Pentium Pro 200 vs Pentium MMX Ep2.

In this episode I benchmark the Pentium Pro 200 that I built in the previous episode against my Pentium 233 MMX. This should be an interesting benchmark since the Pentium Pro was never optimized for 16 bit application while the Pentium MMX was. Which one will win?

The benchmarks I will be using in this video are Doom 2, Quake 3, 3DMark, and SiSoft. Both machines are identical in spec except for their motherboard and CPU.

[kev]

Owning a Pentium pro would had been a pleasure twenty years ago.

[kev]

I cannot believe I am watching this in 2020.

[javinkp]

what about pentium pro vs pentium II 200 ?

[ianbrisland]

Its so easy to forget exactly how fast the Pentium Pro really was in comparision to the Pentium...

[yorgle]

The weakness of the Pentium Pro with 16-bit code has been exaggerated in folklore IMO, and might just be myth.
There are a few things to keep in mind about it:

1) The media makes money by telling exciting and unexpected stories. In 1995-96 you could sell a lot of magazines with headline warnings that the expensive Pentium Pro might have some inferiority to the much cheaper Pentium. I don't doubt tech writers might tweak their tests to find an "interesting" result to talk about.
Most people on the internet were repeating what they read, few actually owned equivalent systems to compare them in real life usage.
The idea of PPro being slower than Pentium in 16-bit was interesting so people liked to talk about it, leading to the perceived difference being exaggerated.

2) Any game or application that's demanding for a Pentium doesn't need to support a 286. As a result, if it's competently written then it's demanding code blocks will be written with 32-bit instructions. MSDOS and Win9x do *not* disallow those instructions. Most mid-90s DOS and Win9x games use 32-bit code.

3) Most of the reviews and first impressions people had of Pentium Pro came from early Intel 450KX based motherboards. That chipset had some serious errata and to fix them, 450KX motherboard BIOSes disabled some important features and crippled the chipset's performance. Later revisions of the 450KX fixed at least some of the issues but not all BIOSes were updated accordingly.
The affected, slow motherboards are rare today. Only the earliest adopters had those boards, but that includes the people who wrote early impressions of the Pentium Pro. Perhaps on those boards there was more of a performance overlap with Pentium in some scenarios.

The 440FX is not affected, but it didn't exist until later when PPro's reputation was already established. Today most PPro boards are 440FX.
You can tell a 450KX by sight because it looks like some development prototype that shouldn't have left the lab. It consists of 9 discrete Intel chips. Not two, NINE.

[mbwoods]

Dont u have a pentium2 cpu? Would be nice to see comparison between the pentium pro running at 233 against the pentium2 at 233mhz.

[Spellspt]

fun video, But what was the FSB of the PPro? Same as the 233MMX? The PPro has unlock multiplier? Maybe it would of been more fair to underclock the MMX to 200Mhz?
If its just a Ppro w/3.5 multiplier, with a 66Mhz FSB, then it was a fair fight, ... I expected the PPro to win, more Cache! Didn't expect it to Win by such margins tho.

[DevilMaster]

That Pentium MMX seems way too slow, compared to how I remember my Pentium 200 MMX with Voodoo2. But I remember something curious happen on another PC (Windows XP era). Out of the box, it came with 512 MB of RAM, and games like Doom 3 and Prey ran quite well. But if I expanded the RAM to 1 or 1.5 GB, they would become much jerkier, to the point I could see the single frames. So... how much RAM do each of the PCs have?

[FusionC]

these benchmarks basically say the opposite of everyother youtube video and article on the internet lol, the mmx isnt that slow compared to the pro

[MarkKolomiets]

Мы в свое время про прошки и мечтать не могли...

[Korstre]

I guess now I'll have to focus my efforts on acquiring more Pentium Pro/440FX hardware, too. I've been wanting to compare the performance of Pentium Pros with different cache sizes at the same speed, but never had a convenient opportunity to get 512K and 1024K variants. Maybe you'd be willing to take up this task? I'm not sure how much of a difference they'll make for games, but I'd almost expect them to be significant with workstation or server software, say maybe Photoshop and 3DS MAX.

[rhuwyn]

The Pentium Pro in most Windows Benchmarks will perform on par or close to a Pentium 2. The 16bit constraints you're talking about generally only are relevant in DOS or maybe Windows 3.11 titles. Doom II is really the only title I would expect the PMMX to outdo the PentiumPro on but you launched it from within windows so I am not sure how that would change the result or if it would. The comments made on cache are also relevant. If you can't cache all your RAM it impacts performance considerably.

[euclideszoto]

In my experience Pentium pro seemed to always work best with voodoo cards.

[albalog]

Hi, great video. I don't understand something. As a kid, I had a Windows NT gaming computer with two of these Pentium Pros (for Christmas 1996) with very similar specs to your computer on the right screen. It had a Voodoo Banshee upgrade in the summer of 1998. Why is yours playing so fast like it's on fast-forward? I got 30fps gameplay like a normal game, not an unplayable fast-forward fest. Pretty much plug the game in, and play. I'm really confused here. Was I lucky?

[Ozfrank]

P-pro is architectural predecessor of Pentium 2, so it performs almost like PII at same frequency.

[RuruFIN]

Funny to think that they returned to the P6 architecture after Netburst failed and evolved that so much after that.

[Xan]

These are some interesting results. Just to make sure, does your S1562 board have the tag RAM upgrade to cache the entire memory? How much L2 cache does that board have?
If you ever feel like doing another round of this, Half-Life (blowout timedemo) and Duke Nukem 3D (dnrate after entering game) would be worthwile candidates; the former is notorious for choking on Pentium MMX, while the latter is actually said to not run that well on Pentium Pro hardware.

[soylentgreenb]

Did you run the pentium pro system with fastvid/MTRRLFBE for the Doom benchmark? Pentium pro, pentium 2, k6-2 etc support this under DOS. What it does is use memory type range registers to combine memory writes instead of doing many small individual memory writes to graphics card. It can almost double the performance sometimes.

[kev]

Did the Pentium MMX motherboard had any L2 cache?

[AncapDude]

There is something wrong with the mmx setup check your directx acceleration and Try again