hey, same here! used that very same PIII rig for 3 years before moving onto Athlon XP 1700.

haha yeah Athlon was a game changer. Intel broke win ME with coppermine core, so we were limited to overclocked katmai 600 running at 650 until tualatin came out, but the first athlon, 700 ran circles around those oc p3 systems so I ended up replacing all LAN gaming rigs with athlons pretty quickly. (Had to run ME because Halo Custom Edition needs the new mem management, and couldnt run NT because they also had to be able to run mechwarrior 3/pirates moon.).

I was a poor child using my K6-III 450 and all friends start to switch to PII or PIII 450, but then the mighty K7 came, and i got a K7 500 and showed my taillights to the others, followed by 700Mhz version. K7 was great back then! Also stability was excellent! Even if i loved my K6, K7 was another world! I still have my K7 1Ghz Slot 1 with a Asus K7V, working and running with Voodoo 5 5500 to play around.

and a hardware backdoor on the Pentium 3.

@@mrfunnyman6807 that's progress for you kid👍

what does sse do for the cpu?

@@raven4k998 Hi PentiumII had not SSE but MMX.. anyway MMX proved to be almost useless, SSE instructions (in the PentiumIII) are better and help cpu with audio\graphic computations

@@raven4k998 SSE instructions (MMX as well) can render some parts of code (specifically written) more easy and fast to read by the cpu optimizing some math computations

@@rokest5971 yeah but what does sse do specifically does it make your porn load faster?🤣

@@raven4k998 ahaha yes it could, visually you won't see any difference though, it's more a matter of coding\developing things. SSE was one of those Intel claims to promote their new processors such MMX HYPERTHREAD, NETBURST and I guess were useful to speed up everything (web surfing, movies watching, apps etc..) :) ..Have you other questions ?

well it's better then the pentium 3 vs pentium 4 which the pentium 3 was faster then the pentium 4 at that point🤣🤣

@@raven4k998 true, tualatin mopped the floor with the first willamette pentium 4.

Thanks man, that made my day :D

Nathan Hardy you should be able to download a special build of steam for that purpose. it's quite sad really.

Perhaps they require SSE2 and utilize the integer features. That's what Firefox and Chrome do. I think they use it for mass processing of text. I'm sure that eventually, most big software will require SSE2 like Outlook, Word, Excel, etc. I was writing a program for text processing and used MMX to process 8 chars at a time (finding a string in a huge array). I wanted to use SSE2 as well but my VC++ 6 did not support it. I had to go to VC++ 2015 but then I found out I have to recode it since VC++ 2008 and above don't support inline assembly. Fuck Microsoft.

Modern compilers use SSE2 instead of x87 for non-SIMD floating-point, and we've long been in the era where compilers will make good use of available instruction set extensions by default. SSE and SSE2 have been supported by processors for a long time now. As a result, new software will require SSE2 unless the authors go out of their way to make it work on older processors.

@@louistournas120 defrag community suffers from changes in compilers too, and i was really disappointed finding i cannot run newest builds of ezquake on athlon xp, which is enough to play quake at about 500 fps but lacks sse2 support. Progress is so progress.

which cpu would you choose and why🤔

Thing is I've decided on these benchmarks a while ago so I can compare everything. I cannot add another test at this stage I'm afraid.

Hardware Hackers It wouldn't be good from a marketing perspective, Pentium 4 was a failer, now Pentiums are low-end CPUs so it would make no sense making it a high-end brand, that would confuse people. Also Pentium is a bit out dated (it came from 586 - penta means 5 and -ium from latin chemistry names for example roentgenium, ununquadium, hydrogenium so it tries to say that it's important; it would be more like novium or decium (986/1086, actually 164/264 but whatever) :) haha

Good enough reason :D

There would definitely need to be new transistors and circuits for instruction set extensions!

GOG has Serious Sam I believe.

That's a good reason :D

Using the naming scheme that intel used then the Intel MMX should have been the Pentium II. That however opens up the can of worms over if the Pentium II should have been named the Pentium Pro II.

