Socket 4 Pentium (66mhz)

[@TimChuma]

Got one of these when I started university in 1995, only had the 3.5" drive in it got the 5" floppy put in. Upgraded it to have a sound card and CD ROM drive and to run Windows 95 when I had to run JAVA for my degree. Was $3500AUD when we bought it on a special deal

[@Mirroxaphene]

Socket 4 also supported the 120 & 133 MHz overdrive chips Intel designed for replacing Pentium 60 & 66.

[@AllboroLCD]

Blows my mind how your 66mhz P5 manages to play quake in sofware rendering so well. My very first pc build I had a Cyrix 6x86MX PR166 and quake was a slideshow on it! Damn...... Id say find yourself a nice1st gen voodoo card for this rig, and just keep it like that forever.

[@GeckonCZ]

2 years old post, but what the hack... The reason why it runs so well is that the engine, and especially the rendering was written specifically for the P5 architecture. The other fifth- and even some sixth-gen CPUs had quite different and typically much weaker FPUs. This is true even for the late Super 7 chips like AMD K6-III+...

[@AllboroLCD]

@@GeckonCZ Thanks, youtube IS forever, so people are gonna comment no matter how old the upload : ) Im aware of the FPU optimization in Q1, its the reason I ditched the Cyrix for a Pentium 233 mmx! STILL though, I recall a friend back then with a packard hell 90mhz P1 running quake and the perf was good yet borderlining unplayable. So yeah im still surprised at your 66mhz P1 running so well!

[@GeckonCZ]

@@AllboroLCD Indeed it seems to be a particularly well-balanced system, for Quake anyway...

[@warrax111]

@@AllboroLCD he had also fast graphic card. some were using ISA slot graphics, it slowerd down even more, to slide show. Maybe it was your cae, that you had ISA trident VGA card.

[@brucetungsten5714]

Quake was truly bleeding edge in this regard - one of the few occasions where a programmer(Abrash) pulled out all the stops and made Intel's promise a formidable reality.

[@fremenondesand3896]

that's the computer I played Total annihilation on, salivating over those 64mb maps I couldn't play.

[@trythis9624]

I had an Pentium 60 with 8mb RAM from 1995 to 1996. the Pentium 60 was my first PC. But Cpu was very unstable. Crashing very often after Hours of gaming.

[@AncientElectronics]

So far I haven't had any stability issues with this setup but your not the first person I've heard that from about the early Pentium boards.

[@pentiummmx2294]

my first PC was a Pentium 100 p54c, 8mb fpm ram, ECS Socket 5 430FX motherboard, ESS Audiodrive, Cirrus Logic GD5430 1mb, WD Caviar 2850 850mb HDD, with Windows 95 RTM installed, the Dallas battery eventually ran out of juice but i removed it, dremeled 2 notches in it and soldered a cr2032 socket in and that made it kept the time/settings and made it boot again, and also i transferred the contents of the 850mb drive to a 2gb CF card and put it in a CF card to IDE adapter

[@TheMirekp]

Unless something is wrong, no 486-class PC should be faster than this. Not even DX4 100. The only 486-class CPU that's close is AMD-DX4 120 MHz later model with WB cache. or some 5x86 hybrid 120MHz+

[@ramdrivesys1869]

Try Duke in 320x200, you have it in SVGA probably.

[@cyberjack]

probably SIS chipset lol

[@fungo6631]

Why is the music higher pitched?

[@MrKillswitch88]

Nice system you got there and socket 4 boards are RARE.

[@AncientElectronics]

+MrKillswitch88 I know, I don't think ive ever run across one "in the wild" and i've seen a lot of old PC's. I lucked out on this one on Ebay.

[@MrKillswitch88]

+0blivi0n100 Only scored one in person and it is an IBM system, did land two Intel Batman boards in a lot off eBay last year but haven't gotten around to putting together any builds. Going to put them in ATX cases as they have ps2 ports and the boards look pretty cool.

[@ByteSizeThoughts]

Nice machine - was a good price just for the 5.25 floppy :)

[@casualretrocollector]

If you install the s3 vbe 2.0 patch in dos before you load duke 3d you might notice a big performance increase

[@armorgeddon]

Are you talking about UniVBE or what specifically?

[@honkhonkler7732]

I had a socket 5 and socket 7 motherboard, but I think someone trashed it. one was a useless Dell Board and the other an IBM. I still have a K6-2 300mhz lying around but the Pentium 133mhz dissapeared. I last used them as a simple web server setup with freeBSD and Apache. Luckily the site was light and I had gotten a compact flash to IDE adapter, which made the 300mhz machine feel "fast". (compared to the old 6 GB Maxtor hard drive)

[@honkhonkler7732]

I had a Pentium 133mhz in my first computer (hand me down). My first computer was the same age as me lol

[@RWL2012]

Richard Tuck what year was that in...? :)

[@nitroraptor5316]

Can’t find a Socket 4 motherboard!

