Cyrix M II - 300 Review DOS Retro Gaming

[@raineyjayy]

I had this exact cpu, I was so proud when I bought it, using an underdog cpu and really getting into building budget beasts. Good little chip

[@scooter4196]

How don't you have more subscribers? Your channel is awesome. Highly enjoy the retro benchmarks!

[@ciplogic]

Thank you +PhilsComputerLab! I have only seen only once a Cyrix M2 and I really wished for it when it was launched. I had a 486 DX2 at the time.

[@FaSMaN]

I had the Cyrix MII Mobile 333 , it was a nice processor considering that they were clearing them out at R350 (like $20) but sadly at this time the Pentuim 2 was well established and my main 333mhz Celeron got most of the love :)

[@tim6803]

what a cool CPU! and great review of it. thanks, Phil!

[@itzcaseykc]

Nice comparisons in this presentation. In a vintage 386 computer I have, there is an MII-300GP 75MHz Bus 3x chip in its socket 7 motherboard. I don't play the games you showed, but I know it's sufficient for Win8 and soon to have 8se in it again. I dabble with a few different things on it, so who can say.

[@HH-fs5hl]

Nice to see ur channel grow Very calm and clear interviews,,though. and makes u wanna build something u might have laying around too ! :D

[@stathissim]

Screamer 2, the ultimate benchmark way ahead of its time.

[@dgerdi]

I had a Cyrix P150+ at the time. It was a good budget CPU comparable in performance with the P133 but way cheaper. It came to it’s limit with Unreal, if I remember correctly.

[@allesbelegt]

Will there somewhere in the future a video about the boosts for the 6x86(MX), like Linear burst mode or 6x86opt?

[@philscomputerlab]

I doubt it, it's very niche / specific.

[@larsenmats]

By the time this CPU was released I had already jumped over to Slot 1 Pentium II as far as I can remember.

[@MrGencyExit64]

Same for me. I loved Cyrix before the Pentium II, but the weak FPU performance and growing importance of 3D at this period of time convinced me to stop buying budget CPUs and go back to Intel.

[@larsenmats]

I never owned a Cyrix CPU as far as I remember, but tested a few. Back in the socket 7 days I mostly had Intel CPUs but also had an AMD K6 233MHz. This one also had a rather weak FPU. But better than Cyrix.

[@wildbilltexas]

By the fall of 1998 I had upgraded to a K6-2 300 with an Epox VIA Super 7 motherboard and a Riva TNT card. It was much cheaper to do that than buying a new PII system. By then Cyrix was starting to run out of gas.

[@wysoft]

Yeah. I remember when these came out, Cyrix was advertised heavily in a number of magazines and online pubs... Pretty much all of them were focusing on office application performance and basic office tasks, i.e. integer-only, and heavily geared towards small businesses who needed inexpensive Windows workstations.

[@wildbilltexas]

The 6x86 was designed as a business CPU. Cyrix sadly didn't foresee that floating point performance was going to become such a important aspect in PC gaming.

[@josephreynolds969]

I remember one of the PC's we had a long time ago had a Cyrix MII. It was interesting.

[@JMUDoc]

This CPU was in our very first PC. Cost us 700 quid, from Comet - in 2000.

[@WaybackTECH]

MII is a really good chip, 333 and 366 overclock nicely with a good cooler for some impressive PR ratings that never officially ever existed :)

[@I.6I5384]

k6-2 and k6-III (socket 7) should be more powerful than that cyrix :-)

[@maikmerten]

As for gold recovery: The 6x86/MII and some K5 chips have that impressively looking "golden" heat spreader. However, the actual gold content of the chips is so minimal that buying them for the purpose of gold recovery makes absolutely no sense economically. I'm inclined to say that selling these chips for the stated purpose is either a scam or at least ill informed. No matter what, it's a pity that some chips are destroyed in the process.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea that makes sense. What I always think is, if there is so much gold in it, why are you selling it and not getting the gold yourself?