@@LionWithTheLamb Back in the early to mid 90's, Intel made a right mess of things. It started OK with the 386 but then you had the 486 with SX, DX, DX2 and DX4 - for "regular" people all very confusing. And then you had the Overdrive processors which only confused things even more! Then came the 586 ... but it was called the Pentium. And then the Pentium MMX. And then the Pentium Pro. All of which confused the hell out of consumers. I vividly remember trying to explain to my dad why my new PC should have an MMX CPU (a P166 MMX) and he just didn't get it. And at the same time, other brands of CPUs became popular as well so I'm not surprised Intel decided to keep things simple with the Pentium II, III and 4.

Good idea. Apart from Quake 2, do you know of any good games to showcase 3DNow! optimisations?

300a, please! the full speed on die cache should make it interesting :)

and to answer Phil's question, a link (using waybackmachine) web.archive.org/web/20001109071400/www1.amd.com/products/cpg/3dnow/optimized/

I'm more after first hand historic anecdotes, rather than a list. Quake II gets mentioned all the time, but not much else. Another game or two is all I need, ideally something that shows a HUGE boost.

Ah Expendable is listed and Quake III! That's another 2 games I got already :)

Not that great for either but if you use a better graphics it will be ok for Windows 98 games. Something like a Riva TNT2.

@@philscomputerlab I was looking at a XFX GeForce FX5200, what do you think about that?. Also, I found the P3 1000 MhZ. My big question is this, should I continue with this build or go with the P4 windows 98 build you have in your video? Btw, i am an expat living in China, lots of parts here

@@drfunkenstein2k The FX needs a better CPU to get going. A TNT2 or Geforce2 with old drivers will be best. Even better a Voodoo 3 or Banshee but good luck finding one at a good price.

I’ve heard the piii 450 often had the cache chips of the 600 version which facilitated an OC where the pii likely had the rated half speed of the core cache rated chips max

They will install on XP, but not on Windows 98.

As someone who stuck with an OC'd K6-2 450 (OC'd to 500) with Voodoo 3 from '99 to '03-04 (Where I upgraded to P4 + Geforce4 TI4800) one could get A LOT of performance for the money. But it was one heck of a jump though. xD From Win 98 to Win XP and 2 GHz more on the CPU, HT and 8x more VRAM and ditto on performance. I think Half-Life 2 was the kicker for me. I didn't upgrade for GTA 3 'cause my machine back then, just barely met the minimum requirements. xD

@@janwitkowsky8787 The K6-2 was a great chip back then. My mom's PC that my friends would use for gaming had a K6-350, and I think I put my old video card in it eventually, an FX5600 or something. Seemed to keep up close with my P2-450, but the SiS chipset in that K6-2 PC was garbage.

?? Quake 3 is included!

Whoops my bad. I missed that part. xD Ignore me.

I have the same P3 450 but I've overclocked it to 560Mhz (best I can get on this chipset) with a Voodoo 3 @ 183/183. I can pull 49fps @ 1024x768. Rocket launchers kill the FPS.

No problem! For the time being I'm locked in with the benchmarks to compare. But I might mix things up when I move to different boards and sockets soon.

It should, but there is no guarantee, depends on the BIOS support.

K6-2 was largely inferior to PII in 3d games! I tested personally the game Unreal that gave me a 15fps difference !

Easy rule, I like it 😀

With a Slot 1 board with 440BX you are all set! If you ever need more performance I can recommend getting a SlotKet with ~ 1GHz CPU, it makes quite the difference and doesn't cost as much as the real slot 1 1 GHz Pentium III.

@@philscomputerlab thanks for the suggestion, and I do like that 440BX system a lot, I am aware of slockets, but I've debated the benefit of more processor. Everything beyond is Windows-only games, with pretty much everything worthwhile running on newer hardware and operating systems, with or without patches. I'm thinking a real Voodoo card would be a better upgrade for this period system than more processor. (I currently have an AGP MX4000 in there because it's the only capable 3D AGP card I have that is either not broken or has no problems in 9x drivers, where like for example with the 6200LE newer driver paletted 2D games are broken)

Oh yes, 6200 is not a good fit. With your MX4000 I can recommend the 45.23 drivers. If you want to upgrade the GPU look out for a GeForce4 MX 440 or 460, these have 128 Bit memory interface, quite handy at higher resolutions or of using AA and AF.

