• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Anybody using a Pentium prior to the 133?

Unknown_K said:
I jumped from a 486-133 AMD (OC to 160) to a Cyrix 686 166 for about a month but switched to a Pentium 133 because the cyrix just overheated too much (and the FPU sucked and Quake just came out). After a while I upgraded to a p233mmx and purchased a second board (BTW I built all of my computers after the 286) which had a cheap AMD K5-133 (still have that CPU on the shelf). That P233MMX was on a TX board I sold down the road, was smart enough to keep my M-tech HX Pentium boards which cached much more then 64MB.

Still have a few PCChip Pentium boards that came in AT cases I got from freecycle (wanted the cases). The big deal about VX/TX at the time was they could use a SDRAM DIMM, but that didnt help much down the road since they could not deal with higher density DIMMS and you generally only got one DIMM slot.

I had looked into early dual P1 motherboards but never found a real use for one other then novelty so I never purchased one, they might be too pricey now to bother.
Click to expand...

Wow that brings back memories. I do remember that a lot of my buddies at the time went the "cheaper" route and bought the 6x86 but my P133 with a Tyan board ripped their Cyrix's in terms of performance. Quake was an obvious choice in that and I believe Duke Nukem 3D came out not long after and made it even worse. However I still like the Cyrix chip version 2.7+ or I believe more commonly called the "L" version as it was much improved. I do have an original 6x86PR-166+ in my collection however my Asus P5A will not recognize it correctly since it’s not the later 2.7 version, it always comes up as a P90+ in this board. Either way I still wish Cyrix was still in the CPU game. Competition is always good..
 
dan87951 said:
Either way I still wish Cyrix was still in the CPU game. Competition is always good..
Click to expand...

Cyrix is *sort* of still around in the form of VIA, but I'm not sure they count. The VIA Nano was getting a fair amount of press as an Atom competitor but other than a few Mini-ITX boards it seems to be unobtanium in the real world.

The C7 was a dud. I made the mistake of getting one of those oh-so-pretty HP 2133 aluminum laptops with it. A 600Mhz PIII runs rings around it.
 
per the earlier thread I had a Texas Micro P90 laptop and loved it. I bought it new in the fall of 1995.

I would like a Compaq Deskpro 5/66M if anyone has one for sale.

Bill
 
Still have my first Pentium, a Dell xps 90 I purchased new, as well as a p66 Toshiba laptop. Don't use them all that much anymore, too fast for most dos games , and too slow for most windows games. :(

The p90 only gets used for Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun and Axis and Allies now.

Either way I still wish Cyrix was still in the CPU game. Competition is always good..
Click to expand...

Actually they somewhat still are, under the name of TI. Funny part is Cyrix started out with mostly TI employees, since it was founded by one itself! Most of the lead techs/engineers stayed after the merger to National Semi. Ironic part is next VIA buys National, and now TI buys VIA!!!!! Its gone full circle! Anyways , back to Cyrix...

Sadly Cyrix bet too much on the Cyrix Genode CPU's and M2's, and ended up loosing the farm when they could not meet manufacturing goals ( Mostly due to National Semi I might add, not their own incompetence!). I was actually a huge fan of cryix. The FPU may have been weak, but in most desktop publishing / office / web-surfing was way faster then the equivalent speed intel/amd. And even more impressive were the java cpu instructions in the GX2/M2. Kind of like MMX, but instead of multimedia enhancements only, it also increased java speed. Intel tried copying their structure somewhat with Netburst, and nearly lost the cpu war themselves with early p4's. Sadly Cyrix was just too far ahead of their time towards the end, with no eye on current demands other then office apps. If they had tweaked the FPU to match AMD, mostly likely it be AMD that was dead today. It was mostly this oversight as well as the merger with National that sealed their fate. Never mind the fact you could not use an AWE64 on any Cyrix 6x86 or Genode. It would only use 32 voices instead of 64, making your nice awe64 a cheap awe32. LOL! Most people never knew of this bug. Top that off with the 75/83mhz fsb fiasco... Shame what happened to Cyrix. =(
 
Last edited:
twolazy said:
Never mind the fact you could not use an AWE64 on any Cyrix 6x86 or Genode. It would only use 32 voices instead of 64, making your nice awe64 a cheap awe32. LOL! Most people never knew of this bug. Top that off with the 75/83mhz fsb fiasco... Shame what happened to Cyrix. =(
Click to expand...