[@GGigabiteM]

Recovering gold and other metals from scrap electronics requires dangerous acids and other chemicals, and creates a huge amount of toxic byproduct that must be disposed of properly. Dissolving gold requires aqua regia (a 3:1 ratio of nitric and hydrochloric acid), but you have to crush and process the chip casings (plastic or ceramic) and the PCBs first which requires different acids and chemicals. Unless you're an experienced chemist, handling hazardous acids and chemicals is likely going to get yourself severely injured or dead. There are plenty of videos here on YT of idiots who hear about the gold in chips, think they can get rich quick, but quickly find themselves in trouble due to not researching before they leaped in.

[@balthron]

I would love to see how this processor fares in win9x games with hardware acceleration.

[@joshwa1234]

Add a 3dfx card and results are quite good.

[@T3CHEVOLVED]

yet another great informative video !

[@OoterDuder]

Yeah if your living in the 90s.

[@sinephase]

looks like you're on the wrong channel, bud

[@ibm5155]

What vídeo capture card do you use for recording those old hardwares? And, all cyrix are better than my Cyrix GXm 200MHz D:

[@vladimirgrbic8325]

Cyrix/IBM 6x86MX/MII processors are good in overclocking at least as Intel P55C. I have 4 of them and all can be overclocked to at least 262 MHz at standard voltage. As for earlier non MMX versions, they were true non-overclockers.

[@HeadsetGuy]

CyrixInstead

[@factsoverfeelings1776]

Had this beast in my first PC. Came with like 100 mb ram and a 4gb hard drive and some type of nobody graphics card. All of this connected to a 15inch crt monitor. lol Oh the memories.

[@pskoksrytp110]

Thanks for review, Phil!

[@bottis86]

Have this cpu in my storage, thinking about testing it on my IBM Aptiva when it arrives next week :)

[@philscomputerlab]

Sweet :)

[@bottis86]

Maybe putting a Matrox Millenium II and a Voodoo2 in it as well. Just for fun :)

[@spidermcgavenport8767]

thanks Phil because of your previous videos I managed to get my hands on a Matrox millennium g550 32mb pci for $8 off Amazon and will build a Final fantasy 7 dedicated machine!

[@spidermcgavenport8767]

Would you happen to have a driver link for this card that I could request from you sir?

[@FROZTEN]

What will be next? Some AMD? :)

[@ugh.idontwanna]

Wouldn't that be a bit RISCy?

[@philscomputerlab]

Smells a bit fishy says the CISCo :D

[@ugh.idontwanna]

PhilsComputerLab We're ARMed with bad processor puns.

[@philscomputerlab]

Daniel Flugt MOSt certainly :D

[@ching-chenhuang8119]

How about AMD K7 processors?

[@Kenadian2006]

The core voltage on these socket 7 CPUs seems absurdly high compared to nowadays.

[@martijnvanzanen4075]

Well Pentium pro goes even to 3.3 volt:D

[@Kenadian2006]

Martijn van Zanen good lord. shows how far we've come

[@martijnvanzanen4075]

Ye, 8 threads on like 1.3 volt nowadays Prolly lower

[@sinephase]

5V 386 is even crazier :P

[@Alexamenus]

this is the most Australian voice i have ever heard

[@vallorahn]

Now you have to do the AMD K6-3 if the board can take it, or K6-2 I had the 266Mhz K6-2 and boy, was that a beast. Complete with Nvidia Riva TNT2 M64 and 4x32MB EDO RAM I played Need For Speed IV on it. It was faster than my neighbours Pentium II. At least psychologically it felt like it had more FPS. We didn't measure it actually. So psycho-bench tells that K6-2 or K6-3 will win it. Also I would like to see the Geode GXM and Rise mP6

[@MaTtRoSiTy]

Ha wow, I had a 900mhz Cyrix back around 2000-2001. It wasn't great but got the job done I guess...

[@MaTtRoSiTy]

Actually, it may have been 700mhz now I think about it...

[@xys007]

What is the name of follow up video?

