Intel Pentium II

Intel Pentium II Real World FPU Tests - Truespace3 Render Times

Intel Pentium II Gaming Performance - WinQuake Framerates

Here you can see the amazing performance increase of the Pentium II over the K6 and even the Pentium MMX. The Pentium II has taken the torch from the Pentium Pro as the new Quake Champ. If you are really into Quake and DOS Gaming (need I mention the upcoming Hexen 2 which is based on the Quake 2 engine) the Pentium II is a must have. Now if Intel could only drop the price of it a few hundred dollars, it would be the perfect chip. At 640 x 480 the Pentium II 300 boasts performance unheard of when using even a Pentium Pro. The Pentium II - 300 performs like a P250MMX with a Monster 3D under Quake. The Pentium II is truly an amazing chip, it has exceeded all of my expectations...oh and one more thing...it is FAST!!!

With the Pentium II, once you break the 200MHz barrier, everything seems to fly. As you can see, the difference in frame rates between the Pentium II - 166 and 200 is huge, while the difference between the frame rates between the Pentium II - 233 and 266 is nearly nothing. Where as the K6 at 250MHz gives a huge performance increase over the K6 at 233MHz, it still cannot compete with the Pentium II at 166MHz.

Intel Media Benchmark

Well, thanks to a great person (FastChip24) who forwarded me the Intel Media Benchmark, I posted some results.

This comparison chart just shows you the increase in Integer and FP performance of the Pentium II over the Pentium Pro, and the Pentium MMX. A Pentium II - 300 gives you about a 73% increase in raw Integer performance over a Pentium MMX 200 or a Pentium Pro 200 and a 63% increase in raw FP performance.

Conclusion

Right now the Pentium II is aimed at the power hungry desktop market, it provides excellent Windows NT performance, and provides the fastest Windows 95 performance on the market today (even though it is just a tad bit faster than a K6 or 6x86MX). However I don't really recommend the Pentium II for a person running only 95, the K6 is a much better and much more affordable option. If you have the money, the Pentium II is worth it, but don't expect it to kill the K6 or 6x86MX under Win95...because it simply doesn't.