Like! How about a Celeron vs Pentium MMX vs K6-2 video? I think it would be very intereresting since those CPUs were the most popular in 1998. Most people in 1998 had P1 MMX, Celeron and K6-2, the P2 was ridiculously expensive back then.
I remember a while back his K6-3+ video that is able to bridge a lot of performance. You'll get around 450 MHz Pentium speed at the top, but can turn off the cache and reduce the multi in software and get pretty close to 386 speed.
The Celeron line was both the worst and best on Slot 1 motherboards - the Celeron 266 was VERY slow, but the 300A could overclock like a champ to 450 MHz with a 100 MHz FSB, and could be unlocked easily : if the motherboard didn't allow you to neutralize pin 21in BIOS, a little bit of electric tape would work as well. At 450 MHz, the smaller but much faster L2 cache of the 300A would make it faster than the PII 450 in some cases for less than half the price. The Abit BH6 motherboard was legendary for that.
I have a p2 450 but it's one of those oem ones that just have a heatsink. I've cable tied 120mm case fans to it but it's insanely loud. I don't pull it out of the box much 😆
Nice video Phil. I've still got my P3 450 in a 98 MB/Machine but cannot use it because the hdd has failed. I'd like to get it up and running again but can't source small SSDs. Where did you get hold of one that you can trust?
Ok a C266 vers PII450 is a little bit unfair : if calculate C450 vers PII450 ist should be ( approx ) 45,6 fps vers 64. Ok its approx 48% better with an PII. You need an PII with only 220Mhz vers an Celeron at 450MHz
The i440 is so legendary. Its spirit lives on today in virtual machines due to being the default setting for new x86-64 VMs in Qemu and VMWare. There's probably billions+ of servers out there "running" on the i440 virtual chipset.
Yup, I maintain a 440BX Asus board with dual 800 MHz P-III Coppermine slot-1 CPUs for nostalgic purposes. It's bullet-proof and rock solid, never had a single issue with it, using multiple different vintage operating systems, with dozens of different vintage apps and games.
can run tualatins on it with a bit of tinkering as well - running mine at either 233MHz p2 or a 1.2GHz celeron p3 all just by slotting out the processor :)
Absolutely best option for 1998 was Celeron 300a, which you could normally overclock to 450MHz. This overclocked Celeron actually marginally beats 450MHz PII and for the price difference back in the day, there really was nothing beating that humble celly. Back in the day I got my P2 400MHz before the release of 300a and I when I heard of the potential of 300a, I was extremely pissed of what seemed like wasting money on a ”real” P2, which was far better compared to previous Celerons. I took everything back few years ago and OCd 300a on my Abit BH6, so all is well now 🤣
C300a to 450 is like a default, you just set the FSB and it's done. If you don't use SCSI card then go to 112 FSB with /3 ratio to get 504 Mhz is also a no-brainer, it is really a solid puncher.
Abit BH6 + C300A was so great! When did You get 50% OC before or after? Today we get without extreme cooling what? 5%? World was different back then. Just saying... good times.
Definitely the best option at the time. It had less L2 cache than the P2 (128 vs 512), but the cache ran at full clock speed compared to the half clock L2 cache on the P2. Great at the time!
I believe we had an Dell Dimension running a P2 350 mhz. Later we upgraded with a Geforce 2 mx. We had that system till we later went for an IBM with a P4, 1,8ghz. We actually got the wrong computer first which had a P4 2,2 ghz. One hour later the delivery guy called and explained the mistake. I was heartbroken 😂🤣
Total Annihilation is a skewed result. Unless you get the community rip, with bug fixes, you'll get that lag from even newer hardware. If you run the bug fixed community rip version, it should run smoother, even on a K6-II 500 or PIII 500.
Probably the worst CPU would be a WinChip, which was basically an "overclocked" 486 or a MediaGX. If you thought that 30 FPS are bad, see when you go on these monsters.