[@playtech7165]

AMD K6-2 400 Review

[@yorgle11]

The M2-300 really had 2 different recommended/advertised clock settings. When using a motherboard that supports 75FSB, the recommended setting was 225/75 rather than 233/66. I think some of the CPUs were marked as 233/66 and some were marked as 225/75, but really either "version" of the chip could be clocked both ways.

[@philscomputerlab]

True. To me this was just cheap overclocking, nothing more. I wanted to have the same conditions, so went with the 66 option.

[@yorgle11]

Makes sense. Even though Intel didn't endorse their CPUs for use at 75FSB, they are just as capable of it as the Cyrixes, so I can understand testing them both on the same bus clock. It's interesting to see how much faster the M2 is than the 6x86. I didn't know there was such a big difference.

[@Infinitrium]

Ooh, is the next cpu a K6-3?

[@ccanaves]

Hi Phil, how do you benchkmark Duke Nukem 3d? Is there some sort of doom-like timedemo that shows an average fps after it runs? Or just type DNRATE and note the instant fps in a certain place?

[@philscomputerlab]

AFAIK there is no benchmark built in!

[@ccanaves]

@@philscomputerlab So you just take instant FPS on the start position or something like that?

[@philscomputerlab]

@@ccanaves Yea pretty much :)

[@ccanaves]

@@philscomputerlab awesome, thanx

[@kanopus06]

In 1998 I sold my pentium 166 MHz machine and upgraded to a pentium 2 266 MHz with 128MB SDRAM PC66, and a 3DFx Voodoo2 which had amazing gaming performance for the time, and trounced any Socket 7 CPU no matter which one.

[@ntallocatevirtualmemory8488]

Will be nice to see which cpu oc better than others... on my old 166mmx i was able to get 266mhz

[@icqme8586]

Would a 3dfx card compensate for the weak cpu/fpu in glide games? Unsure if glide is faster or only prettier looking?

[@philscomputerlab]

Yes, to a certain degree.

[@glennwilson9956]

I had this cpu, the 1st I ever bought for myself, great cpu except FPU performance - quake was painful lol

[@sleveee]

run them at 83 FSB with a 2.5 multiplier. if you have a good chip can even use a 3 for 249mhz.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea might make for an interesting video, trying out FSB and multiplier combinations. The board does go up to 83 MHz. Though at this point you might as well just go with a Super Socket 7 board?

[@sleveee]

yeah, i'm just thinking back in the day when i couldn't afford the intel processor or the newest board and AMD super socket 7 i'd try overclocking anything to try to get a little more life out of a rig. i've even run an intel 233mmx at 266ish on a 75mhz bus.

[@9800xt256mb]

Mine PR200 was 66x2.5 and i set it to 83x2. Perfomance was same as 75x2.5.

[@EgoShredder]

I've got the one that ran at 333MHz and a 75MHz bus speed if I remember correctly. The Intel Pentium 233MMX was around the same performance, apart from floating point which was terrible on the Cyrix and so useless for serious audio work.

[@cristiannicolae6309]

Do you know if this CPU is a good match for a Voodoo 1 card?

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea that should work fine, the Voodoo 1 doesn't need a super fast CPU.

[@Elios0000]

need to test a K6-2 400Mhz and drop a voodoo 2 in that pc

[@sumosushi7571]

About £95/kg at the refinery many years ago. Many a scrapper's pension fund...

[@ZankDigiTrash]

how about the Pentium Pro 200 socket 8 and of course what about AMD

[@jangelelcangry]

Basically Cyrix processors were good in anything but FPU.

[@sinephase]

what's ironic is that the company started out making math coprocessors that were faster than intel's :P

[@louistournas120]

+janelecangry: "Basically Cyrix processors were good in anything but FPU." ==It was a long standing tradition for Cyrix. I had a P200L+ where L means low voltage. It was the only Cyrix CPU requiring a 83.3 MHz bus. The multiplier is 2.0 and you get 166 MHz. The FPU performance was like a Pentium 100 or 120 (I played Quake and Quake 2 software mode). In other things like Winzip, Kchess and anything that just uses integers and logic, it was faster than a Pentium 200 MHz.

