Pentium Socket 5 : This was UNEXPECTED!! 

Opti Viper was by many accounts slower than FX even though it came out just a little bit earlier than 430VX/HX. It found some use in laptops and low-end IBM Aptivas, but otherwise it was the last nail into Opti's chipset business. I believe the biggest problems with Opti were memory bandwidth and PCI implementation. To add insult to injury, your Intel Zappa board is one of the early 430FX boards that used 486-style async L2-cache - most 430FX boards that came after that actually had pipeline burst cache. Without PB cache 430FX effectively has performance of an earlier 430NX (Neptune) chipset. In Quake that would result in a difference of 5 FPS (about 15%) for the same amount of cache. A 430FX motherboard with 512KB PB cache would be about 20% faster in Quake compared to your Zappa. I don't have a Viper motherboard, but I have Socket 5 boards using three Opti Pentium chipsets that came before it and competed against 430NX and 430FX: 571/572, Cobra and Python, all of them VLB-based, PCI is only available via a bridge chip. Cobra and Python could only match Zappa in most of my tests under these conditions: - a lot of cache. My Python board supports up to 2MB of L2 cache which I think is not supported by any 430NX or 430FX board. My Cobra board supports up to 512KB - still double the amount Zappa has. In 1994-1995 I think 2MB of L2 cache would cost about $200 while Zappa itself would be around $250 :) - very tight timings for cache and memory (430FX doesn't allow user-defined timings at all). Opti had a habit of having very conservative BIOS defaults, but usually reacts to tweaks pretty well - but yeah, you do need pretty solid memory and cache chips for that. Fun fact: 430FX actually uses 4-3-3-3 timings for write cycles in async cache (3-1-1-1 in PB), which is often slower than just writing data to RAM. Because of that, 430FX without any cache would be faster in Quake and Doom than it is with async cache. Here's more info on that: dependency-injection.com/intel-430fx-triton-l2-cache/ - VLB videocard and IDE controller - because all of my Socket 5 Opti boards have PCI implementation in a form of a 82C822 bridge chip. That chip is essentially a VLB device and its job is to try and pass PCI requests whenever it can, making PCI a second class citizen in the system and adding latency to PCI cards. Viper is the first and only Opti chipset to have a native PCI implementation, but I'm not sure how good it is. For Quake at 320x200 I had 24.1 FPS with Zappa, 23.5 FPS with a Cobra board, 24.4 FPS with a Python board. PC Player at 320x200 gave me 25.7 FPS for Zappa, 25.5 for Cobra and 27 for Python. Pretty much the same dynamic was seen in Speedsys memory and cache tests: Cobra being a bit slower than 430FX, Python being a bit faster thanks to 4x the cache. Note that I used Ark Logic 1000VL on VLB boards and 2000PV on Zappa for my tests - those are among the fastest DOS videocards, but unfortunately I don't have a PCI 1000PV card. 2000 uses a 64 bit chip, 1000 is 32 bit, which is probably why at 640x480 Zappa was faster in both Quake and PCP. Bottom line: at the very least Opti Pentium chipsets had crappy memory architecture which you had to compensate with a lot of high-quality cache. Opti was a "budget" choice that didn't really save you money. In 1994 a Pentium 90 PC would cost at least $3000, so saving $50 on a motherboard and then buying $200 worth of cache and messing with BIOS settings certainly didn't make any sense at all. I suspect the same is true for your Viper board, so it would probably need a 512KB cache stick to match Zappa a bit closer. But it would still never match a full-featured 430FX board. Sorry for the long rant, hope it could be somewhat useful :)

The "PBA" means "Printed Board Assembly", a typical label found on Intel-manufactured boards of the era. It basically denotes a particular product type and is often found accompanied by another similar-type label with "AA" at the start, the AA standing for "Altered Assembly", which indicates that it's a particular configuration of the main PBA. So, for example, if you had a PBA which had 3 different variants, say no cache, 256k cache, and 512k cache, each one would have the same PBA number, but different AA numbers. The 3- numbers after the dash is the specific revision of that PBA or AA. The yellow label in the upper left corner is the serial number for the specific board, and the letter at the start of that number denotes where the board was manufactured. If that number starts with a "K" or "U", it means it was manufactured in Ireland, although most of the boards I saw were K serial numbers. I don't remember the other codes very well these days 😆. So, you've got a genuine Intel-manufactured board there.