The same applied to AMD chips too. Creative's installer for the WaveGuide software wavetable synth insisted on a real Intel Pentium in the system.

While on the subject, anyone remember NexGen? They dared to be different and had their own socket, never came across one of those machines after all these years though. They gotta be pretty rare.
 
njroadfan said:
The same applied to AMD chips too. Creative's installer for the WaveGuide software wavetable synth insisted on a real Intel Pentium in the system.

While on the subject, anyone remember NexGen? They dared to be different and had their own socket, never came across one of those machines after all these years though. They gotta be pretty rare.
Click to expand...

I saw one Nexgen equipped system back around 96 but its lack of a coprocessor kept me from bothering with it. I think the improved coprocessor equipped version would be incredibly rare since AMD bought NexGen about the same time and quickly closed down NexGen's product lines.
 
Just found the receipt for our P133 upgrade (fastest chip out at the time) from back in the day 96-97 time frame (can't read date). Price was $579. Can't remember if that was with the motherboard or not its very hard to read.
 
I just realized that I also have a Compaq Prolinea P75 which I use simply to contain an old HDD which I might want to refer back to on occasion. I'm keeping it as a collector's item, but I absolutely hate it. Not being able to modify the BIOS without some special disk makes it proprietary garbage to my way of thinking. My P60 on an unidentified MB with an American Megatrends BIOS is a way better machine and actually gets some use.
 
I have a Compaq Deskpro 466 with a Pentium Overdrive 83 MHz (PODP5V83) on it. Sometimes I use it for some old DOS-Applications. Installed is DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11.
 
carlsson said:
I recently installed Windows 98SE on my Pentium 75 with 16 MB memory. It was painful both to install and use. Actually that one is better off in MS-DOS land, and I should rather save Win98 for my stripped Pentium 200MMX.
Click to expand...

I actually had an old P75 that came with a Windows 95 machine. It originally had only 4 Megs of RAM. After upgrading to 16 Megs, and installed Windows 98, it ran fine. Then again, I unstalled a clean version of 98 and got rid of all of the junk that came installed originally. In fact, it was in use from 1995 till about 2001 when I finally had to give up and upgrade to another computer.
 
I have several, some Socket 4 and 5 boxes. A Socket 5 75Mhz gold-top was my main DOS box for a while, and I went to upgrade the CPU and was surprised to find it was a Socket 5 and not 7 as I had expected to see. I maxed out the socket (at least as far as what I had) with a 100Mhz chip. I mostly had been using the P75 for stuff that most people would relegate to a 486 - Win3x, DOS games from the early 90s, etc.. but I also did some later DOS games like Quake on there. The P75 and then the P100 had the added advantage of being BLAZING FAST under Win3x. It might have been software configuration, but IIRC the P75 was even faster than my Am5x86 133Mhz under Win3x.

My Socket 5 box also has odd ISA slots - they are white and are slightly wider, so you can insert cards with much less force. They instead rely on the screw to keep the card in place snugly. It's really nice, lol.
 
I don't have it anymore... but we used to have an Acer Acros with a 75MHz Pentium... 16MB ram. It was running Windows 3.1 when we got it, but I upgraded it to 95. I soon learned that a P75 was too slow in 1999, and we got a far better one... I think it was a eMachines eTower 333i. Had a 333MHz Celeron, 128MB ram, 10GB HD. I thought it was a HUGE step into the future when we got it.
 
