Pentium MMX 233 Review 

Nice, thanks for sharing!

Indeed!

Ours had a 3d blaster branded voodoo banshie could run all my games on max (16mb not sure if it was ago or pic model)

I still have mmx 166 in the storage. It has locked multiplier of 2,5. It overclocks easily on Super Socket 7 to 250Mhz. I guess the one you have is mmx 200. They have locked multipliers.

i really regret being a brat and not knowing about overcloking at the time. my 486 and my pentium 233 were the cpus i would have benefited the most from overclocking, but i only learned it was a thing with my pentium 2 400. actually, it was when i already had my atlhon 700 and my brother was sad that HIS pentium 2 400 was so much slower. he overclocked and bridged like half of the gap for free.

yes, in those times, i didn't know about overclocking, i had 486, pentium 133, and amd k6-2+, then thunderbird 1,33 Ghz. All on stock speeds. So much performance was lost during 1995-2005. But in 2005, I've got sempron64 2500+ and finally got DFI Lanparty highend motherboard, meant for overclocking, and learn to overlock. I've achieved 1,6 Ghz to 2,45 Ghz, which is +850 Mhz, differance was incredible. I was sad, I suffered all those years many times on slow FPS in games, particulary, before 3d accelerators came, in Duke 3d 640x480, quake 1, and some 1997 non accelerated games. Was shocked, overclocking was so easy, you can basicaly read one tutorial, and in 1 hour can learn to overclock and understand all around it, to not screw things up.

2022 and I confirm the same

To be fair the P200/P233 can't even max out a VooDoo 1, which is HALF the speed of a V2. Put a VooDoo 1 in a Pentium II 233 and compare framerates, the PII can max out the VooDoo 1. I tried VooDoo 2 (and SLI) with a K6-III 450 and it was a waste of time running SLI, and the K6-III is way faster than the Pentium 1 233Mhz. I run my Pentium 1 200Mhz machine with a single VooDoo 1 and it plays everything that I played back in 1997 on that machine. I have the VooDoo 2 SLI sitting in a Duron 700 machine which took FOREVER to get working properly due to issues with the motherboard I used. But it flies, and I can max out the V2 SLI with that rig at stock CPU clocks. XD

Yea only one CPU gets picked, but I do look after all of you, so I cover the CPUs that didn't get picked as well :D Plus some more that I have lying around :P

playstation 33 mhz risc cpu so why not

Perhaps.. just PERHAPS he is trying to see the difference MMX extensions make without 3D accelerator influence. ps, perhaps. :s

funny thing is my ryzen 2700 runs quake 1 @ 1280x1024 (a bit over a quarter of my native screen resolution) in software mode at only 30fps. (as opposed to 2400 fps using open gl). so it's easy to make fun of these frame rates but software rendering kills pcs in these old-ass games even today. although there must be something very wrong because it doesn't feel right. it should be well into the 500s even in this resolution. it must be a windows 10 thing. [edit] defintively a windows 10 thing. a 486 dx4 100 gets 7fps in the demo1 timedemo, and this is like 100~500 times faster than that even using single-threaded unoptimized period benchmarks. my 500~ish guesstimate was actually a bit conservative. unreal tournament won't even run in software mode.

@@GraveUypo I think the software renderer is capped there in order to prevent overwhelming the cpu core(which also does the math for the ai, soundeffects and so on). Using the software renderer you can get 30 fps in crysis 1 at 1280x1024 with your ryzen.

@@abcdefg9613 nope it's some sort of windows 10 glitch, it runs faster under win xp on an old core2quad i have laying around.

I just sold an IDT-Winchip 2A 233 on eBay for a few hundred quid. Was looking through a box of CPU spares and came across a couple of them, among a butt load of other weird and rare CPU's, including a bunch of 486-DX4 overdrives. Listed many of them on eBay. Rather people actually use them than they spend another decade in that shoebox! XD I kept one Winchip though. Planning to test it out in a rig when I find the time.

Like that one in the MS-DOS time machine? Kkkkk

Kkkkk. I had a K6-3 with an ATi Video Card (I don't remember the model, probably Rage) and Windows 98. Then I bought a new motherboard with a Pentium III 667 MHz. It's still alive today for retro gaming! Kkkkk

PGA 370.

***** Yeah, I agree with this kkkkk

that beauty

The instructions set are incremental, P-III has the same P-MMX + SSE, then P-IV has SSE2 + P-III

166 MHz with or without MMX was the classic; it was on sale seemingly forever and just got cheaper and cheaper.

I can imagine that. Intel always charged lots of money for the top model.

