Broken CPU Launched the Pentium Branding
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 ธ.ค. 2024
- After the 486, Intel went another direction and branded their 5th generation of microprocessor the Pentium! The first two models were clocked at 60 MHz and 66 MHz. Their significance in CPU history is without a doubt, but what about using such a CPU for Retro PC Gaming?
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I was an engineer developing array radar in the UK . Base software was written on a pdp11 and then compiled for the Pentium. When I left to join the city of London as an investment analyst the system was just not working on a Pentium but was when using the pdp11. Months later was sent the message that the fault was in the processor and not the software. I was a victim of the floating point error
Amazing! Thank you for sharing.
Feels like this is more of a collector's item nowadays than a serious candidate for a retro build
How many collectors need it ? Museum ?
@@lucasrem I mean if I had it I'd run it, but it commands a big premium that doesn't make sense compared to other pentiums for a new build
One would certainly be better off cost-wise with something like a P75 on a Socket 5 board. That being said, sometimes it's more fun to have an oddball. What would be REALLY interesting is testing the Pentium Overdrive for Socket 4 against a standard socket 5 P120 or P133.
Yes, it's a collector's item, although I have a 166 MHz Pentium MMX in my IBM ThinkPad 760XL and I'm really enjoying it. I remember when the Pentium was originally launched. Having a superscalar CPU which could execute two integer and two floating point instructions at a time was revolutionary back then, at least for desktop computers (very expensive workstations had already introduced this tech). We bought one at work and I was amazed at how much faster it was at running Doom than my 486 PC at home.
That's all I keep the CPUs for - I have a 60 and a 66 in my collection. I would never assemble a system around this gimped CPU. I'd rather build a 286 ;P
If I remember correctly in Magic carpet you fly around and kill monsters and other wizards and collect mana to your own castle. Goal is basically to collect all the mana that drops. You also expanded your castle which meant that the castle would have guards that tried to protect it against any other wizards that would attack it. There were many different spells but you could only have 2 equipped at the same time.
I remember this clearly. I had a friend who had spent a great deal of money on the shiniest new Pentium he could afford. It turned out his had the FDIV bug, since he was an engineering student, Intel sent him a brand new correct version and told him to keep the old one. He was able to sell the one with the bug and make a fair bit of his money back.
He should have kept that with the bug... 😅😅
i thought they were swapped, like intel took back the faulty one? They didnt?
@@CosmoRiderDE If I remember right error was so rare and harmless for home users that Intel was not going to replace them all.
He sold it for about $500 IIRC. I think he made the right choice. @@airmicrobe
In the case of my friend, no they didn't I don't know what their official policy was though. He was an Engineering student and used the machine for his schooling, and so he had a valid reason to get a replacement.@@CosmoRiderDE
Keep up the great work Phil, it's almost Patreon time, definitely well deserved!
Much appreciated!
My first Pentium was a 75 but I had it for years before upgrading because there was nothing I throw at it that it couldn't run. Great times! Somehow these days nothing seems nearly as exciting as it was back in the mid to late 90s.
I remember the speed at which tech progressed in the 90s, it was simply insane!
We startes the 90s with people having 16 or 33 MHz 386 and 2 megs of RAM, a basic VGA card and a brand new Sound Blaster 16. At the end of the decade we had an advanced Pentium III CPU with SIMD instructions running at a blistering 1GHz clock speed and 256 megs of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce 256 3D acceleration card with 64 megs of on board VRAM and sound cards with 5.1 surround support. Those were some exciting times. A 100 MB hard drive in 1990 was considered a luxury, a 10 GB hard drive in 1999 was all the rage.
So as mine, I overclocked it to 90Mhz, but at 100Mhz was very unstable.
To elaborate on Magic Carpet a bit further than previous comments, here's the basic premise for the game from the first level.
You start facing a red vase. Flying into said vases picks up spells, in this case your first one called Posess. You use this spell to convert mana to your side as well as converting villages. If you fly a bit to the left from the start you'll come across your first village represented by a bunch of tents with people crowding around them. If you fire your Posess spell into these tents, it converts them to your side which is represented by a white flag appearing over them, which also nets you some mana. Converted villages spawn more villagers who eventually build more buildings which then spawn an army in the form of archers, which fight for you attacking monsters and enemy wizards.
If you fly around the first village a bit, you'll come across your next spell called Create Castle. If you fire this spell somewhere in the enviroment, it'll spawn a white tower with a hot air balloon over it. This balloon flies around the map by itself collecting all the mana you've converted and then brings it back to the tower, adding to the mana bar below the castle icon in the HUD. Your minimap's dotted and blinking line always points you towards your castle. If I remember right you can also upgrade your castle in later levels.
Your overall objective is to collect a certain amount of mana to win the level, how much you need is represented by the flashing white line on the castle icon's mana bar on the HUD. You find mana lying around freely as colored orbs in the stage, killing monsters and converting villages. All mana start at a golden color, which means it's neutral. Your color is white and the enemy wizards' is their color, for example blue. As stated, you fire the Posession spell into the mana to convert it and then the balloon comes around to pick it up to take it back to the castle.
If you fly around some more you'll eventually come across your first offensive spell, Fireball, which you use to kill enemies like the bats flying around. Enemies are represented as black dots on the minimap. You'll also come across some other neutral buildings like a fort, which if converted will spawn archers that fight for you like villages.
You can only have two spells equipped at a time, which map to mouse 1 and 2. Pressing enter will open your spell list which will allow you to map a spell to a mouse button by clicking it with that button.
