VIA Cyrix MII

Cyrix have been around quite a few years now plugging away at the low end of the CPU market. They take a bad press for being slow for games with their MII chip but this isnt where its targeted, its targeted at the business and budget end where masses of FPU power isnt required. This is why you normally see them in machines with onboard sound and video which isnt much good but does the job for basic tasks like word preocessing. Also all MII's made now have a v on the end hence making them MIIv's. This v means that it has extended FPU from the original MII and has extra multimedia instructions. Cyrix make the MII upto PR433 and this runs at a core speed of 300 MHz ...  Read the complete review

Having used Cyrix cpu's all of my computing life, around 4 years now, starting with the 486 sx-40 through to the Cyrix MII-433 now, I have a good knowledge of them. Contrary to popular belief Cyrix CPU's can handle games. Although not the best FPU on the market, being 2 generations out of date, it actually can handle games. I will give you three examples. I play a hell of a lot of Half Life, Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 originally on my Cyrix MII-333 (3 x 83) (my 433 is going in when my new motherboard comes)with originally my Diamond Savage 4 video card, and now with my Diamond Viper II Savage 2000 video card and I get very respectable performance. In Half Life ...  Read the complete review

Many people say dont buy the MII its got poor performance, its slow at games and its multimedia floating point performance is pathetic. Well then people who read those reviews think why does anyone buy this chip. Well let me give you one little example. Suppose you work for a large company or even a school. You need to buy 200+ computers. They are only going to be used for spreadsheets and word processing etc. You look at the people who say spend an extra £50 and get a decent Intel or AMD system, now lets look at the maths in that respect. £50 extra per machine 200 machines £50x200 = £10,000 Now you look at it and you know why ...  Read the complete review

The Cyrix MII was effectively the 686mx (which once ruled the CPU market for speed) this chip had a job to do and it did it well. It was certainly aimed at the Bussiness user or the low end home user. I used the Cyrix MII for about a year and I was impresses by the overall speed, however I started to get a little annoyed at the low FPU performance, it was very low performance on that account. At the time only a few games seem to be affected by it so I stuck with it for a while. For the price I paid I dont think I have had a better value chip then the MII but eventually I had to go to AMD in order to get the smoothness back in my games. I am a system builder and ...  Read the complete review

When you're evaluating this product please don't forget that it's probably only costing you £15/£20 pounds and it IS a budget processor. There is speed to be had in this processor but it's NOT 333 Mhz of speed. It's a cleverly multiplied low-end processor which has a very high effective speed. The best situation for this chip is where you could normally only fit a P166 Mhz chip. Older machines. Once excellent place for this chip is in network servers. Laugh all you will but .... You can pick-up a rack-mountable Compaq Proliant server which support 4 processors (P166) for about £250. Buy four of these and fit them ...  Read the complete review