Editing Pentium OverDrive (section)

===Compatibility and performance===
During development, Intel had changed the design specification, causing various compatibility and performance problems with some boards that were previously fully compatible. For instance, the [[Packard Bell]] 450 motherboard required a specially-designed [[interposer]] to be installed between the processor and the motherboard to cope with the changed specification, with the unfortunate consequence of precluding access to the motherboard's [[level 2 cache]], resulting in sub-par performance.<ref>[http://www.uktsupport.co.uk/pb/mb/450.htm UKT Support page for the Packard Bell 450 motherboard]</ref> In addition, some older chipsets do not support the [[write-back]] functionality of the chip's level 1 cache, which could also reduce performance. However, the majority of [[Socket 3]] motherboards, particularly later (post-1994) [[VESA Local Bus|VLB]] and most [[Peripheral Component Interconnect|PCI]] boards, provide proper support for the Pentium OverDrive including fully operational access to the level 2 cache, and many earlier boards also support the processor with varying levels of compatibility and performance.

Performance-wise, many popular synthetic benchmarks of the time showed the Pentium OverDrive under-performing its much cheaper and higher-clocked rivals, though its real-world performance (given the motherboard cache was being optimally used) could be much different: programs that were floating-point dependent or optimized for the Pentium architecture (as were both becoming increasingly common in the mid to late nineties) derived a more substantial benefit from the Pentium OverDrive, particularly the 83&nbsp;MHz version. In addition, it fully supported programs and operating systems specifically coded for the Pentium architecture, such as many [[emulator]]s, multimedia utilities and even later [[Windows]] operating systems and games; however, the benefit of running such programs on a clock- and motherboard bus-constrained system may be questionable.