If you want more info, GOG has the game manual in the extra downloads page.
I'll add, that the game is quite speed sensitive and playing it with a Pentium above, say, 166mhz will make it run too fast. You can try to toggle hires mode by pressing R to slow it down. Some of the F keys also control certain graphical effects which should help to speed the game up with slow CPUs.
Have fun, and thanks for the videos.
Thank you!
Pentium 60 performance.......... I remember back then when i had to decide between a used Pentium 60 system and my second 486, it was a DX4-100 intel with a whopping 32MB of RAM and S3 Trio VGA. I was happy i had chosen the 486 because it ran nicely stable at 120mhz with a 40mhz bus and it kicked P60-ass. It was 1996 and back then even new Pentiums (120, 133, etc) were sold with only 8MB of RAM. What a shame. But my RAM constellation was a bit weird. It was a Soyo Board, with PCI and 4 PS2 RAM slots, 2 of them were populated with 8MB each and then i had a SIMM-Shuttle filled with 4x4MB 30pin SIMM.. Well it did work! Glorious times back then! Cheers Phil and a nice weekend!
(i would love to send you a modded SL2Z4 Intel MMX Processor so you can make an interesting Video about it if only i knew your shipping address.....)
Oh wow! That brings back memories. Thanks for another great video!
I bought myself a Pentium 60 when I was in High School. I was into music production and composition and had it outfitted with the Sound Blaster AWE 32. Mine had the floating point error and I got a great deal on upgrading the system with a Pentium 100 and new motherboard a short while later.
My obscure wavetable card from Trust I can't even find back on the internet but it was cheap(er) and it worked. Doom with music :)
It's been a hot minute since I played Magic Carpet but yeah, the swret spot for that game was a 486DX/2 66Mhz.
Dusting off some cobwebs, you're supposed to fly around, collect mana orbs and destroy every hostile thing trying to knock you out of the sky. There's not much hand-holding... just fly around and explore.
One of the whacky gimmicks in that game were all the Graphics Modes:
* Normal
* Red/Blue 3D (glasses in the box)
* MagicEye (that distorted shopping mall 3D format where you had to cross your eyes and squint to maybe see a 3D boat in some colorful digital noise.) The game rendered that noise in real time, it was pretty wild if you could get your brain to lock onto the 3D image.
Nice video and I love that vswitchzero made such an awesome donation!
Def wasn't expecting one of these nice OPTi VLB Pentium Chipset Boards here, very nice
Hey Phil! Was a really nice surprise to see this video. I totally forgot that I sent this system to you. Glad it worked out well and that you enjoyed testing it out. It's a very unique board and the original pentium is an interesting bit of history, that's for sure. Great video as always. Cheers! 🙂👍
Thank you and took me long enough, life just has been very busy last few years...
I got my P-60 in 1995 at a discount. I learned most of MS-DOS and QEMM etc. on this system. It had 8MB and my brother wanted to play FIFA Int Soccer but it needed all the (ext/exp) memory for the audio commentary to work. Spent a lot of time configuring startup scenarios. Still have it in storage.
G'day Phil & Mike from Canada,
Thank you so much for sharing & WOW! so cool to see this hardware still powering along 😁
Thanks for watching!
For those who don't know, the reason why the 1MB cache configuration was slower in some things is that larger caches require longer times to look things up. Plus, some programs aren't large enough to keep that much in the cache, so they don't benefit from more cache. Sometimes, there isn't enough data being cached to make up for the longer latencies of the larger cache. So, it's a balancing act.
I remember the first Pentium. I was jealous for my friend got a Pentium 133 I'm still stuck with a 486 LoL. Back in 90s it was very expensive upgrade. Pentium played Descent so smoothly, I'll never forget.
Still have a Packard Bell socket 4 machine with a vibra sound card and diamond stealth 3d pci card that I love dearly.
Great video! Always love learning about older tech 🙌
Glad you enjoyed it!
Nice video Phil. I had one of these first gen Pentiums, the 66MHz variant. A very expensive "white box" build, close to $4000 AUD in 1994 with an Octek mainboard, Connor 420MB HDD, Tseng Labs ET4000W32i VESA bus video, Sound Blaster AWE32, 16MB RAM and a KTX branded 15" SVGA monitor with a 16x2 character LCD status display below the CRT that displayed monitor settings, resolution and refresh rate information. The CPU had the FDIV bug (tested in Excel using a particular formula). One day the computer went into a boot loop, resetting every 5-10 seconds. On opening the case I discovered the heatsink had fallen off the CPU. It was glued on, there was no mounting bracket! The Octek mainboard inside was a cost saving design with a mix of VESA local bus, PCI and ISA slots. This slot configuration meant the system took a performance hit - this board introduced extra wait states on the expansion slot bus in order to juggle the different slot types. A more expensive pure PCI system with the W32p video card would have been better. Video benchmarks confirmed my friend's 486 with a cheap video card had better pixel pushing performance than my expensive Pentium with its premium VESA bus Tseng Labs video card. Still I have some great memories of this machine playing games like Tie Fighter, Wing Commander and of course, DOOM (including some local PvP over a null modem cable I built).
My family had a Pentium 60, purchased second-hand, back around ... 1996? It replaced a 386sx so it was a pretty exciting step up at the time. I remember over clocking it from 60 to 66 mhz! It wasn't long before it got replaced by something newer, though it stuck around as a 2nd machine for a long time and I even took it to college my first year.