Totally agree! In late 1998 my office colleague got new PC with IDT Winchip 200MHz and it was really horrible painfull compared to my new Celeron 300MHz (same Covington core as this in Phill test, without L2).
@@honzaplachy5040 I had upgraded my P133 to a WinChip-2 200 in 1998 and it runs fine with my pair of voodoo2. However the non-super7 platform is really a bad choice at that time if you buying a new computer. That’s why I got my C300a platform after doing some part time job during the summer break before I got in college.
IDT Winchip has nothing in common with the Cyrix MediaGX, they're not even made by the same company. The IDT Winchip was made by a company called Centaur Technology, the Cyrix MediaGX was based on a Cyrix 586, itself a cut down version of the Cyrix 686. All three aforementioned CPUs were actually very good, if you only needed to do integer math. Their bad reputation came from their poor x87 FPUs being slow and terrible for games. Cyrix's MediaGX lived on long after the demise of Cyrix with AMD, which rebranded it as the Geode. AMD did minor improvements to the Geode and sold them up until I think 2019. The VIA C3/C7, despite using Cyrix's name had nothing to do with Cyrix. VIA used another core design from Centaur Technology, which they bought along with Cyrix from the ashes of National Semiconductor in the late 90s.
@@GGigabiteM to be very fair, MediaGXm was quite bad as it wasn't also having the L2 cache (like the first Celerons) on the main board and also it has a quite pathetic bus (33 MHz). The cherry on top was just 16 KB cache, which was quite of a downgrade compared to 6x86MX or M2 (which had if I recall right up to 87 MHz bus, 64 L1, and L2 on main board, and in general more executing resources. The reason why Geode was popular was the low cost of producing them (and MediaGX series in general) given high levels of integration. If Phil is interested, I am quite skeptical that MediaGx would beat by much a WinChip if winning, but this is mostly because WinChip excluding the pathetic core, had many things on it's side: 66 MHz bus, 64 L1 and mainboard L2 cache. If I would be to bet, I would still bet on WinChip to be better overall, but by pathetic margins
You should have added a year or two and included the slot 1 Coppermine cpus. I have an Asus P2B-F that started life as a PII-266 in ‘98, then to a PII-400, then to the P3-800/100mhz, all on the same hardware. It just needed a board flash for the Coppermine CPU. 1 gig of RAM and it ran Windows 2000 like a champ. Still have it.
Cool! I just uploaded a video Reviewing a Premio Pc with a pentium II 300. Should be a bit worse than this one, but it's issue in the moment is the video card it came with, an ATI Rage IIc, which will be upgraded in the next video featuring the Premio. Nice video, thanks Phil.
PCChips sold the Celeron 266 Covington in a "Pentium II" labeled SECC enclosure hehe. I got pics of this CPU somewhere. Too bad cant attach them here. PCChips really fooled customers back then.
I have that same motherboard. The "LOAD SETUP DEFAULTS" (which is the same as clearing CMOS), set the "IDE HDD Block Mode" as Disabled, with a huge performance impact in Disc Drives. "TURBO DEFAULT" set it to Enabled for faster access.
The Celeron Covington 266 and 300 mhz actually were nice budget CPUs in early 1998 especially because they overclocked like crazy to FSB 100 and even more. With FSB 100 the 266 mhz version reached 400 mhz and the 300 mhz 450 mhz. At the same frequency the Celeron Covington had a very similar performance to the AMD K6-2 and Pentium 1 MMX (would be nice to see a comparison video Celeron Covington and Mendocino vs AMD K6-2 vs Pentium 1 MMX with a Voodoo 2 or V2 SLI). The Celeron Covington became obsolete just 2 months later when the Celeron Mendocino with 128 mb cache was released.
