I used 6x86 and later MII CPUs in combination with the Voodoo 1 to great success in budget gaming. :) The slow FPU performance of the Cyrix didn't matter as much when the rendering could be offloaded to the Voodoo. I used the iconic Asus P55T2P4 motherboard which could be tweaked a lot to drive even the later Cyrix processors. It was a great budget gaming experience.
And then they say Voodoo is hocus pocus!!! Totally loved my Voodoo card. Had a powerVRx2 card as well. Quite good, but nothing like as good as the voodoo. We always argued over who was playing on the voodoo machine.
I wish people would reconsider using Quake as some sort of proof that other CPUs were inferior . Quake was made for one and only CPU - The Pentium P5 which is well documented by Abrash. It actually runs just as fast on a 200 Pentium Pro as on a regular Pentium P5 200 as well, when normal non P5 optimized code runs 45%-70% faster on P6. P5 does have a pipelined FPU but Cyrix has FPU tricks of it's own ( I think you can issue up to 5 fp instructions to the fp independently of the two integer alus). It's just nobody bothered to optimizes for the Cyrix 6x86.
What other tests would you recommend? Both for DOS and Windows. I'm very interested as I personally dislike Quake and everything related to it and I'm tired to see it framed as the "ultimate benchmark". Cheers.
7:28 actually it might be a memory issue : the i430TX can cache at most 64MB of ram, and windows sits at the end of the ram which is uncached. That means quake itself running in Windows might be running in the uncached space !
one of my machines at that time (lan party gaming!) had a 200Mhz 6x86 that I got running at 166Mhz using 83Mhzx2. Was mostly stable but got VERY hot on 83Mhz bus. Was ALWAYS stable running at 75x2(PR200+).
Hi - having owned from 286 to I7's when they were new i have experienced DX2-66 DX4-100 Pentium 100 ( which i still have ) As tradition i would pass my PC to my son and his to his sisters, i did own both the AMD 586 and they cyrix 686 - 2 of them actually the P120+ and the latter MMX maybe the 233, i never had anything in the 300's pr 400's - as I sat with my Pentium 2-200 write up to i purchased my next new PC a HP Pentium 4 in 2003 So using the 2 cyrix was no issue, yes quake was slower but i also had 2 x voodoo2 cards ( yes i started with voodoo 1 , then sold it and went to voodoo 2 , then a bit later went dual / SLI ) so my mentality was " this is as good as it gets without dropping big $$$ What surprises me is that quake is blamed for the death of Cyrix - it is a very popular story - and like most of the urban myths , based on some truth but the rest of the 90% is just made up Would say the entire I3-I5-I7 die because it cannot run the latest version of saw world of tanks or eve online ??? of they cannot get 300fps on CSGO ?? It just seems so strange that a budget CPU or budget PC with say a 686, would also contain minimum ram, slow hard drive and basic VGA adapter - would have the sole purpose of running quake and causing a public uproar that would basically shut down a product line ?? Regards George
Well maybe i5-i7 no. But perhaps some of AMDs chips did not fare well in the marketplace because they were not competitive on the latest games. Of course it depends which segment of the market is the one where all the profit is.
The second PC I ever had used a 6x86L-P200+ cpu. The "not fully pentium compatible" part was true!. Although, Windows 3.1 and 95 worked fine with it. I used Linux (486 only) with it and it was fine.
Been playing around with an IBM 6x86MX PR200 (75mhz x 2 @ 2.9v). Was able to overclock it to a PR233 (75mhz x 2.5 @ 3.2v). Noticeable difference in performance / framerates. Think the MX (successor of your cyrix chip) is a better fit for overclocking.
I think he resides in the UK, but I suspect he must be from Australia by the heavy diphthonging in the accent. I bet if you listened to some other Australian computer enthusiasts you'd probably hear the same pronunciation again.
Indeed, the FPU performance is what made me jump to the Pentium200 MMX eventually back in the day. Super socket 7 AMD K6 CPUs after that and again Pentium III slot one after II en III iterations of the K6. Never liked the Pentium 4 as it was quite slow despite my CPU being a HT model. Core2Duo, i7 2600 and i7 3740, 4790 made me eventually jump to Ryzen CPUs.
Cyrix compatibility was not a "nothingburger." In fact, nobody said "nothingburger" in the 1990's let alone 2000's. And when it came to computing compatibility in the 1990's, I guess it could be called an "everythingburger." But never mind the "burgers" because those "burgers" had to be a misnomer and were meant to be said as "boogers" as there was a very very fine line between compatibility and proprietary as it made all the difference in the income from licensing. Licensing often made the difference between a banner year and getting sold to a predatory company because there was no funds to counter sue off a sale.
I hope someone does have it. I have looked before but when I'm happening was the sites that I found when I clicked on the links they were all dead links.