At the moment I have a Gateway Pentium 60 in my collection but haven't gotten around to actually setting it up for anything - and I may never. As far as useful / fun things to do with retro stuff there are certainly more practical and easy-to-acquire options out there.
Phil inspired me to make a few Retro PCs. 1. 286-16 4MB(DOS/WIN3.11) 2.K6-2 380 Voodoo1 (WIN95) 3.PIII 1GHz Voodoo 3 3000(WIN ME). 4.MSI MEGA Mini PC P4 2.23GHz Radeon9600(WIN XP). 5. P4 3,4GHz GF MX440(WIN98SE)
Awesome 😎
I remember when the p60 first came out and it being so ridiculously expensive compared to a high end 486 that it just wasn't worth it
Yep, especially considering there were much cheaper 486DX4-100 available around that time which were almost as good as those early 60/66 MHz Pentiums (depending on the task). Though when shortly after Pentiums went to 90Mhz and higher clocks, then it became clear what a beast Pentium architecture was. I was on a 486 DX4-100 until Pentium MMX 166. Fun times, I was really into all that computer stuff back then, was reading all the magazines about new CPU's, video cards, sound cards. 😆 It's not as exciting now as it was back then.
I remember at the time the first Pentium came out in 1993, people were just starting to upgrade from 386 or 286 to 486, so usually the average consumer would buy the previous generation when the new one came out because prices came down for the old one and were suddenly affordable. 1993-1994 was also a pivotal point for the PC in general, as a lot more people started to buy PCs for home use, and the most popular CPU for that was the 486DX/66. I only got my first Pentium in late 1996, clocked at 133MHz, and I couldn't have been happier.
@@elimalinsky7069 indeed as the pentium was available when I built my 486 pc but at the time very few games even required an fpu let alone the kind of fpu the pentium had. That all changed when quake arrived but by then there were much faster pentiums available at more reasonable prices
@@kosmosyche hi, wasn't uncommon for the top end CPUs to command an insane price above the next performing one, the fastest 486 was a budget alternative to the Pentium 90.
The first computers with the 486 DX2 66 were also crazily expensive, that is a March 1992 CPU, the socket 4 Pentium 60 came a year later in March of 1993, then the socket 5 Pentium 90/100 came in March 1994 alongside the 486 DX4 100, in October 94 Pentium 75, and in March 95 Pentium 120 (the 133 before Win 95 in June) so if you didn't needed the FPU of a Pentium a fast 486 were still a great budget option, but you would need a 120/133Mhz 486 to clearly beat the slowest pentiums on integer.
BTW in November of 1995 Intel introduced the Pentium Pro 200(256) at 1300+$
I never had the original Pentiums. I was on the AMD wagon at the time, using the 486 100-133 versions and then I went with K6 variants. I recall it was like 50% of a Pentium price. I switched to Intel when Celeron 300A came out, had a couple of Pentium 3 machines and later went with Athlons and Athlon64. During those days, each release brought a significant performance boost, I was often selling my hardware and buying a new one.
We had one of these at home, and a DX4 100 - Magic Carpet ran perfectly well on both but on the 486 you missed the "designed for Pentium" jingle at the beginning!
I was lucky to have found a sealed replacement unit from a seller in Germany, probably around early 2021.
It comes in a small white box with a sticker indicating the content.
Thank you for another interesting video.
I think I still have a Pentium 90 system in storage which had the FDIV bug, was working at a university IT department when it happened and we were tasked with changing them out. In the end, with the last batch, the supplier didnt want them back. About a year later I built a PC with pone of the buggy Pentiums to play with and ended up keeping it.
Thanks for this video, Phil. Always enjoy seeing your passion for this stuff. I can relate.
To get started in Magic Carpet find these spells in the first level. Fireball, Possess and Castle. They are marked as steady non blinking red dots on the map. You can bind the spells to your mouse left and right buttons in spell menu. Press enter to get to spell menu and click a spell icon with either left or right mouse button. You can also bind spells to number keys here.
Usually the level goal is to expand your castle and banish competing wizards. You gain more power by either killing creatures and possessing the released mana or by possessing people's dwellings.
This should get you started. It's really a fun game once you get your head around the mechanics.
I went from a 486DX2 to a Pentium 120 and remember a VAST change in performance, despite having the same Cirrus Logic video card. The main benefit of the original Pentiums was the optimization of floating point calculations, which not a lot of games took advantage of but some certainly did, notably Quake and Magic Carpet which both run WAY better on Pentiums compared to 486s. Magic Carpet even autodetects the presence of a Pentium and turns on ALL extra detail settings! System Shock and Duke 3D have playable framerates at 640x400 (looks better than 640x480 for both) on a P120, though with Duke 3D you can get even more performance out of a non-SVGA mode if you go into the config file and manually set up a "chained" (Mode-X) graphics mode with your desired screen width and height, even if you just leave it at 320x200.
As for playing Magic Carpet, the goal is to create a castle and fill it with mana. Hunt around for the red spell jars to get spells to cast which you can choose between by pressing Enter to swap between the main game view and a map/spell screen. Left or right click a spell to assign it to the left or right mouse buttons. The Castle spell will build/upgrade your castles, the Possession spell will claim yellow mana orbs, and other spells like Fireball will let you take down your foes! :B
Thanks for the pointers! I will try the 640x400 resolution in the future 🙂👍
Why would 640x400 look better than 640x480?