Many people already explained this in his last video about the Celerons in particular, but they never seem to get any attention unfortunately. I don’t know why he disparages them so harshly, I made a comment about how they made for great 16-bit gamers when paired with early 90s DOS and Windows 3.1 as a budget solution for a mobile laptop capable of such an OS with an active matrix display since they often have a terrible 2D video chip integrated (like a NeoMagic) which, he hearted. That’s how I repurposed an old Gateway Solo 2500 I bought off eBay as untested a few years back
Hi Phil, you did a lot of videos on Mendocino celerons, P2, Durons and Athlons, but I'm waiting for years for a video on Coppermine-128 based celerons. They were also amazing overclockers. Back in the day I had Celeron 566 on MSI BX Master mobo (with adapter) and not only it easily did 850 MHz (50% OC), but I used it on 952 MHz for everyday use, it could boot non-stable at 1050 MHz, and I think it was stable at 1030 MHz or something with voltage boost. But as I said I used it everyday on 952 MHz with no voltage boost. I know Duron was a little bit better, but I enjoyed my coppermine-128 Celeron so much. Phil, maybe you can make a video on some of these?
Coppermine Celerons are terrible. 566 will easily overclock to 850, but its performance will be approximately of PIII 700. 1Ghz Coppermine Celeron is about as fast as PIII 750. Given low prices of PIII CPUs, it's a waste of time to consider Celerons. I have plenty of them and only use them to test unknown boards. Either 1Ghz or 900 Mhz PIII should be used depending on whether the board is stable at 133Mhz FSB.
@@Alex-df4ltthey are not terrible. Only difference is 128kb cache. For non cache sensitive applications and at the same clockspeeds they perform %90 fast as pentium iii’s.
@@mtunayucer Nope, they also have lower cache associativity. The result is a terrible CPU even at 100Mhz FSB. I have tested 950-1000Ghz Celeron and PIII at various frequencies therefore I know they are a waste of time. Lot of heat for poor performance.
@1:25 Viewers should know, that when us older users point at a 440bx chipset, we often point to the south bridge. Probably because it's uncovered, and easily recognizable as the 440bx's side kick to the south. The 440bx chipset is actually the larger chip under the heatsink near the CPU 😊 Phil definitely knows this. I am just poking fun at when we do that. I do it too lol.
I remember ordering a pII 400 that was the fastest and the next month the 450 came out. I felt betrayed.. lol.. back then there was very little news/information as far as when or what was coming out next compared to todays updates via media outlets.
I absolutely love the AOpen AX6BC mainboard. I built my first system around that and a Pentium II - 400Mhz with 256MB RAM initially. I have several AOpen boards in this series from past adventures and am currently using the AOpen AX6B Pro in my win98 "Hobby PC" because that revision has onboard SCSI. Rock solid, stable, even all the way to 133MHz FSB. Also works with a Pentium III-1 GHz (my current configuration with a Voodoo2 and GeForce2 GTS card.) Great test system and hit me right in the nostalgia feels. 🤗
@@blackterminal Indeed. I got extremely lucky. A friend of mine was going to toss his old computer and I offered to help. This was before Pentiums were considered "retro". I planned to strip it for parts and keep everything except the proprietary stuff. To my surprise, there was a Voodoo 2 12mb card in there and not much else of interest at the time. I've had that card ever since.
Those heatsinks are a nightmare to remove. I only did it to one of em I had and broke 2 of the pins things. Placed new thermal paste and decided to not do it to the others I have.
When i upgraded my Pentium 120Mhz to my Pentium II 233Mhz @266Mhz, most of my my friends was marking me, as the brought the Celeron 266MHz, @300-350MHz. Their funny remarks, stopped, when the power was revealed. Let's say. Myne was a little faster, when we began to compiling code (C++).
Plaese rebench a Celi400 against P2-400 or a P2-300 vs.Celi300 vs. 300A. The Core is still a P6 and outperforms Pentium MMX or K6. You can use Ziff Davis Winbech97 or 98 for Office Tasks.