I remember using pentium mmx 200mhz at 233mhz oc . then swapped to k6-2 400mhz, that was huge performance increase .

why no amd k5 ot k6 in the benchmark cytrix youre having laugh

They're really not... lol. I've scrapped boat loads of these and older chips over the years. I guess to folks like phill, hightreason and myself though they're occasionally worth $5 - $20 tops, if the nostalgia bug bites at the right time ;)

cool to know people also have retro rooms. here's mine: s18.postimg.cc/7iv88cz7r/IMG_20160917_214747424_HDR.jpg it's a lan room. the computers you see on this pic are not THAT retro but i do have some really old ones. pretty sure i have a 286 and a 386 lying around in my office still. the oldest one in this room is probably... a pentium 2 400mhz. i currently only have space for 6 pcs at a time with that stupid table. gotta buy some more fitting small desks to put against the wall, not in the middle of the room.

@@GraveUypo impressive retro room. I don't have the space for that. I am trying to make a retro desk. It will, hopefully, have 8 computers under the desk all sharing single keyboard, mouse and monitor with a KVM to switch the active PC. I have a KVM that I can connect wireless USB keyboard/mouse and the KVM can translate that into PS/2 signals for older PCs, and into USB for newer ones. I am hoping to go from 386/25mhz era up until 2021 with an AMD 5950X/RYX 3080 all on one 1.6 Meter wide desk. I am not using standard cases. I am making my own enclosure to house it all, and small power supplies where possible (taken from ATX Shuttle PCs).

Even with non-MMX-optimized software the MMX-CPUs were still faster at the same clock speed, because along the MMX-instructions other parts of the CPU-architecture were optimized.

The MMX CPU had the extra 16% clock speed AND slightly increased cache, over it's 200Mhz vanilla Pentium counterpart. Pretty sure the MMX extensions did nothing in 95% of games at that time. I seem to remember there being a version of POD that was specifically re-written to take advantage of MMX, and possibly the first MDK game. But that's it.

...and then I hear your comment at the end of video! 🤓

Ha, but not in the video next week. I'll see what I can do for another one though :D

You're a legend!

I believe I've done a video about exactly that! It was titled something like "what if Intel made a 250 MHz Pentium MMX"

True, you can likely get a ton of extra performance out of this chip.

3 pinmods and the L2 cache is working, plus a 4.0x multiplier. 400mhz are easily possible. Runs nice

No, because the chip architecture is designed with using caches in mind. It's an integral part of the architecture. Nobody would set out to design a turbo engine in a way that the engine also works great without the turbo.

Oh to add, after the incident it still ran fine at 166 and I sold it and bought a faster amd! (as 166 was no longer good enough!)

Me too :) But yea, some parts these days are just too hard to get.

Shame you are not in the US Phil. I have a Pentium Pro CPU and M/B you could of tried

Could be in interesting project!

and PII 233 vs P233MMX :)

buraxta Also a good idea! I will get to slot 1 soon enough I guess.

Btw, In the old days. I remember thats my slot 1 celeron beated the pentium 2 slot 1 in games. I guess because of the l2 cache being on full speed on the celeron Would be an interesting project as well mate. I had a celly 300 and a p2 333. I liked the performance of the celeron better back then. ( both had a voodoo3 )

PhilsComputerLab A benchmark with cpus from 1996-1999 would be very interesting in my opinion. Pentium vs MMX vs K6 vs K6-2 vs K6-3 vs CeleronA vs Pentium 2 vs Pentium 3 Katmai. The benchmarks you made with cpus from that time were great but as far as I know you used only Pentium 1, K6-2, K6-3. It would be very interesting to see all Intel and Amd cpus from that time against itch other :).

You do know that the video is already done, and you can't add content to an existing video...

Were the original K6 compatible to the socket 7 or did they required the super S7?

I don't know for sure. I am pretty sure AMD made some chips for socket 7. The one I had was a Super 7 one. I am not sure but I think there were converter boards that let you use Super 7 CPU's on Socket 7.

For those faster AMD cpus he would be using a Super7 motherboard as it supports fsb speeds faster than the 66mhz bus on regular socket7 boards. I remember reading about these in PC magazines back in the day.

Yes you can overclock the bus and multiplier!

There should be a review on it. The tests are the same, so you can compare. The regular Pentium only came in the 200 MHz version as the fastest model.

I'll have to look into it. I remember upgrading my Pentium 120MHz to a 200MHz CPU (that I got from a broken Gateway system) back in the day. The 90's were good times for computer enthousiasts!

Well there was the AMD K-6 and also the IDT WinChip?

IDT Winchip- that's it! I think I had the 200mhz version, gaming sucked, but it was an improvement over the P100 (it may have been a P90) my AST Advantage PC came with. I think I got that in 1996, then got the Winchip in 1998. Man I miss those days where such a minor upgrade would lead to significant improvements in games and boot time.

Yea I don't have any of those I'm afraid :( Would love to test them though, especially the top models.

or even 300 mmx

@@genghis666 266 was max

@@Untitled_01 nope 😅

@@genghis666 well unless its 266 overclocked. There was literally no 300 from stock

i had a Rendition V2100 (Diamond Stealth II) which had a special patch for Tomb Raider, making it run very smooth. I liked that card.

Yes.

Thanks man!