@@armorgeddon Because of a fun little thing called ALIASING. I'm sure you're familiar with the term "anti-aliasing", typically used to describe advanced techniques which help to reduce aliasing artifacts caused by the fact that screen resolutions are finite. Well, System Shock's high-resolution graphics are designed specifically for 640x400, which means if you run the game at 640x480 it STRETCHES the 2D parts of the output and there is NO anti-aliasing to compensate, thus you get lots of horrible aliasing artifacts around text and status bars and such! D:
@@Pixelmusement Thanks for the explanation! I never played SS but Duke 3D a lot, though at 800x600 on CRTs and never noticed an aliasing artifacts issue.
@@armorgeddon At 800x600, given that Duke3D's assets were designed for 320x200, this results in pixel-perfect vertical scaling, and while it's not pixel-perfect horizontally the scaling factor there is 5:2, which means for every pair of pre-scaled pixels, one will be two real pixels wide and the next three real pixels wide, alternating perfectly between those sizes. As you might imagine, this can be fairly difficult to notice. For System Shock, the assets at 640x480 were made for 640x400 so there's no aliasing horizontally, however, the scaling factor vertically is 6:5, which means for every set of 5 pre-scaled pixels, one will be two real pixels tall and the other FOUR will be only a single real pixel tall. This looks... pretty nasty compared to how it should... :P
It’s interesting being the first Pentium. Back in the day I never knew anyone with this CPU though. Everyone had a 133,166 or 200mhz Pentium. In school we still used 486s though. It wasn’t until a was an adult I even knew that there were Pentiums below 133mhz. I remember back then the 200mhz MMX pentium was my dream machine. I didn’t know what MMX was but I didn’t care it sounded awesome and it was used in the marketing a lot.
Pentium 90 and 133s are the ones I remember the most. But I only had a dx4 I "found" at school in the parts room. Upgrading me from a sx2 66mhz. Me and my friend had Compaq presario 800 series. And we fought for every upgrade. His a dx-50 and mine the sx2-66.. I would find a stick of memory, and have the upper hand. Then he would get a bigger harddrive and so on..
But we never got past the dx4 stage. It was such, I got a 233mmx and then a k62.. but the war was long over by then.
You should benchmark it with a PCI video card. Most boards with both VLB and PCI have a gimped VLB bus. Sweet board though. That is a keeper for sure.
If I remember right, I think I have one of these in PCI somewhere. Yep, it's a Stealth 64 DRAM T PCI with two removable memory sockets and 2 fixed to the board.
While I appreciate it wouldn't be period correct, I'd also love to see this with a Voodoo 1 added. I'm thinking along the lines of, if this were late 1996 / early 97, would a Voodoo have given such a system a last hurrah before being retired from running modern games.
Why do I love the videos of this channel? Must be nostalgia and that cool dude.
Thanks 😊
I never got the replacement CPU but I do remember getting a fancy envelope and a cheque for $15 many years later. The Pentium MMX 200 though, that to me was the big upgrade from the 486DX. 1GB hard drive back then was mind blowing. The time flies...
So funny to see these “new” old tech reviews - I get a lot of enjoyment out of them. Back in the day we would never see these detailed benchmarks.
I have a Pentium 60 system that recently stopped posting, haven’t gotten to the bottom of that yet. I never got a chance to check it for the FP bug. I had it setup with OS/2 Warp
I also recently upgraded my Pentium 200 to a 233 MMx… mostly so I can slow it back down again 😂 like your 136-in-1 project using setmul. Turns out the 233 MMx does help a lot in borderline performance games too like Half Life (the system also has a Voodoo2) so it’s a win/win
Thanks for all these videos!
Awesome, thanks for watching 🙂
Wow, Magic Carpet! I remember having played it as a kid. I was clueless as well, all I remember is having to collect resources or mana balls and building / upgrading your castle, which acted sort of as a base or respawn point? I do recall coming across some cheat codes on the interwebs which made you invincible. Such a fun game even if I had no idea what to do.
I had a friend back in the days who had a PC that was Pentium based I believe, I saw a lot of good games at his place that I'm very fond of to this day. I first saw Doom, Quake, Duke3D, Magic Carpet, Lode Runner (the windows version from Sierra), Warcraft 2, Incubation - Battle Isle phase four, Need for Speed 3. I wish I knew the exact configuration of that machine, I'd go out of my way to replicate it as much as I could.
Lode Runner was cool! Boy, I gotta go find that CD and see if it'll still play on one of my old PCs.
Hi Phil! Great Video once again!
Hey, thanks!
Once again, breakfast with Phil's. Perfect timing. Great video.
I still remember when that was on the evening news, but so few people had PCs that hardly anyone cared/was affected by it. I didn't get my first computer until late 2000 when I was in my early thirties, and it was a 66 MHz 486.
getting a 486 in 2000 is still better than getting a AMD FX in 2022 like I did lmao
VESA was before my time. I was unaware it had a special slot just for it, kind of like PCI/AGP. Interesting stuff! Thanks, Phil.
I find even 486 stuff to be quite expensive these days. Socket 7 is a good compromise for age/cost/performance/compatibility when building retro systems.
2:08 Socket 7 is looking a bit weird today ;)
Hi Phil, even though the Pentium 60 have some nostalgic value to me, just like with the Pentium Pro, I can't justify paying current market value for these chips, what the Pentium 60 can do, the Socket 5 can, so is the case with the Pro.