[@jangelelcangry]

Interesting. Thanks for sharing that.

[@GGigabiteM]

>I’m not sure. But I think their FP performance was fine ... IF that’s all you were doing. The FPU in the 6x86 and MII was more or less unchanged from their 486 era parts, meaning lackluster performance. There was also the issue that the Cyrix couldn't execute both integer and floating point instructions at the same time like the Pentium could, further crippling performance.

[@wildbilltexas]

Cyrix designed their 6x86 processors in the early 90's for PC business software, where integer performance was most important. They sadly didn't foresee that with Quake the PC was going to become a huge 3D gaming platform. And being a fabless company really hurt Cyrix too. They couldn't create and test processors as fast as AMD and Intel could.

[@AiOinc1]

What game is at 11:56?

[@philscomputerlab]

Need for Speed.

[@blooder81]

going to buy socket 370 via cyrix III 550mhz/100mhz/128kb and test it

[@Jack7277]

I've tried mII-300 not far ago, did some tests, it is slow and sad, and now I'm stuck in pentium-2 era, because I never had p-2 :)

[@SudosFTW]

Just a tip, I believe it was also the MII that was a proper 686 CPU for SS7. Friend of mine did a video a long time ago of him running VISTA on that CPU with a late late SS7 board with an early ACPI 2.0 board. kzbin.info/www/bejne/g2i2npiEhs97hdk so if it's possible to recreate this in HD with the proper parts, you should be in the clear to do so, since my friend doesn't have this board or CPU anymore. --- Another CPU you should consider doing a video and benchmark on should be the Transmeta Crusoe. the HP T5710 thin clients come with these and enough RAM and disk space to make into a nice little box to show the performance differences against the Pentium II, III and IV of the time when it was released in 2002. the 800MHz variant has a proper Crusoe, and the 1.2GHz variant has an Efficeon. www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hp/t5710/ and here's some info on that. I don't know how rare those are in Australia, but it's worth a check-out. games to do tests with include UT99 and Quake 3 Arena when the time comes. with a normal hard drive or an SSD adapter hooked up to it, it should be able to run normal 2000 or XP, like any other Transmeta platform out there can. but the big thing to amplify how efficient they were for how slow they performed was the rated ONE WATT TDP. with both the extended battery and the modular bay battery, my Fujitsu P series Lifebook with one of these in it is rated, with a mechanical hard drive, to be able to run for around 10 hours or slightly more depending on use, off a single charge.

[@philscomputerlab]

That's pretty cool actually :D

[@AshtonCoolman]

I happen to have one of the Cyrix M II-333G CPUs. I was watching that very video you reference before seeing this one!

[@FullMetal-Tech]

You need to benchmark Mechwarrior 2 on different cpu's. See what CPU can handle it's 1024 x 768 resolution mode.

[@lightdark28]

not bad for what was a budget CPU, Intel still wins in the FPU performance it seems, but otherwise its competitive To be fair some games were just written to run well on the Pentium, there is sadly no way around that I wonder what the next CPU will be , Im looking at the benchmarks to see how well they compete with the socket 8 platform (P233 MMX actually beat it in Doom and equalled it in Quake, but others like Tomb Raider or System Shock are still slower)

[@philscomputerlab]

Remember this is just one system, and it uses SIS chipset, which could be good or bad :D

[@lightdark28]

of course, though I will say your Pentium results are pretty similar to the ones I got with an Intel chipset, it also uses SDRAM which is quite nice (though I do wonder how much that helps a system like this) Where the SIS chipset would fall short is in terms of stability, at least I would have to assume of course, given the Cyrix was more of a budget CPU ( versus the MMX which was mainstream a year earlier, or the PPro which was workstation/server gear) its certainly doing well.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea, I have some stuff to say about the performance of this system, but can't as it will be in the next video!

[@Zeloverevolution]

I can tell you live in Australia, but were you born here? Your accent sounds very unfamiliar.