Back in 2009 I had a Gateway 2000 P5-100 running Windows 95 and *gasp* 64 megabytes of ram! This had a 100 MHz Pentium III, 1 gigabyte hard drive, 2x CD-ROM, S3 Trio 64V+ and no sound card :(. I then had an eMachines eTower 600ix for about 3 weeks until I got my AMD Athlon XP 1800+ system which lasted me a year until the power supply blew and took the motherboard and processor with it (along with the hard drive and video card). After that for the next year I went through 2 computers, a Pentium 4 HT @ 3.2 GHz, a huge step up which died of a motherboard failure then an AMD Athlon X2 4600 that still runs but I upgraded to my current computer which is a 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo.
 
I've got a P75 Packard Bell Legend computer that I got new in 1995. It came with MS-DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.11 for Work Groups and a coupon for a free upgrade to Windows 95 when it was released.

It still has the original P75 processor but I've upgraded almost everything else. 8 mb ram upgraded to 40 mb. 1 mb video ram upgraded to 2 mb.
850 mb hard disk drive upgraded to 1.2 gb. I also added a 360k 5.25" disk drive as the B: drive.

I still use it ocassionally for DOS gaming and other DOS software.
 
I could never afford a Pentium when they came out.. started with a Cyrix 133+
But have collected numerous systems over the past few years & I especially like multiple CPU systems

At present in Socket 4/5 I have numerous white box systems but also these
IBM PC Server 300 (single P60 but it has had a P90 on a adaptor & a PODP5V120) running NT3.51 WS
2 x IBM PC Server 320 (dual P75s & other dual P90s) running NT4.0 WS
Compaq Proliant 2500 (quad P100s but I have the P133 & P166 cards) running NT 4.0 Server
Compaq Proliant 2000 (quad P66s also have the P90 cards but still chasing 2 more 486 cards) running NT 3.51 Server
 
Last edited:
Argh, the setup I described in an earlier post finally gave up life.. what happened was that a 2GB IDE disk broke, while the much older SCSI disks kept running just fine, no problems (3 of them, from 1990 - the fourth, from 1989, gave up a year ago). I thought I had good backups, but they were a bit old as it turned out. The IDE disk could be fully read in an offline USB IceBox setup though, even though it didn't work in the PC. A terrible noise from it. Didn't have another 2GB or small IDE disk, and it refused to run with a new big IDE. Some wee bit of trouble finding a PC with the right combination of slots to use both the Adaptec ISA SCSI controller and the rest, but got it all sorted out eventually, SCSI content and all (although those disks are still running, spinning as they have done for 21 years, even though there's no PC connected anymore).

So now it's all running in a virtual system instead.

-Tor
 
krebizfan said:
I saw one Nexgen equipped system back around 96 but its lack of a coprocessor kept me from bothering with it. I think the improved coprocessor equipped version would be incredibly rare since AMD bought NexGen about the same time and quickly closed down NexGen's product lines.
Click to expand...

lzf70000 is selling one on ebay for $850! I have two motherboards with 90mhz chips on them but they are both VL-Bus. I don't understand why Nexgen bothered making VL-Bus motherboards at all. VL-Bus is a 486 technology, not a Pentium technology. They should have been making only PCI boards for the nx586. It sucks trying to build a Nexgen system now because of both the chips with the FPU's and the PCI motherboards being so hard to find. You can't run any of the good Pentium era games on a machine with no FPU and only VL-Bus/ISA for video.
 
Tor, that is a rather sad, yet invigorating tale, my first pentium machine was a p-166mmx box, i thought, and still do think, it is the best thing since sliced bread for dos gaming. 64mb Ram, dual 850mb hdds, win 95, still whirrs along faithfully. I've recently gotten alot of my life and parts sorted out and am able to be part of the forums again. And tor, do you have any used shops that you could get a 2gb hdd from? If not, PM me.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top