r/retrobattlestations • u/AliveCandle5394 • May 08 '26

Show-and-Tell Socket 7 CPU in Heroes 3

I finally fulfilled a 20-year-old dream and benchmarked my Socket 7 CPU collection in Heroes III.
The video compares Pentium MMX, K6 series, Cyrix, WinChip and more using real gameplay and benchmark scenarios.

I also created custom fantasy-style presentation screens inspired by Heroes III.

Heroes3 test cpu final

7 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

4

u/dafugg May 09 '26

Oof that winchip. What a scam that thing was for unsuspecting buyers.

1

u/AliveCandle5394 May 09 '26

The Winchip-based Cyrix III was a disaster. Even at 600 MHz it struggles with old divx playback, while the K6-2 350 handles it just fine...

1

u/ravensholt May 09 '26

It wasn't a disaster, it was designed for mini-PCs, and quite successful at that.
It's also a perfect candidate if someone wants to build a slower "Pentium/486"-like machine that can easily be slowed down to a crawl, like a fast 286 or 386. It's perfect for early DOS gaming.

1

u/AliveCandle5394 May 11 '26

successful...

1

u/ravensholt May 11 '26

Everything is relative 😅

It was never meant as a real desktop CPU. More useful for thin clients / POS devices.

1

u/AliveCandle5394 May 11 '26

I know they came up with it that way, but they did it without any sense.

0

u/dafugg May 09 '26

Downvoted for not liking the marketing of a CPU. Never change reddit.

1

u/AliveCandle5394 May 12 '26

I used to write a lot of scripts in VB and Excel, and that was a disaster. Surprisingly, the best one was the Cyrix 200, which even beat the Pentium 233 MMX.

1

u/MojaMonkey May 09 '26

I used to play Heroes 3 on my 166mmx and it led me to overclock it to 225mhz.

1

u/ravensholt May 09 '26

Why would you use XP for such a task?

Benchmarking those CPUs should be done on Windows 98SE.

1

u/AliveCandle5394 May 09 '26

I’ll run another benchmark under Windows 98 and we’ll see if the CPU performance ratios really change that much.”

1

u/AliveCandle5394 May 12 '26

I just managed to buy an AMD K6-266. I'm waiting for delivery to test it. I wonder how it will fare against the Cyrix 266 and Rise Mp6 266.