Happy you could test it, that is a great board!
Thanks for the memories!
There are hundreds of options available for retro computing, but the very first iteration and the very last of anything will always command a premium. Some of the AMD and Cyrix alternatives from that era were great... I have fond memories of owning different variants over the years.
I had a Pentium 60 back in the day that was my CAD/CAM machine and I dont ever remember running into the floating point problem even though they said there was a problem there.
would love to see the same chip on a PCI board, another nice Diamond S3 card and even a Voodoo 1 for some super early dos titles. the slowest pentium I have is a 133mhz but do have the AMD 133mhz 5x86 which is probably the same kind of performance in some areas. a good fun era for gaming just before it all tipped over into windows 9x.
The battery was a Lithium battery, which is why it hadn't leaked. But it would've been flat anyway so a replacement would have been necessary.
My dad bought a 486 DX2 66MHz because the seller said that the Pentium was buggy lol.
That F00F ruined my childhood lol.
Love the motherboard - pci, isa and vlb :-) very useful !🎉
I studied computing around 1995-7 and I was aware of them as we had a technical manual (I had come from the world of Motorola 68k/PPC so had basic knowledge) and I remember the crossover from 486 to Pentium's well. The Pentium 60/66 was pretty rare, most people I knew bought either a 486DX4/100 or a Pentium 75 or newer. I was given a Compaq Deskpro XE 560 in the early 2000's, it had a Pentium 60 and 8Mb RAM. I upgraded it to 136Mb of RAM but IDE was a pain - I eventually got a 2.1Gb drive working with it. It had Compaq QVision 1280 graphics on a proprietary local bus and only 4x ISA slots! My one also didn't have a 256k cache module. Apparently the IDE bus was also hobbled... I ran Win NT 3.1 on it. I donated it onto another collector when I moved out of my parents house.
My family's first home computer was a Packard Bell Legend 100CD, equipped with a 60 MHz Pentium and Windows (FW) 3.11 plus DOS 6.2. I believe the last PC I had been using was a 386 or low-end 486, so I really enjoyed the performance boost for many of my games. Technically the P5 Pentium was not that great; not only the FDIV bug but especially the high power consumption and questionable stability with Socket 4 boards, but even despite those you could see its performance potential, and I have to say that not knowing any better as a kid it was still a pretty great upgrade for me and was well-suited to most of the games around at the time. My dad even had the tech come out and do the CPU replacement for the FDIV bug (which did not take care of the odd graphics color corruption I occasionally saw like I was hoping it would).
I remember running one of these under OS/2 Warp. The rest of my workgroup was running either DOS or Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Coming from a 486 the Pentium flew and under OS/2 you had real preemptive multitasking, unlike Win 3.11.
Did you try with any VBE util when testing the 640*480 res.? I remember it could give a nice speedbost when running at higher resolutions when you had the CPU horsepower to do it.
Phil have you ever played Shellshock the tank game from Core Design?
I have not! Worth checking out?
@@philscomputerlab Yeah was a decent game at the time
th-cam.com/video/Mku3hex5prU/w-d-xo.html
Haven't played in it 25 years though.
so how you can remove the heatsink is to use heat, get a small torch and heat it up very hot around 80-100c and then it should just pop off
Iconic chip. Even many PC enthusiasts in the early-mid 90s did not have much contact with it though, fast 486's filled the affordability gap and could somewhat keep up with the early, low clocked Pentiums in certain tasks. Quake ruined all of that of course and basically demanded that you upgrade, it was a lesson for a lot of people who focused on clock speed alone though and in 100MHz+ variants the Pentium basically smoked every competitor, it took AMD until the K6 to really come up with something comparable.
I know I wanted one and couldn't afford it :) Socket 4/5 were also an expensive dead end for those who could afford it and typified how quickly platforms could become obsolete in the 90s.
How come you didn’t try a PCI gpu? Surely that would squeeze a bit more performance. I skipped the debut Pentiums in favour of AMD 5x86 on the PcChips UMC board with fake cache. I rebuilt it during covid and it still goes great.
Ohh, back in the days I have the same VESA S3 videocard in my 486 setup :) It can drive a my 14" monitor at 800x600 at high color :D
I do have Socket 4 boards and my experience is that it's actually fun to try the same (DOS) games and demos that show the limits of a faster 486. The Pentium behaves very differently and in my experience it's roughly equivalent of a DX4-100, sometimes slower, in rare cases it's even faster. That AMD 5x86, especially at 160MHz and in a good motherboard runs circles around it (for example it's possible to see 100+ fps in 3DBench in a well tuned 5x86-160 system) - with the exception of Quake that makes good use of the independent and pipelined FPU of the Pentium. What I couldn't try is a fast socket 4 board, they tend to have dog slow chipsets and mostly only EDO tolerant rather than making actual use of the newer, faster memory. At least the VLSI and SiS ones I could try were slow. Intel made its own chipsets for the Pentium and it took a few iterations to get it right. Is there an i430FX chipset for socket 4 at all...? That's the turning point, AFAIK. And I tried 430FX with Socket5/7 CPUs and it's very decent, very close to the more modern S7 chipsets. Those I've tried with S4 - not so much.
VLB with Pentium is something I could never try with a Pentium so it was quite educational :)
Wow, what a donation! Pentiums with fdiv bug are incredibly rare.
Hi Phil, it´s been nearly 30 years and i still don´t know what to do in Magic Carpet!
