Intel Pentium MMX vs Pentium II

Windows 95 Performance Pentium MMX vs Pentium II
Business Winstone 97

The Pentium MMX at 290.5, although clocked at a speed about 3% greater than the Pentium MMX 300, provided excellent competition. Its Business Winstone score of 57.6, although 8.9 points lower than the Pentium II at 300, is extremely good for a processor lacking any onchip (or in this case, "on card" cache). The difference between the CPUMark scores is very small, except whe ndealing with 32bit scores, the Pentium II's strongpoint. Who would've guessed that a < $300 chip could perform almost as well as a > $700 chip...both made by the same company! The only problem I see here is getting the Pentium MMX stable at 290.5MHz, when testing it, the system crashed a few times however I believe most of the crashes were caused by inefficient cooling (I didn't use any thermal compound). I picked the Shuttle HOT-569 to conduct the tests on because of its excellent performance and stability with the Pentium MMX at 290.5 as well as its SDRAM support. I chose the Megatrends FX83-A for all of the Pentium II tests since it is the fastest performing Pentium II motherboard I have tested so far, and it continues to prove its excellence in the Quake tests below...although you do get to see some interesting results...

WinQuake Performance Pentium MMX vs Pentium II
Business Winstone 97

Why would a processor, almost twice the price of its supposedly lower performing counterpart, be outshown by it? Yep, the results say it all, at the 320 x 200 resolution under Quake the Pentium MMX at 290.5MHz is FASTER than the Pentium II! Although that trend doesn't continue to the higher resolutions, if you feel that 320 x 200 is the only resolution you want to play at there is no point in choosing the Pentium II over the Pentium MMX. I should note that I didn't use any third party performance enhancing utilities (i.e. FastVid) so I could get a raw comparison of both identically configured systems. The Pentium II rules the 512 x 384 and higher resolutions under WinQuake (or Regular Quake for that matter) however the Pentium MMX is still the fastest GLQuake performer out there (the Pentium II doesn't work too well with the voodoofx chipset).

Real World FPU Tests Pentium MMX vs Pentium II
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