[@Piotrek843]

Sounds German

[@HZL_AD]

the cyrix 300mhz not bad at all but when come to 3D hardware it still wont beat pentium mmx 233mhz

[@binarysun_]

„Not so cheap“ 😅 haven’t seen a nice CPU for under 50-70 in 2 years now. It’s ridiculous how people trying to keep old tech alive are milked these days

[@philscomputerlab]

All of this WAS cheap. Timing is key. Socket 775 IS cheap now, but nobody wants it, which is why it's cheap ☺️

[@HZL_AD]

i have cyrix 133 mhz....it struggle to play diablo 1 ..but it much cheaper than Pentium 100mhz..

[@FaSMaN]

hmm fastest socket 7 CPU next week? So it has to be the 200mhz Winchip CPUs man are those things too fast /JK looking forward to the next video , AMD made some great CPUs for the socket 7

[@philscomputerlab]

Haha, we shall see :D Also, I got my Orange Pi finally. I must say, compared to the Raspberry, the software support is far worse. Lakka for example doesn't have all the options and ran into other issues with other distributions. So yea, good hardware on paper, but the software, support, documentation and compatibility is just so much better with the Raspberry.

[@FaSMaN]

PhilsComputerLab Wow that was fast shipping :) yea software wise its still in development ,distro wise Armbian is well flushed out and works good, what problems did you run into with Lakka? mine seemed to work fine on the Opi-lite ?

[@philscomputerlab]

The config.txt file wasn't on the first partition. I need to edit that to get the output to work in the full RGB colour space. And the scrolling wasn't as smooth as the Raspberry. It was ok, but the Raspberry was perfect. Ambian works great, but I had the same issue with the full RGB colour speace, despite using the h3disp command which has an option for that. I tried the FluidSynth soft synth on Armbian, it was working, but the music was skipping / sounding off. This also worked flawless on the Raspberry :/ So yea, I could spend more time tinkering with it, but I will devote my time for the Raspberry, that thing just works. But the Orange was cheap enough to just give it a go. I think by the time they sort out the software, a new model will be out :)

[@FaSMaN]

Hmm I have to admit I didn't even notice it wasn't using the full RGB colour space :) will give it some more testing :) Smoothing seemed okay for me , was it in game or in menu? The menu isn't as smooth as on the pi but it doesn't bother me too much :)

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea the menu also lags on the Raspberry, but just low FPS, no tearing. I read in various forums that the Mali GPU is not that well supported, likely this is why I am seeing these bugs. The AC adapter also wasn't for Australia LOL Although the page sate it would. The case is nice though, does have a small crack though. I tried Lakka on a notebook today, worked great, even live off a USB. I'm really impressed with that software. They nailed the user interface and easy-of-use.

Processor CII is fucking garbage, but this show is amazing ! like

[@sinephase]

yeah, cyrix was garbage, except that intel stole tech from them and settled out of court and licensed cyrix tech? Intel is actually garbage.

[@deltaboy4752]

the caiche

[@OneCosmic749]

Will it run Crysis?

[@kaneCVR]

Dude, stop using Quake for benchmarks. It is heavily optimized for the P54c architecture and will run slower on anything else - or at least mention this fact.

[@philscomputerlab]

Boy, piss off and don't tell me what to do, thanks.

[@Darxide23]

Cyrix were such garbage processors back in the day. The only thing they had going for them was the price. They were a lot cheaper than Intel and AMD for competitive performance, but they ran hotter than the surface of the sun.

[@philscomputerlab]

I had zero heat issues and we had a 40c day here in Australia the other day :)

[@wildbilltexas]

The early Cyrix 6x86 processors ran at a high voltage (3.3 or 3.52v) and needed a big heatsink and fan to cool properly. The later 6x86L, MX and MII processors ran at 2.9v or 2.2v and ran much cooler.

[@philscomputerlab]

I'd love to have that final model, MII-400 with 2.2 V.

[@wildbilltexas]

That would be a good one or the MII-366. I think those were only for SS7 boards.

[@janmuller4343]

i really have the chance to write the first comment great vid btw