3:16 do you happen to know what type of glue that is? I want to glue a fan to the chipset of a board that gets hot and the thermal glue tubes you find online are too weak, I think they're just plain silicone.
Hi Phil, I just found you can use wd40 to dissolve heat compund. Spray and stay 30 seconds. Then wipe using harder paper towels or blow with canned compress air. Works for both PGA bga socket and CPUs. shiny as new!
By far the best retro build option for a sort-of comparable system IMO is to get one of the early Pentium IIs with an unlocked multiplier. They're not expensive, the boards for them are more easily available, and you can find them in ATX so they fit well in less expensive modern cases and use modern power supplies. Being unlocked processors, they can be sped up or slowed down as needed to be flexible for a wider range of software. You'll get a lot of flexibility with AGP, PCI, and ISA slots, too. They're perfect for both MS-DOS 6.22 + Win3.1 and Win95/98 or Windows 2000.
Agree. Beyond this point, compatibility gradually wanes, especially when it comes to ISA support. People often warn about needing to find ATX 1 power supplies for such systems, but, in my experience, modern power supplies are sufficient for all but a relatively small sliver of high-draw Athlons during the transition to using the 12v CPU power connector, which was known as the "P4 connector" at the time. Even then you can get the right boards, like the nForce line, which include said connector. You will need to do something extra to get -5V out of a modern power supply though.
Very good advice. A P-II on a 440BX motherboard is rock solid, the pinnacle of stability and compatibility with any number of vintage operating systems, apps and games.
By far the best? Maybe for you, but a Pentium 2 is further away from the 286, 386 and 486 era, where a lot of retro games come from. Then there were the Pentium MMX which had the advantages of compatibility with those and the early Pentiums, as well as "new" MMX enhanced software. There is no "best" solution, just a solution that suits an individual's wants and needs. You could argue an i7 or Ryzen with DOSbox is the better solution.
@@another3997 I think you know what I mean: "best" as in best solution for someone wanting to build a machine to replay the software from the original Pentium era on bare metal. It's not "further away" from those older chips you mentioned in functionality terms, either. P2 is fully instruction compatible with those older 16 and 32 bit x86 chips, and there are options for downclocking it to be generally speed compatible as well if timing sensitivity comes up as an issue. The boards for P2s have ISA slots, so the same sound card, ISA video card, etc., you'd use with those CPUs are still on the table (with the exception of VLB, but just get a PCI video card for that).
I'm just making an honest recommendation for people who want a physical retro computer to run retro games / software on a period-correct (mostly) platform. That was implied as the specified need / use case. Please don't come in here and try to derail a productive discussion with a bunch of "but you could argue ___ because it all depends on your wants and needs!" And, like, DUH, yeah, it always depends on wants and needs. But those are pretty well implicit here, so what are you really contributing with the naysaying?
Look up Phil's AMD K6-III build. Intel fanboi 😛
I had a board like yours. That weird brown vga connector! Please do a video on that if you haven't already. We had a 486 overdrive.
Goldstar is meaning LG nowadays isn't it? 4:28
Yes I had a 15" monitor (56m) with integrated Speakers that was first sold as a Goldstar and then rebranded as an LG, that was about the time the Pentium 133 was the absolutely fastest and expensive thing out there (I had P90)
@@RetroTinkerer I still have an audio system(23 years 10 months old at least) from those days and its logo is clearly LG.
Hello@@airmicrobe the transition was a bit earlier if I'm not mistaken, must had took place around between Windows 95 and Windows 98, I already had replaced my Pentium 60 CPU and its VLB motherboard under warranty for a Pentium 90 (PCI motherboard) when I purchased my Goldstar StudioWorks 56m and a Diamond Speedstar 64 PCI.
If you search for that monitor "StudioWorks 56m" or the one without speakers (56i) you will find pictures of the same screen with Goldstar / LG logos.
In the mid 90s I had one of the OPTi boards that was VLB only. Oddly enough it was in an AST machine but was otherwise a standard AT board, and I later put it in a standard AT case since the AST case had a crappy drive layout.
It also had no on board IO which sucked. So you had a Pentium class CPU using an ISA IO board. I had a VLB IO board but for some reason it wouldn't get along, probably some VLB wait state issue or something under the hood about VLB not really being designed for pentium
Still it was faster than the DX2/66 I had before for sure, and my Stealth64 VLB ran quite well.
It also overclocked easily with a single jumper for 60/66, I just added a fan.
The FDIV bug was never a concern for playing games and running Win95.
Not long after I got a 5x86/133 and OCed it to 160. It was much much faster than the P66. The P66 lived out its last days running FreeBSD as a cable router for years until the early 2000s, the only time I ever rebooted it was if it lost power or I had to do an OS upgrade.
For the removal of the CPU fan, I'm too lazy to read all comments to check if this already came up: Put your CPU in the freezer for some hours, afterwards you should be able to twist the fan off easily
Would you try to add to this computer first Voodoo and see the performance gains (or not) in games like Tomb Raider or GLQuake? That might be quite interesting.
The magic carpet game looks cool! Even terrain changes its shape after explosions.
And the battery was probably still fine, Necroware channel got some motherboard with similar Israel-made lithium battery a while ago, and it was even still charged after all those years.
Crazy to think how much computer parts have gotten better since then
But... they still work like shit.