Here in Europe PentiumII 450 are ultra-rare ! I got a solid PII400@450 with SoftFSB :)

P3 can decode mpeg 2 video on the fly

Ahhh... I see. Did not know that. The reason for me asking, is that I remember those times, when risc cpu's were much faster clock for clock compared to cisc. Then I have no exact answer to why they are so close.

They took Pentium II, added SSE, make small changes and you have a Pentium III; I don't think it has something to do with RISC/CISC.

Thanks. :-)

That's Expendable!

Yea my Abit Slot 1 board is just awesome, they made some great boards.

Phil mentions it at the beginning. It's Millennium Soldier: Expendable.

Thank you!

And winn xp ? I have a 500mhz Pentium 3 and it's ok in win XP but windows 7 runs very bad in xp internet lags too

Good old days. I went from a p333/celeron 300 to an AMD Duron, man was an upgrade that was.

I went from the 450MHz p3 to a 1.4 GHz Athlon. I remember the AMD Duron was an overclocking champion.

Similar story here, though I had 128MB RAM and a regular TNT (which was later upgraded to a GeForce2 MX). That got replaced in 2002 with an AMD Athlon XP 2100+ with 512MB RAM and an ATI Radeon 8500LE.

:O For real? Dang, well that's good news for all the Pentium III fans. Is there anything in the change logs of a recent update?

They released an update that removes the SSE2 installer requirement. But at the time I'd mentioned that to you, it was valid. Though internet installers for some blizzard games: Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2, still have the installer packaged with SSE2 code, keeping many AMD systems and Pentium 3 and lower systems from installing. Starcraft and broodwar still work.

I have a Intel Pentium 3 800mhz, i installed steam and it works fine. (If i could upgrade to 1ghz)

Nice!

forget steam. i played warcaft 3 with both 4mb and 256mb video ram. pii 450mhz and very little ram. The real wc three disc wrs fine

Effective data rate being equal the memory with better timings and less refresh time would win. But which is it I don't know. Don't remember typical timings off the top.

Yes good point. However, how does GTA 3 run on the P III 450? It might be one of those features that wasn't used for a while, and at that point hardware had moved on anyway? Just guessing though as this era is a bit of a unknown for me :)

PhilsComputerLab I want to see gaming on windows NT 4.0

That also moes to my mind, are games that actually benefit from SSD or have it even as a requirement actually run proiperly on the slower P3.

I played GTA III everyday for years on my Pentium 2 400, 400Mhz. It ran great frame rates, but did slow down a bit in the middle island in the city area.

Pentium III Tualatin 1400 with a sloket. But for native Slot 1, probably the 1000B Coppermine with 133 FSB. It exists native for Slot 1. For a budget that depends on the speed. Something like a Celeron 300A, those were used quite often back in the day and almost always were able to be clocked to 450 MHz. Or P3 450 & 500, should be quite available even today.

Without converters and overclocking the bus, I believe 1 GHz is the top end. With prices and value, the slowest and best is usually poor value. Something in the middle though should be good value, like a 600 or 700 MHz.

soooo, instead of this explanation being a comment, make it into a video so people don't have to sift through each and every video to find this exact comment now thats an awesome idea!

Check the video "First Slot CPU". Now if you want to do "slow down tricks" with caches, I can save you a lot of time and recommend to go with the Pentium, not Pentium II :D

I will check that out. I did see your video on using the K6-iii 450+ to run it down to a 386; very cool. I did use Throttle utility to slow down my P3 650 down to a nice speed for Descent. My wife has also been quite tolerant of me having taken some of the dining room for retro building. To add yet another might push it over the edge. My end goal is to have a nice P2/3 build and an Athlon 64 build to cover a wide range. Below that, I might rely on DOSBox for the really old stuff.

or even a Pentium 3, 1.4 ghz vs a Pentium 4 1.4 ghz

Yea that is interesting. But it usually becomes a system comparison as there are so many chipsets and memory options. And there are historic comparisons (What was around at the time) vs. what is easily available now and can be had for cheap.

I've been using it for a long time actually :) Haven't done a sound card review in a while though.