Nice comparison vid. In fact, the Celeron A series processors were not quite as bad as you might think with the lack of L2 cache. In certain situations, overclocked Celeron A was faster than the equivalent Pentium 2. example: Celeron A 300 was able to use 100mhz bus speed at full speed while the 300mhz Pentium 2 was running at half speed because of limitations. In this situation, overclocked Celeron is faster, in heavy calculations Pentium 2 wins, but in game use Celeron was favorite of enthusiasts. :) My personal favorite of Slot 1 platform was 350mhz Pentium 2
This appears to be the case because the Pentium has longer pipelines than the celerons. This is also true between high end P3s and early P4s, again its pipeline length. This means early P4s make rather decent budget retro machines but little else. Athlons make better 98 machines if you want to go higher end. Particularly socket 754 or 939.
i sunk countless hours into skirmish on TA commander pack with the classic soundtrack playing in the background on a P2 366 laptop, i dont remember having bad performance issues at 1024x768, good times
Do you ever have issues with the Gotek flopy drives having the screw holes in the wrong placement on the outer plastic shell ?... I have had to drill new holes in all of mine, about 5 of them... all bought from different sources over time.
I still Have my slot 1 system packed away. Its and ASUS MB and It had a P2 400 when I got it, but I eventually replaced it with a P3 800, and then overclocked to to become my first 1ghz machine. Still keeping it around incase I want to put together a retro gaming system, still got a stack of my 90s CDs.
Celerons without Cache were nice for overclocking. If you were on a budget, that was a good option back then. Buy a Celeron 266 on a decent board, set it to 100x3,5.
On my slot 1 system, i have a p3 850. For what i play i just turn off the cache and run at 66fsb (566mhz) as needed. I have a p2 233 to swap as needed. It runs at 300mhz pretty well. Ive also get it to underclock at 133 mhz
This system with a Elsa Victory II was my first computer in 1998, when I was 13. It was the most exciting moment in my short life, when i got this. I only left my room for the toilet and food for a whole week!
I have that very same Aopen AX6BC motherboard bough new back in the day. At some point, I upgraded to a socket 370 P3 500 with an adapter slot card, and has been that way since then. Last year I downgraded the OS in a new drive going to Win98 from the XP that it had for regular use for years and years until recently as I used it to run a serial flash programmer that did not work elsewhere. Love that machine
Have you ever made a comparison video between a Celeron 300A (overclocked or not) and a Pentium II? I like the Slot1 form, it looks so different and our first PC had/has a Slot1 CPU so that's why I'm so fond of this type.
I remember back in the day having the celly 300a to 450 was like a minor diff. vs the p2 450. Like 1 a 2 % maybe? But the celly felt smoother in games. Its cuz of the full speed l2 cache I started to try out the AMD Duron. Instead of the older slot 1 pentium 3 with also slower l2 cache. Never regreted it.
Am I missing something? you mentioned that you would put something in the video description about playing Incoming? I can not seem to find it... am I blind?
if im not mistaken chris taylor was part of the team that developed total annihilation , he then around 5 years later developed one of my favorite Action Rpgs of all time Dungeon siege
Got plans to check out Celeron 300A? Or perhaps try plugging in a Tualatin 1.2GHz with a Socket 370 Slot 1 adapter? They were quite good on the i440BX chipset.
There was a socket 370 adapter for the slot 1. A Tualatin CPU was adapted to that adapter. I had one. I had a dual slot 1 motherboard with dual Tualatin CPU. It was really nice at the time... Nicely done... =)
An interesting video might be comparing the first Slot A processors (Athlon 'Argon' 250nm/'Pluto' 180nm/'Orion' 180nm) vs full speed cache 'Thunderbird' 180nm cores. Of course Slot A stuff is kinda rare in the retro scene. A showdown between Slot A Athlons and Pentium 3 'Coppermine' might be pretty cool though, there was much arguing in 1999 if the first Athlon's asymmetric cache frequencies made it worse than Coppermine.
I had Asus P2B with Pentium II 350MHz, then upgraded to P III 450MHz that would OC to over 500 MHz and then got Pentium III 866MHz Coppermine with an Slot 1 adapter. That Asus P2B motherboard was the best I ever had. For storage I had Adaptec 19160 SCSI controller with 3x Quantum 9GB 10k HDDs and Asus Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra 32MB. Man, that was some high end stuff at the time.