I was waiting for a video featuring the first Pentium. My friend bought a PC with the first Pentium back in the day. The problem was that the chip was new & state of art so it was really expensive. This meant my friend only got the base parts (motherboard, memory,cache, graphics card etc). When we compared it side by side to another friend's loaded 486......the 486 kicked it's arse. We were shocked but not surprised because the 486 had all the best parts. Your video showed that the Pentium guy probably needed to dial in the settings more and add the better graphics card & cache.
I notice this theme happens a lot when a new category of microprocessor comes out. It's so expensive that sometimes the cost/performance ratio is better when you get a loaded PC with the older chip.
Yea for example if you give an ISA OAK graphics card with the Pentium but a fast VLB card with the 486...
Oh my god Comanche, I remember playing this on the 486 and it chugged like you wouldn’t believe, I was a kid though so I didn’t really know performance or any of that so I was still into it lol. We got a pentium 133 down the line and it was a really nice upgrade for sure. Watching you play duke at 640 by 480 reminded me of my ever present struggle as a kid to hit 800 by 600, slight resolution bumps used to crush some games back then.
Do you think the VLB card is a good match for this CPU? It has PCI slots. I think VLB and PCI are similar in speed but there are many slightly new PCI video cards to pick from. I wonder how a 4MB S3Virge or Rage II would perform on those dos benchmarks.
I remember studying the chipset data sheet but the details escape me. One of the connections was more native and likely I did a quick test with PCI...
You should consider testing a Pentium Overdrive for Socket 4 (PODP5V120 / PODP5V133) on that board and then compare it to a bog standard Pentium 120/133 on as similar a Socket 5 board as possible.
That is a really interesting idea. I remember all the debates about whether a P120 was actually faster than a DX4-120, and it would be great to see them head to head.
Actually, I probably have specimens in my Computer Closet... finding them is a different question!
Now just have to find such a chip 😀😂
and a Socket 5 Board with Opti VLB Chipset (those actually exist too)@@philscomputerlab
I remember Comache on my 386 DX-40 as well, wasn't the greatest but playable, I also had a co-processor installed. I don't remember if Comanche utilized it though.
This seems like a fun board to work with, I've noticed you hadn't really made a video on the 5x86 either, I do wonder how this board would fare at max with that 1MB of cache and that modified ATI Rage XL from covid times.
Edit: I just noticed this is a Socket 4 motherboard, when I saw "Pentium" my brain went immediately to the Socket 3 overdrive.
The OPTi boards were slooowwww
Pretty much the bottom of the bucket as far as the original P5 chipsets go, not that there was a lot to choose from.
Their only saving grace was that the P5 was just so much faster than any 486 when it appeared on the scene.
I remember downloading some of the white papers for the chipset since I had one of the OPTi VLB boards - Viper I think.
My speculation was that the OPTi boards weren't even making use of the Pentium 64-bit bus. If you referenced the white papers IIRC a lot of the part numbers were the exact same as their late model 486 chipsets.
I had a Pentium 60 back in the day but without VLB. I hated my parents for buying this one as my friend had a 486 DX4 100 and my parents bought a 60MHz macgine but after a while I noticed and learned that this P60 was faster then the machines of my friends due to the PCI videocard and faster onboard I/O controler. So in the end my friend came to me to play games. Cirrently I do have a Pentium 60 CPU in my collection but still searching for a good compatible mainboard for it.
I had a friend back in college who had one with the FDIV bug.
Intel recalled the buggy CPUs, but he *intentionally* kept it. He was weird that way.😅
On Another note with those old Video cards is to run UNIVBE. This dramatically increases Performance on some Dos games. Duke3D showed massive gains
you can heat the heatsink up with a blowtorch or heatgun. It will soften the glue. Twisting the heatsink will make it easier to get it off. That can be archived with a screwdriver.
Actually cold might work better. Thermal adhesives are designed to be stable under high heat and will get brittle under very low heat. So a freezer might work way better than a blowtorch.
@@harleyn3089 Cold might work as well but most thermal adhesives i have seen began to break down at temperatures as low as 100C. Epoxy based thermal glue might take higher temperatures but that stuff is usually not used by commercial manufacturers since it is much more expensive than acrylic/acrylate based glue. Some super-glue removers work on heatsink-glue/pads as well. The glue turns into a gummy consistency but it takes a lot of time to let the remover creep between the heatsink and CPU.
Because of the premijm price i kept my DX4-100 until 1997 and then swapped it to a Cyrix 6x86MX-PR200 system. Later just swapped the cpu to a Pentium MMX-233. But i bought a cheap socket4 system with the batman board and a rare Penitum Overdrive with 133MHZ. Traded the cpu for several 486 things, an AT Case and a Voodoo3 3000.
I like to remove glued-on heatsinks with freezespray. Spray it directly on the heatsink for about 15 seconds and from very close, you don´t need to spray it anywhere else on the board. Then let it sit for about 10 seconds and use something plastic to gently twist it off, with my Voodoo3 I simply used a credit card to pry it and it just popped off. Then let it sit for a while so that the freeze wears off, the components are in a fragile state when they´re frozen.
Oh my god Comanche, I remember playing this on the 486 and it chugged like you wouldn’t believe, I was a kid though so I didn’t really know performance or any of that so I was still into it lol. We got a pentium 133 down the line and it was a really nice upgrade for sure.
Hallo Phil, warum muss der Kühler runter?, seih doch froh das er gut hält und gut ist.
This early platform is more of a collector's item. I'd rather look for a Socket 7 P233 system to use for 1988-1998 games. The only disadvantage here is the missing AGP slot. Yes, there is Super Socket 7 with AGP, but it's also very hard to find at an affordable price.
