then you realize you could have built a much faster old machine for the same price, or even less, but you choose not to.
meh
Yeah like I said, if you just really enjoy tinkering with old hardware and that's your thing, go for it. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. I'm just saying, that if your only goal is to run old games, you'd be better served by using something like Dosbox on a modern PC.
I wonder if it would at some point be able to return to these cartridge based sockets, maybe even a fully PCIe based design.
Do you know the game Asterix & Obelix XXL? Can you leave links in description for these old games?
A friend of my fathers was a cartographer for the government and he got access to a lot of random computer stuff that they'd "dispose of" He had the first pc server I had ever seen it had multiple pentium ii xeons and sounded like a leaf blower when he turned it on xD. I think he wound up renting it out to people for websites or something across those lines and made a ton of money off of it.
But how does the Pentium II compare to the PowerPC G3? I heard the PPC G3 is supposed to be twice as fast as the PII and at a lower cost.
Please do an AMD Athlon video It was a way better gaming cpu than the Intel Pentium
I will do Athlon of course, but with a twist :/
Excellent n.n!!
awesome what they did with the TDP in the revision
What WipeOut game is running in the background? It is available for PC?