In 1998 I got a PII 350, 32GB PC-100 SDRAM, 8GB HDD Pre-Built. It came with Sound Blaster compatible sound on the board and built in AGP x2 Rage 128 Pro graphics. I upped it to 512MB PC-100, 20GB Maxtor 7200RPM HDD and a Voodoo 2 3000. I got the base unit from Gateway. It was the first last and only pre-built I have ever purchased. It was an enormous step up from my P233 MMX, So much so I couldn't believe it. GL Quake was amazing. UltraHLE was amazing, really anything I threw at it for the next 2 years was amazing. I recently got a few from a recycler for free, including 2 PII 450s, a PII 350 and one of the odd 66 Mhz FSB PII 366 models. Weird those models. They perform like an un-gimped Celeron. I also received the Celeron you reviewed last video as well as the socketed model from after the PIII launch. I loved that PII 350 so much that after I ordered the parts to build an Athlon system I didn't build it right away. I finished all the games I was playing on my PII 350 before I did. The last game I beat was FFVIII. Then I moved onto the Athlon as Max Payne played ok on the PII 350 but I knew it would scream on the Athlon. I also OCed that PII 350 to 450 Mhz. It was stable and worked fine. I put a larger, faster fan on the CPU box but I don't think it was necessary, just precautionary. At that time I also received a PIII 1 Ghz system as a tip from a customer. Yes, an entire PC, monitor, mouse, keyboard, printer and some extras. He said he was going to put it into the trash otherwise. This was a very wealthy person. I then set up to test all three and concluded the Athlon T-Bird was going to be my battlestation, the PIII was going in the living room and I gave the PII 350 to my adopted son. He needed something to keep him out of trouble and that was the ticket.
My family also got the PII 350 Gateway tower. That was a sweet computer, unfortunately it died when the house was struck by lightning. It came with a dvd drive and Zork the Grand Inquisitor. I've found another Gateway GP6 and built a dual P3 tualatin into it.
The P2 450, the CPU that has always stayed in my memory as being the first CPU I ever saw that could run Microprose Grand Prix 2 maxed out at a decent frame rate :D
@@PhilipPetev Ah yes I forgot about that. I don't think it matters much for the retro gaming actually but maybe for someone that want to do semi modern tasks...
I had the Celeron one back in '99 and I was switching to it from a 486 so I didn't even realize it was bad, it actually was an amazing upgrade for me at the time. Barely managed to get the money for that, the Pentium II would have probably been a fortune back then, no way I could have afforded it anyway.
I think that Total Annihilation might run that slowly because you use a "modern" resolution on it 🤔 Maybe using one of the contemporary resolutions, like 1024x768 or even 800x600 would improve things? This is a software rendered sprite-based game so it might impact performance on CPU side as well.
In the summer of 1998 I had a Pentium II 400 and fortunately it had an open multiplier, ran smoothly for years at 450Mhz with the stock 2V voltage. Even 500MHz (5x multiplier) booted, but unstable, because it was a very early Deschutes stepping. A SL2S7, dA0 stepping, produced in June 98. Today, It's not so easy to find unlocked Deschute PII CPUs. The original 450s are always locked, in the old SECC1 and newer SECC2 Case, like phils PII 450 in the video.
I just checked which slot 1 CPUs I own, for now I found 2 CPUs and one of them is a Pentium 3 450MHZ. The Model is: 450/512/100/2.0V S1 and it's an SL35D The other one is a Pentium 2 233 Model Nr. SL2HF. I will check my stash, maybe I also have a P2 450 somewhere.
Interesting. I was wonder why I did not have any experience with Slot 1 and P2. I only used Socket 7 and Socket 370 later then. I remember I used K6 and Celeron 833Mhz.
Slot 1 certainly feels different to all those Socket Platforms, If I could play with it I would. And obviously my pick would be a Pentium II CPU. I kinda prefer the Windows Games + DOS Games combination on one PC in this instance.