[@samsmall3801]

Have you tuned the bios settings at all? I have 4 x socket 4 motherboards. One with ALi and one with Sis chipsets which i have tuned for fastest timings With 512kb cache. However both my batman and Dell systems still are faster in ever bechmark (they have intel 430Lx chipsets and have very restricted bios). I would love to get my hands on a 43x motherboard that i can tune the cache timings etc on

[@samsmall3801]

my intel batman and dell boards both “only” have 256kb

[@AncientElectronics]

Its been a little while since I set this machine up. From memory I think I did some mild BIOS tweaking but nothing major. I may go back and play with any settings I can and see what results from it.

[@samsmall3801]

I have put together benchmarks of all my boards feel free to have a look drive.google.com/drive/folders/17A_xqlZtLnxZJiXLtdViINCSfQx0cEl7?usp=sharing. Did you ever get around to looking into repairing that burnt capacitor? Also would you be interested in swapping the board for a Elitegroup SI5PI socket 4 board at all?, its quite a nice socket 4 board with a SiS chipset, photos are in google drive

[@AncientElectronics]

no, I never had the burnt cap repaired as I'm not to great with soldering and I didn't want to try it myself. so far though it hasn't given me any issues. out of curiosity why would you be interested in a swap. is that board of yours a double?

[@Mateusz-ts2mo]

Windows 3.1?

[@cyberjack]

Looks like it yeah

[@cyberjack]

loved my P66 and quake, Hexen ..back in day ... ...hmm SIS chipset ...lol

[@jordicoma]

32MB ram in '93? I had a pentim 166 mmx on '97 and I had only 16MB. This is too much for a 93 machine. For the time it should have 2-4 MB maximum! Why they need so much ram? I'm sure this is an upgrade (but still to much ram for this computer)

[@warrax111]

Good fit to Pentium 66 is 16 MB. With Windows 95, you want 32 MB. We had 486 with 8 MB, and it was little. With windows 95 we had to upgrade to 16. FOr pentium, 32 MB is optimum. IN 1993, most would not afforid it, it's true. BUt later builds was worth to upgrade to 32 MB.

[@armorgeddon]

That reminds me of the story when my uncle bought me Microprose's Formula 1 Grand Prix in the summer of 1994. My PC was still a 286 so it couldn't run it so I had to play it in my uncles house on his Siemens Nixdorf 486 DX2/66 which he got in late 1993 or early 1994 for CAD work. So the first time I cycled to my uncles house to race F1 Grand Prix on an afternoon when he wasn't using the PC since he was off to work I found the PC was already running (which in my circles was very uncommon at the time to leave a PC running without sitting in front of it). So I just turned on the monitor and saw obscure (to me) numbers etc.. I then called my uncle at work and he told me that what was going on was a full memory test since he had upgraded the machine from 4 MB RAM to 24 or 32 MB (we both can't remember exactly) and wanted to make sure that all modules were ok since he had payed a fortune for them. I said to him it's alright and that I'll play tomorrow then & I couldn't believe it when he told me that the memory test would take several days more to complete. :-D

[@lordmmx1303]

Duke is more frequency oriented. runs better on 100mhz 486 than on 60mhz pentium.

[@AncientElectronics]

Duke3d actually runs pretty smooth even on my 66mhz 486 when at the lowest resolution and in non SVGA mode and that's in full screen.

[@Xan0906]

There is some benchmarking data from back in the day: dukeworld.com/2001-current/rtcm/general-tools/Dukebench-II.zip (dukebencTim.txt) There's a P66 result of 30 FPS vs. 32 FPS on the fastest DX4/100 machine. A hypothetic 27 FPS on a P60 wouldn't be so bad given that the DX4/100 clocks over 50% faster; Build is supposed to have Pentium optimizations, after all. Plus that ET4000 W32p card seems to be at the bottom of the pack anyway, judging by the P100 results, so you could probably add a couple of frames to the P66 result if a faster video card had been used.

[@RandomlyDrumming]

Stick a Voodoo 1 in it (if you haven't already) and you'll have a pretty neat retro gaming machine (for 1996-98. games). :)

[@DxDeksor]

On a pentium 66 ?! That won't run great at all ! Many 1998 games are asking you to have at least a pentium 90 or even faster, the P66 is comparable to a 486DX 100 for most tasks except for floating point unit. So that's best for DOS games from the early to mid 90's. A voodoo 1 will be a better fit in a faster pentium machine (such as a pentium 166 or faster).

[@RandomlyDrumming]

Heh, you're 100% right. For some reason, when I was posting my comment, I was thinking about Pentium 166 (instead of just 66)...weird. :)

[@xaer0knight]

I'll buy that for a dollar. That is a sweet tower!

[@AncientElectronics]

+1 for Robocop reference. Unfortunately the tower was missing its cover and I never could find a matching replacement that fit right.

[@infinitecanadian]

You could have redneck'd it and put some canvas on it or something.

[@kman201399]

hmmm i don't see the value to this i owned plenty of these machines have no wish to own another i just love making or edit a floppy config and auto files even than others i/o port serial etc. even win 95 plug and play was hit and miss at least stuff was standardized, i didn't have to worry about if this or that part working together, unless i was pushing the limits at the time