I got my Pentium Pro 200 MHz processors (with 1MB cache!) in the mail today. Thought I would get them installed and do some form of benchmarks. Did everything go off without a hitch? Of course not 😂. So, what happened this time? Let's talk about it! 🧵 time!
So, step 1 was deciding which operating system to use to do the benchmarks. I chose Windows 2000 to start. I thought I would go with SiSoft Sandra 99, but, well, that's too old, and I couldn't find a better version. Alright, no problem. Quick reboot... uh oh...
Yea, this system has a SATA drive, and the connection has always been flaky. Looks like we got some corruption. Bummer. Guess I get to reinstall W2K later! I swapped in a new SATA cable. Drive detected. Good. Certainly this will be the last of our problems...
Well, anyway, let's use Windows XP instead, and deal with our W2K problem later. Going to use PCMark '05 to benchmark. We'll start with the currently installed CPUs. Wow, this thing does peg both CPUs. Good! That should make for a good comparison, or so I hope.
Alright, I ran and saved off some benchmarks and specs. Don't worry, we will see those in a minute as a side-by-side comparison. Let's get those 512KB CPUs out and the 1MB CPUs installed. Out with the old, and in with the... less old!
Great! Let's see if this baby boots. Indeed it does! I am sure it is going to run just fine from now. Foreshadowing...
Yea, so, I left the room for a few minutes and returned. The machine was powered off. WHAT?!? Okay, no problem, just power it back on. No. It's dead. Greaaaaat.
What happened??? Well, the power supply gave up the ghost. So I swapped in a new power supply, and we were good to go! I did try swapping back in the old CPUs to see if the system would power on with the old power supply. Nope! It's a goner.
Alright, enough of that. Let's look at some cursory comparisons. First, just for fun, I did run CPU-Z. Ah, look at all of that glorious cache we have now in the "after" photo.
How about a look under Linux? Here it is! Nothing earth shattering here, but fun to see, right? RIGHT!
Okay, so what do we see if we compare PCMark '05? Not much of a difference! We went from a 367 to a 380, and I bet if I ran this a few more times, we'd get different numbers, these are not statistically significant. So, I think I need to find some more benchmarks to run!!
Right.. so after striking out with the hardware issues, and not really finding a satisfying benchmark yet, I decided to call it a night. Next up, on another day, I think we'll run more benchmarks, and reinstall W2K too. Thx for following along!
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