Some Slot 1 motherboards have jumper switches that allow some Pentium II processors (all Klamath and some others that have unlocked multipliers) to be underclocked to as low as 133mhz w/L2 cache disabled or 166 and up w/L2 enabled. Makes for interesting DOS build possibilities.
You reminded me to make a list of all my SLOT 1 cpus, and beside of two PII450s there was a unknown Pentium labeled one and when i dissasembled the cooler it was actualy a Celeron 300A. Label is glued over the hologram and looks like it was cut out of a magazine. That sticker boosted the performance by quite a bit probably.
From my experience, it was not so much about the CPU or even GPU... But the manufacturer. There were lots of random manufacturers offering rock bottom quality mobos and even GPUs. Motherboards from brands like "Tomato" or "Surf" ... I had a Surf with my P166, when it died months later and switched to an Asus, it felt like my P166 was performing like a P75 until now. I also saw Geforce2 MXs unable to run NFS4 faster than 10fps. Maybe it would be a fun idea to assemble a retro PC with the worst quality components possible.
Yes, cheap motherboards in the 486 to Pentium II era were pretty bad. The power regulation especially could be an issue. Manufacturers were using switching voltage regulators that didn't switch fast enough, or linear voltage regulators that weren't linear enough. That was in addition to using the really lousy capacitors of that time period. There were some really good boards as well though. FIC, Shuttle, Chips and Technologies, and Intel all made good boards. BTW, I was building computers professionally in 1997 and 1998, generally about 3 a week. Most of them were AMD based, K6 and K6-II were the most popular. But we also did some Intel based machines if customers asked for them.
Chipset made such a difference, of course crappy components on motherboards didn't help but garbage chipsets from SiS and Via on cheap motherboard were a big problem at the time. I remember Via's K7 chipset was particularly unstable, you really wanted a board with an AMD or Intel chipet for their respective platforms.
I was always fond of the slot 1 cpu's it was the time when games came out and that supported mmx and 3d accelerators were getting more utilitized and making actual use of it
Btw Phil, why has never ever anyone made a Tillamook Video on RU-vid? Like you get the SL2Z4 Pentium MMX 266mhz aka "Tillamook" and you modify it to run on certain Supersocket 7 boards. Modifications on this CPU are necessary, to enable the board´s L2 Cache for the CPU and to tell the board that this CPU got a 4x multiplier (instead 3.5 on the 233Mhz MMX). And then set the Vcore to like 2.3V (instead 1,95) and FSB to 100 instead of 66 and have fun with an Intel MMX on Socket 7 at 400 or more Mhz (depending on the board whether it can provide higher FSB than 100) - without thermal stress because this great CPU is not even getting warm, i have played around with that a lot in the past. Sadly, not every motherboard supports this CPU, some POST, but dont BOOT, some dont even POST. Asus and Gigabyte are useless for this. But when you got the PCChips M577 or DFI K6XV3+/66 it works fine. I would love to see a video about this.
Not quite a 450 but back in 1998 I had a PII 350 coupled with dual Voodoo 2 SLI on an Intel 440 board. It was the best of gaming times. The following year I naively purchased a PIII 800 (coppermine) as an upgrade but couldn't get it to work on the 440 and had to replace the board that had a VIA chipset. I recall being disappointed that gaming performance was only marginally better than the old 350 even though the clock speed was more than double.
Similar enough: I have a Pentium III 450MHz in a 440BX system. Without any charts I remember first using a Pentium II 333MHz(?) and the upgrade probably felt more significant than it actually was. Nice video btw! 👍
My very first tower PC was a hand-me-down from my Dad. It had a Pentium Pro 200Mhz, with a 1MB L2 cache. Running Windows 2000 Professional on an Intel motherboard. I think it had a 256MB GPU in it. But I could be wrong on the GPU. I used that PC for many years. From what he told me, it was very expensive at the time he built it. Several thousand dollars for the whole setup.
