Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini
4 hours ago
- Mac Mini M6 achieves stable 600MHz Pentium II emulation using a customized 86Box build, outperforming the M4 which maxes at 500MHz.
- 86Box emulates old PCs at the hardware level, with most work on a single thread, making single-core performance critical.
- Testing used a fixed emulated configuration (Slot 1 motherboard, Pentium II, 256MB RAM, Voodoo 3, Windows 98 SE) running Cinebench 2000 and Winamp to measure sustained 100% emulation speed.
- M6 maintained 100% emulation at 600MHz through both Cinebench and 3DMark 2000 SE, while M4 failed at 550MHz due to audible dropouts.
- Emulated Cinebench scores are higher than real period hardware, likely due to emulated memory and cache timings.
- Host CPU usage shows M6's performance cores running at ~4.7GHz with ~45-49% utilization, leaving headroom; M4 cores ran at ~3.7GHz.
- The M6's single-core performance advantage translates to a tangible 20% higher stable emulated clock compared to the M4.