We had a school lab back around 1996/7 that had a mix of pentium and 486 pcs. We’d get into physical altercations when it came to lunchtime quake sessions.. lol

People had a tendency to skip every other generations of PC's/CPU's because of fear and they were already invested in a PC. In other words, People did not invest in 8088's because they were new, but started to see their value, so they invested in the 80286 gen. Then the 80386's got ignored because people had just bought the 286's. Then when the 80486 rolled out, people were ready to invest in a new machine again. The same thing happened when the 1st Pentiums rolled out. It's true they were hot, but everyone already had a "fast" PC, so they waited for the 2nd gen Pentiums. Same thing happened with Windows. If you look back, it was every other version of Windows that was successful.

Back in the day, I found a discarded slim Pentium 1 machine, I upped the ram, installed a voodoo 2, and was able to carry it around to play multiplayer quake 3. Many games had CPU requirements, but running the game in glide always bypassed the checks.

Messing around with Pentiums is always fun! Thanks for continuing to make interesting videos

For the little it's worth, I'm Canadian, and I'm even fluent in French, but in spite of at least three decades of effort to retrain myself, I'll still say "caysh" if I'm not careful.

3:40 - Socket 5 CPUs had 2 multiplier selector pins, for socket 7 it was 3 of them - x2 was repurposed for x6 by AMD.

Thanks for another amazing video. Love the thorough research!

I guess back then with the memory prices coast modules where cash on a stick.

It look like you have a very very early revision of the Intel Advanced/ZP (Zappa) motherboard with Triton chipset. The first revisions could only go to 100 MHz (90 Mhz officially supported). Later they pushed the support to 120, then 133 Mhz. The latest available BIOS is 1.00.11.BS0. You have the first BIOS (1.00.01.BS0). This motherboard was also distributed in the OEM channel such as Gateway 2000 (very very widely widespread).

I startet at 8088 later V20 EuroPC, 386-DX33, Pentium 75. The P75 was a lot faster than a DX4/100 some of my friends had back in the day.

Thanks for the vídeo !

your experience with early PCI boards reflect my own. i bought a asus PCI board and expected huge gains but instead was extremely disappointed when my vesa local bus system smoked the PCI board and i returned it next day.

What I would be really curious is to see a Socket 6 board in action. They are freaking rare, as it was a kind a transition platform between the socket 5, 7 and 8.

The Intel Pentium actually went to 233MHz on socket 7 boards, but I happen to have a 266MHz socket 7 Intel which is an OEM CPU for Compaq computers installed in a "mid-range" socket 7 motherboard.

Love how the time is 30:47:55

great video

The 430FX Triton I (1995) is a typical chipset for the first generation of Socket 7 boards. It is possible to use it for Socket 5 as well, but if we want to research technologies from the time when the first 3V Pentium P54C (75-100MHz) were introduced to the market (1994), then it would be better to use the chipset from that time, i.e. 430NX (1994).

Intel had an internal contest to "Name that processor!" instead of just calling it the 80586. When the winner, Pentium was announced, John Dvorak of PC Magazine said it sounded like a kind of toothpaste :) The early Pentiums were indeed extremely hot. I think the speed of the first release was 75MHz. The jump from a 386 to a 486 was enormous in terms of performance, not so much the 486 to the Pentium. There were so many releases at different clocks that people grew weary of it, and the 1st gen Pentiums are not remembered fondly. BTW this is the year the name is retired. From now on it's just "Intel Processor". Do a video on the infamous Pentium bug (FPU hardware error)!

