Elektrine lite

← Feed

@PurpleJillybeans@kind.social

Post #2018405

2026-05-05 06:38 UTC

Alright, putting it out for #RetroComputing Fedi: Who all out there has some experience with VIA C3 CPUs? I have a 650 MHz Samuel 2 in a Socket 370 mobo with a VIA 694X chipset and it's running slower than frozen molasses. From contemporary reviews I'm getting the impression that it should be about half as fast as a same-speed Celeron, but what I'm seeing is more like "386 with the turbo switch off" performance. Kinda like what would happen if the on-chip caches were disabled. (cont'd)

Replies (5)

  • I did a BIOS update on the motherboard and after that I saw a major performance improvement under DOS, but as soon as a 32-bit OS (like Win9x or Linux) starts, it slows back down to 'retreating glacier' speed. Is there something I need to do that I haven't? #AskFedi #DuckDuckFedi

    Open ##2156920

  • @W99@rollenspiel.social 2026-05-05 09:53

    @PurpleJillybeans Oh, I used to have one of those, too. That's old stuff. You might want to try to install Debian 6 or so, that might still run. Or DamnSmallLinux. Other than that I guess that more modern CPUs might not be optimized for such old hardware any more.

    Open ##2156924

  • @apz@some.apz.fi 2026-05-05 13:12

    @PurpleJillybeans I've had plenty back in the days, I remember them mostly running fine. Often used them for firewalls with NetBSD or FreeBSD.

    Open ##2156925

  • @bhtooefr@snack.social 2026-05-05 16:35

    @PurpleJillybeans so there's a bug in the way those processors report CPUID, that makes some utilities think the CPU has 16 MiB of L2 cache it *actually* has 64 kiB L1$I, 64 kiB L1$D, and 64 kiB exclusive unified L2$ but I wonder if that's screwing with something performance-wise

    Open ##2156926

  • @kaidenshi@exquisite.social 2026-05-06 00:03

    @PurpleJillybeans It's been over twenty years since I touched one, but from what I recall they were just about the worst performance you could get in a Pentium III clone at the time. I don't recall any hard numbers but I remember trying to get BeOS to run on one and it was a slideshow on the desktop. That could have been a lack of video drivers though.

    Open ##2156928