That is true, good point!
I was thinking a VLB based hard drive controller might get you a little more performance. Kind of rare, but possibly worth it. Great video!
Yes that is true. I wanted to leave all the bandwidth to the graphics card.
Socket 7 boards also often had IO like floppy/IDE/parallel and serial onboard which are not easy to find these days, some had DIMM sockets and there were even ATX boards which make them way easier to get up and running these days. I'm still looking for a decently priced PCI GPU and then I'll look for a decent i430 based Socket 7 system.
A lot of the "run of the mill" PCI graphics cards are relatively cheap, but the likes of 3DFX Voodoo/Banshee, TNT 2 Ultra etc, all attract premium prices. I had loads of TNT 2s, old Geforce 2s etc lying around for years. I wish I'd kept them, not just my Voodoo 1. I could have made a fortune! 😁
@@another3997 my problem is that I live in Switzerland and all local supply for such old hardware has dried up and are sold as rarity for around 100$. Yet importing from other countries is becoming increasingly expensive with shipping prices around 30$ and import taxing fees of 20$ that makes importing anything worth more than 20$ not worth it.
Something broken may have launched the Pentium, but Nothing is broken at Phil's Computer Lab
😂
I remember my old electronics shop back in the early 2000's had a ton of these Gateway desktops that had P60 or P75 cpus in them. Good for what they did even though it was during the Athlon and P4 era
My...fourth computer, I think it was, was a Packard Bell P60. Talk about experiments...I was able to get the original 66MHz clock out of it and did run into the FDIV bug a few times. It tended to hard lock the system. I also cut off some VRAM chips from a dead video card and shoved them into the open VRAM sockets on the motherboard (yep, some crap IGP) to get a full meg of video RAM in the thing.
I didn't know anyone made an AT Pentium board. I thought they were all ATX or proprietary by that point.
There are even later boards with AT and some have both, AT as well as ATX.
Beautiful system, I'm jealous! Been trying to get a first-gen Pentium for quite awhile but they're rare and too expensive when I do find them!
This was a pretty rough time for Intel. Apart from the FDIV-bug, performance just wasn't there. For most games at the time, a 486 would perform similarly and sometimes better, and they were considerably cheaper with a fully-developed ecosystem of parts available, not to mention AMD had very competitive pricing on their 486 chips. The Pentium was brand new, unproven, had a crippling firmware bug, ran way too hot (5 volts!) and cost several hundred bucks more to build a system around. It wasn't really until we got the P-90/100 when things started to look good. Once the P120/133 hit the shelves, Pentium systems started flying off shelves in large numbers. I worked at a boutique PC manufacturer during the mid 90s so I experienced most of the 486 era and the beginning ot the Pentium saga. Those were fun times. :)
Indeed, amazing times.
Phil, a nice way to remove these old heatspreaders is soaking them in hot water and gently prying for a few minutes forth and back.
It's not night vision, maybe the art they based it on is (on second look, it seems that they based the helmet of a tank crew rather then a pilot). It's a h.m.d the pilot (more the weapons officer) has it on to control the machine gun an aim with head rotation. It supposed to look like this so the operator will still be able to see the controls and cockpit. Plus the night vision goggles from around that era for the helicopter were more of a rectangular box shape with 2 lenses in the front (similar to the VR headsets you see today rather then goggles like). At least in the Air Force I served in.
Thanks for the detailed explanation!
would love to know VLB vs PCI for same gfx card chipset
Beyond irl SIZE?
"Where there's smoke, there's a Pentium" - early viral slogan I remember from the time.
VLB were awesomme on 486, but moving to Pentium it was more like a stop gap for reusing what VLB card you bought with your 486.
Yeah, that's exactly what it was. PCI was a thing by the time Pentiums were, and putting VLB and PCI on the same system often didn't work as well as hoped. It was clear that PCI was the future, but there was just too much leftover VLB hardware to leave behind all at once.
@@wasd____ Yup. PCI-VLB bridge slowed the system down.
I believe I tested PCI but don't remember the details. I must have not found much of a difference otherwise would have used PCI.
@@philscomputerlab i believe it was a former user on Vogpns, that did a test using Pentium board with VLB, PCI and ISA.
@@philscomputerlabI just had this idea for your channel, now that you did an Amiga video a couple of years ago.
Now that the newest console generation is nearly 20 years old. Then why not get a Playstation3, install custom firmware on it, and then test emulators and other homebrew software on it, as well as the overall gaming experience of Ps3 games them self.
It is kind of starting to become retro gaming now, as those that grew up with these machines, have begun settle down and starting family. It is with the 7'th generation now as it were with 486, Amiga, C64, that at some point it is cheap and then prices explode. That time have come now, with that console generation. Cheap before it becomes hip to own.
Makes me want to rebuild a Cyrix 486 pc 😏.
Would really like to know what's the performance difference between VLB and PCI graphic card. Interesting board for sure
I don't think there is a massive difference but both will do much better than ISA. I feel it's more a test of how the chipset implemented the connections.
in Magic Carpet You must collect balls and build a castle as i remember. A great game!
I separate heatsinks on graphics cards with hotair. I blow carefully with air, high temperature on the radiator so that it heats up quickly and then I quickly peel it off. Be careful, it's very hot. I haven't tried with the CPU yet. I don't know if it's safe for porcelain processors.
hehehe, not sure why he has night vision goggles on during the day. He's just built different!