Yeah KAtmai wasn''t that much of a difference. Coppermine with 133 MHz FSB and higher clock rates did a nice push and then obviously Tualatin with 512kB full speed cache and a prefetch logic.

It's the same exact setup for the last few weeks...

That´s interesting. I never heard of a PII 500Mhz. Every site states 450Mhz as maximum clock. Maybe you have an unreleased PII model. Conserve it well.

@@rcarkk He had Pentium III 500 mhz for sure. Pentium II 500 mhz can be achieved only by overclocking. Maybe he had 333 Mhz one, that has multiplier 5x, and ran it on 100 Mhz FSB motherboard... that is 5x100 = 500 mhz.

@@warrax111 Makes sense

@@rcarkk I was thinking of it, and I know, what probably happened. There is a pin mod, thanks to what motherboard detects 66mhz FSB like 100 mhz. This trick was used also in Pentium II era, particulary on Celerons. Usually Celeron 300A, after this pin mod, could run 450 Mhz. Sometimes, when one was extremly lucky, he could get very good bin 333 Mhz (66x5) Pentium II. Someone probaby made pin mod on the pentium. It could be done even permanently by soldering something. Motherboard then detected it like Pentium II 500 mhz, even HWinfo tool detected it as Pentium II 500 Mhz. I just tried on my BX440 PII 400 motherboard, to switch jumper for multiplier on motherboard from 4x to 3x. It is working. Seems Pentium II were locked only way up. Both motherboard and HWInfo detected it as Pentium II 300, although it is Pentium II 400 originally. So he probable got such permanently modified Pentium 333Mhz to 500 Mhz. It was extremly rare, cause only very few handled such overclock. Much safer and wider spread was to take 300, ale got it to 450. That worked like 90%. On Celerons without cache, it worked almost 100%. Because it was mainly cache, that didn't handled that overclock. Pentium II cache ran on half speed of processors. At 450, it's 225. Not all cache chips handled it. But on Celerons, there was not cache, so they all could be overclocked from 300 to 450, if motherboard supported 100 FSB. So there are two variants. Eighter, he had Pentium III 500 Mhz (Katmai) and remember it wrong, or he got pin moded Pentium II 333, that worked on 5x100 = 500 mhz. As he puted it to motherboard, it automaticaly switched FSB to 100, and with that multiplier of 5, which 333mhz Pentium II has, it showed Pentium II at 500 mhz at starting screen. If he was given that Pentium by someone other, that " it is Pentium II 500" , he could not know it was pinmoded overclocked Pentium II 333. It wasn't mentioned anywhere. He would need to take out passive cooler from that Pentium II, and would detect that pin mod on it by eyes. Also, on chip, there would be probably marking Pentium II 333 / 66 / 2.0v.

AmstradExin Because the P2 was expensive and the best and P3 was cheap and the worst P3, I rarely even see P2-400 but P3-450/733 etc - a ton

Exactly.

yeah PII450 are much rare afaik :)

One could still buy a Pentium II or Celeron. Simmilar to the transition from Pentium 4 to Core 2, or Core 2 to the 1st gen Core i, the older chips were still sold simultaneously.

It was also the second fastest CPU available when it cost $469. You're missing the context of what 90's computers were like. This will come across as a long rambling list, but it is important to feel what it was like: There was a faster 500 MHz model released on the same date of 26th of february 1999 and it cost $696. On the 17th of may, same year less than 3 months later, the 550 MHz pentium iii was released at $700 and the 450 and 500 MHz version got price drops (likely the 500 MHz version dropped to a price similar to the old price of the 450, and the 450 to 300-something dollars). Then on the 2nd of august 1999 a 600 MHz version of the katmai slot 1 was released at $669 and everything below it got price drops. Then on 26th of september, still the same year, the B-stepping of the PIII 600 was released at $615 with 133 MHz FSB. Then on 25th of october, still the same year, the coppermine core was released beginning with the PIII 600EB for $455, PIII 650EB for $583, PIII 667EB for $605, PIII 733EB for $776. Everything below it was either price dropped or discontinued. Stores stuck with discontinued stuff would clear old stock at a lower price. Then on 20th of december, *still the same year*, the PIII 750EB was released for $802 and the PIII 800EB for $851. These CPUs were right at the edge of what intel could make. And they would charge a big premium for that. Half a year later they were "old hat" and had dropped in price to something affordable. If you bought a pentium III 450 in august of 1999 it would surprise me if the CPU was much more than $200. The average growth in performance per year of CPUs in the 1990's was 60%; 50% from clockspeed and 10% from IPC. If you asked Joe random in 2000 they would have thought it obvious that we were going to have 10 GHz CPUs by like 2003. The pentium 4 gave it a good college try to get to those clock speeds but they just ran head first into a concrete wall (well, thermal wall).