When my Dad upgraded my gaming PC back in the day, from a 486DX4-100 to a Pentium 100, one of my friends also upgraded his machine soon after, but he got a Cyrix 5x86 clocked at 120. We were both surprised how much faster the Pentium really was. Quake wasn't really playable at 100MHz, even in 320x200 ... But even in games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, my P100 easily outpaced his Cyrix. I was also surpised that my P100 overclocked to 133 and was still stabile as a rock. I didn't dare push it further. The cooler actually had an issue later on, and the motherboard would play für elise :D

From a non-techincal standpoint(the technical stuff seems to be well covered), I was always under the impression that PC Chips was very much a "budget" board back then and problems were not unexpected. So, again, non-technically, I would not be surprised that the older intel board would outperform it. My memory from back then isn't the greatest, so I don't recall if I did a build with that brand or not. Often if I did a build for someone else, tho, usually it was just a person who wanted something cheap that worked, not a "high performance" gaming machine.

Thanks :O)

This is a intel board. Reference model AA socket 5

If you want the "instant gratification" kill in MK2, use mouse aiming and zoom to aim a precision gauss slug into the enemy's cockpit.

Ah the days of ceramic cpu's MC68060/pentum.

This is my time to shine :D That board is a intel Advanced/ZP (aka zappa). Got one myself and it's horrible. Can't get it to work reliably with usb addin cards no matter which os (tried w95 r2, w98, linux etc). Another annoyance is its hdd drive support. Forget anything larger than 7-8 gigs :)

That looks like the Intel Zappa board, Gateway along with many other companies used it.

In mechwarrior 2 you use the target key to select your targets. An info box will tell you what is targeted lol. The mech on the left was the enemy. Btw MW2 sux on an amd486 100, all graphics off at 320x200 to get usable frames

The Opti Viper chipset was complete...trash, as soon as I saw it, I knew what the result would be. For the non MMX Pentiums, the Intel HX Chipset was king.

Intel chipsets for socket 5/7 were pretty good, there's a reason why some of the chipset makers that thrived in the 386 and 486 era disappeared in the late 90s only for SiS, VIA and ALI to remain until the mid/late 2000's. To be honest, socket 7 doesn't bring much to the table by itself. It's like Socket 2 or 3 with 5V only over standard 486. They basically support the same CPUs so it doesn't really matter which socket you have, until you find a socket 3 board with 3.3V capability or a socket 7 with a split voltage capability (which can then run Pentium mmx, K6, 6x86mx, etc).

we quite soon changed our 90mhz to run at 100mhz and it never had any problems from that. the mobo was a lot like that and I can't remember the brand(i never knew what the brand was I guess). edit: and yea the difference for 486 for some stuff was quite a lot. shoot the legs. increase resolution for mw2. it's got a tactical view mode too and you need to target the enemies to get info about them. mw2 mercs is the best mw2 mech game, with longest campaign and buying stuff and everything like that.

The full 800x600 super EGA resolution could perhaps be set by multiplying the the horizontal and vertical sync by the amount of screen images you’re seeing? (H: x6.5 & V: x9.5) Does each screen image have a delay compared to the previous one? Just thinking out loud here. Rubber duck!

Yeah OPTI was crap/cheap chips sets for 486 and Pentium. In my experience, they were also less stable besides being slower.

The first Pentium I had was a p90. It ran like a dog.

look up your board on Ultimate Retro they have a bios update and manual, also they probably would like a dump of your old version

The only difference I can imagine from socket 5 to 7 is the voltage, which on socket 7 can be much lower. You would have to use a multimeter to check what voltage the processor is being fed, and also check if the capacitors on the board are within the expected values (mainly ESR).

FPU is not that much better on Pentium compared to 486. Quake uses the fact that Pentium can do FPU calculations in parallel with non-FPU calculations. Almost like having 2 cores. 486 couldn't do that, and that's why quake gets such a different result.

