Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini

A focused evaluation shows the Mac Mini M6 running a custom 86Box 6.0 build can stably emulate a Pentium II at 600 MHz with an emulated Voodoo 3, thanks to an ARM64 just-in-time recompiler and strong single-core performance. The setup uses a Deschutes Pentium II configuration with 256 MB RAM, Voodoo 3 (16 MB), Windows 98 SE, and a workload combining Cinebench 2000 CPU rendering and Winamp playback so audio underruns immediately reveal timing shortfalls. The tester extended 86Box frequency tables to 800 MHz for the runs and required a flat 100% emulation speed with zero audible dropouts for a pass, intentionally treating single-thread throughput as the limiting factor because most emulation work falls on one host thread.

Results put the M6 clearly ahead of the M4: the M4 held 500 MHz reliably but began hitching at 550 MHz, while the M6 passed both 550 and 600 MHz (650 MHz failed due to brief audio underruns). Cinebench 2000 on the emulated PII scored 9.28 CB at 600 MHz and 7.02 CB at 450 MHz, numbers that exceed many period hardware submissions and indicate emulator/ timing differences rather than literal hardware parity. Telemetry shows 86Box concentrates work on two high-performance M6 cores running ~4.48-4.71 GHz with package usage under ~26%, explaining the 20% higher stable emulated clock versus the M4 and making the M6 an unusually capable, compact retro-PC emulation host.