@@soylentgreenb Thanks for all that info. I wish I was around during the glory days of Moore's law. My first PC was a pentium 3 around 2003, but I didn't really get into the community until Haswell. That's when I really took interest in the topic

@@FrankieHiltz Moore's law is still sort of hobbling along. Moore's law was never about speed, it is about how many components you can get onto a chip; and that's still sort of hobbling along (except at intel, with their 14nm+++++), but the components aren't getting much faster and more power efficient anymore. That free lunch was called Dennard scaling. If you make transistors smaller, you can not only fit more components on a chip (Moore's law), but you can clock it faster at a lower voltage and end up with the same power consumption per unit area. Early 486 ran at 5V VCore. Today CPUs run at a little over 1 V, which is almost the same as 15 years ago when Dennard scaling crapped out; it is no longer possible to lower the voltage and have a functioning device. Ontop of that, there was a lot of thermal headroom in the 90's that had not yet been consumed. In 1990 many CPUs didn't even need a heatsink; they just put out 2-3 W. But this headroom allowed CPUs to improve faster than Dennard scaling, because you could run them at slightly higher voltage and clock them a lot faster and just put a bigger heat sink on it. To do this CPUs had to become deeply pipelined so that not a lot of work is done in one clock but you have many instructions in flight at various stages of completion and you're working on them all in parallel, doing a little bit of work each clock.

Expendable aka Millennium Soldier: Expendable.

Thank you very much

My first PC bought with my own money was a Pentium III 450 - cost €2800 back in july 1999. 128MB RAM & a DVD drive (which was very unusual at the time). The store tried to get me a Pentium II instead (old stock?) but I would have none of it. They did convince me to get a Riva TNT 2 instead of a Voodoo 3 and I DID regret caving in because the TNT2 overheated in no time and broke and they lost the card (cost me €300 back then!) when they send it in for repairs. They refused to even refund it, laid the blame with Guillemot.

@@redavatar nice story. Voodoo3 was much better for longrun, as they were very quality made cards, with quality components and good logic. They overheated but it just didn't destroy them. They were very durable cards. Reviews often overlooked this. For me, it seemed, there were already war between Nvidia , first to destroy 3dfx, and then trying to destroy Ati (succedded only partially, as AMD bought them). It's so pity 3dfx was destroyed so early, I would like to have 3d card faster than voodoo5, based on one chip, with support for Glide, for backward compatilibity. Something as fast as Geforce 2 Ultra. This card is missing for retro builds, now people have to use Geforce 2 combo with 2 voodoo2 cards in SLI, which is slow in Glide in 1024x768. Have voodoo3 to this date in retro rig, but thinking about puting active fan on it, so it overheat less and last longer. Computer was used from 2003 (then I've bough it and upgraded it from office PC to retro win98 rig) till 2011. It was used quite often as we had often LAN parties here. Then it was put in storage room, in last month I had retro- nostalgia flash, read lots of retro reviews and watched videos, and I've taken it out, just for fun, after almost 9 years. Still working, lol. Those slot 1 PCs and voodoo and BX440 motherboards are incredible durable stuff. The only thing I should change is Power supply. It's period correct computer, but that power supply is 200W noname, typical late 90's... it can destroy components if it blow up. But I lost era-correct computer, by inserting new power supply, but it will be safer .

@@warrax111 Yeah a LOT of stores skimped on the power supplies. This really expensive PC had a dirt cheap power supply as well which died a year later. That computer store closed only a year or so later - they were incompetent anyway.

Check my past videos!

unaclocker celeron sucks

Yup, it was also only 1/4 the price of a P3-450 too.

That be a big difference:P