1:56 Sorry for nitpicking but I don’t think the 100Mhz Pentium was actually available for sale along with the 90Mhz. Sure, it was *announced* alongside it, but this is very different. After all, the Pentium Pro was only available at 150Mhz in November 1995, with 200Mhz parts only coming out in January 1996 or thereabouts. Looking at magazine scans from the likes of PC Mag and Infoworld from the first half of 1994 gives the impression that it took around a couple of extra months before you could find any system rated at 100Mhz as a home consumer. It wasn’t until the 2nd generation of Pentium II that Intel started getting better at delivering higher-clocked and lower-clocked parts simultaneously out the door.

I think the RGB2HDMI can only do up to 10 bit colour depth and most of the modes you are trying to do are higher. I could be wrong on this as I do not have a RGB2HDMI at the moment.

We are Pentium of Borg. Division is futile. You will be approximated.

Wow that is one EARLY Socket 5 board. 256K of Async cache. Most FX boards were supplied with 512K of pipeline burst cache. For that early board, I am wondering if you didn't have too much ram in it for it to cache.

yup. it was...

Have you tried flash the MR BIOS to this motherboard? I have the same board with MR BIOS and Pentium 200MHz (with a small BF1 modification). The biggest weakness of this board is the L2 cache. When it is disabled the computer runs faster.

Fascinating video on this second generation Pentium CPU! I didn’t know that the first generation Pentiums ran hot-Pentium 4s are more well known for their heat. What graphics card were you using in the motherboard with that Pentium?

Most people skipped the first Pentium I skipped 486... My Pentium 60 had VLB, I exchanged it under warranty (+$$) for a Pentium 90 as it had the FDIV bug what a shame I didn't knew about the socket 4 overdrive it would had been fun to have a 133MHz Pentium with VLB. 😁

9:56: "Now the only real problem I have with this game is, it's a little bit hard to distinguish what's the enemy and what's not."

Your motherboard is an Intel Advanced/ZED ! Could you please send a picture to Ultimateretro so we can add it to the page and also dump its bios ? Thanks :)

Socket 4, was a huge dead end. Intel released an overdrive that put a second gen 120 or 133 on them, but that was it.

It's my understanding that Pentium era Intel Chipsets were quite solid and generally performed better than their third-party counterparts. It's unsurprising to me that the Socket 5 Intel chipset performed better than the Opti Viper chipset. I'd be curious to know how an early Intel Socket 7 chipset compares to the Socket 5 and the Opti Viper to confirm.

Am I mis-remembering or have you changed to the more common pronunciation of cache? But not data...

I believe you did it the other way around, I believe you increased FSB and decreased multiplier, that would explain lower latency on the onboard cache memory, the other way around not so much.

F00F, FDIV

17:01: _[blushes]_

Why 360p?

Compared to the Sk3 board in your "One of the BEST 486 Motherboards Ever Made" video; this Sk5 mobo's CACHE (although it's rated 5ns slower), somehow runs TWICE AS FAST in cachechk benchmark!!... (That might also have a lot to do with the higher score in Quake.) But why does the onboard cache run faster though?!?!

The OpTI viper REALLY is that slow. Its pretty bad.

i have 2 Pentium 233 Mhz. chips

4:11 the hell is that RTC doing showing 30:47:54? Is that like australian time or something? xD

I had a Scoket 7 motherboard with allso a Yellow barcode sticker and it is a Intel made motherboard maby this bord is allso made by Intel

Just get a monitor with HDMI DVI and VGA they still make modern once you don't have to deal with this

I skipped the first gen Intel pentium and went with the cyrix instead

Aint that a zappa motherboard?

i seen pentium in socket4! not 5 and those were the real first gen try finding one of those today

you shot your team mate... the red dot on the radar was a good clue. He was green... now the poor bastard is dead. on the tech side, your rig is running quiet well for an ISA video card? i still recall running quake on a 486dx2-66... with a half size screen.

Cycle Through All Targets T Previous Target R Target Nearest Enemy E Target Friendly (Starmate) F Target Object Underneath Reticle Q Inspect Targeted Object I

cash on a stick 🤣

the problem is that chipset sucks