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Anybody using a Pentium prior to the 133?

Unknown_K said:
So how many people actually have the older models in their collection (machines not just CPU) and what do you use them for if anything?
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I still have my Pentium 120 that I drag out from time to time. It cost me $2500 in 1995, and I wrote about it (also in 1995) here: ftp://ftp.scene.org/mirrors/hornet/info/demonews/1995/demonews.094 (scroll down to the text "Behemoth - 120Mhz Pentium for Demos".

What I don't think I touch on in the article is that, to accommodate a 120MHz CPU, the bus speed was 60MHz instead of a more normal 66MHz. This didn't seem like a big deal at the time but it actually wreaked havoc with my very first 3-D accelerated card, an ATI 3-D Expression+PC2TV (had TV output, even for DOS programs and graphics). The timing mismatch caused the 3-D accelerator to operate so slowly that CPU rendering in software was actually faster.
 
Now that I have found a need for one, I rebuilt an old Compaq 5304 from about 1998 or 99. It has a P1 333 processor with 64 Megs of RAM and a whopping 4 Gig hard drive. I have Windows 98SE/Plus installed as the primary OS, but I primarily use the underlying version of DOS 7.0. The only thing I use it for is writing floppy disks to use with my even older IBM 5150. Some of the things that were changed were to replace the original CD ROM with a new 24X DVD ROM, remove the 3.5" floppy and install an internal 100 Meg zip drive and finally, added in a 5.25" 360Kb floppy drive. There are some issues with the 360 K floppy tha I am addressing an another thread, but outside of that, this is a pretty useable computer. I had forgotten how useful these old systems could be. I am even thinking about installing a newer, larger drive. Something on the order of about 100 Gig. Of course that means I'll have to partition the hell out of it, but at least I'll have the storage space I need and I can multi boot like crazy; DOS, Win 95, Win 98 Etc. This has the makings to be a decent vintage gaming machine. Doom, Quake, I've missed you.
 
No, I'm just using
Pentium II
Main article: List of Intel Pentium II microprocessors
Core Process Frequency L2 Cache FSB Socket Release date
Klamath 0.35 µm 233–300 MHz 512 KB 66 MHz Slot 1 May 1997
Deschutes 0.25 µm 266–450 MHz 512 KB 66–100 MHz Slot 1 January 1998
Tonga 0.25 µm 233–300 MHz 512 KB 66 MHz MMC-2 April 1998
Dixon 0.25 µm 266–366 MHz 256 KB 66 MHz MMC-2
 
I seem to recall Pentiums becoming popular around the 90MHz mark. I think sales of the earlier chips were held back by worries about the floating point bug and they weren't worlds faster than 486-66MHz chips anyway.

Personally I've got an old 75Mhz ThinkPad 755CD that I bought through Craigslist about eight years ago, and my family's second computer was a 133MHz Pentium with 32MB RAM purchased new in July 1995. It was a full-tower Micron Millennia and I've still got the receipt: $4,117.00 for the computer sans video and another $449.00 for an ATI Graphics Pro Turbo 4MB PCI video card from a third-party vendor. Add an extra $1059 for a 17" Sony Trinitron display and the total was $5,625.

The 75MHz chip is nothing to write home about, and I would not consider it adequate to run Windows 95 satisfactorily. But the 133MHz Pentium really shined - it was great for playing The Need for Speed and Flight Unlimited, which had just come out around that time.
 
dave_m said:
Is this because the P90 was a 3.3V chip and ran at less power than previous +5V Pentiums? Or did 3.3 V chips come earlier?
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Only P60/P66 were 5V (and the illusive 50MHz engineering samples). P75+ were 3.3V.

P75 wasn't so popular maybe because of the 25MHz bus speed, so I guess a 486/DX4 was probably as fast and a lot cheaper at the time. P90/P120/P150 ran 60MHz bus speed, and P100/P133/P166/P200 the 'proper' 66MHz.
 
My first Pentium was a 75 Mhz Packard Bell. It really wasn't as bad as some made it out to be. But when these were first sold, they came with only had 4 Megs of RAM installed along with a 540 Meg hard drive. After upgrading to 16 Megs of RAM and a 2 Gig drive, it ran like a whole new machine. My wife and I used it until about 2001 or 2002 when we actually sold it for use as a server.

The computer had some drawbacks, but then again it was the first one that I knew of that sold with a pentium of any kind. I bought mine for almost $800.00 with a computer monitor and mechanical keyboard and it had the famous monitor mounted speakers. Nice design, but really a pain to upgrade. I sometimes wish I still had that computer.


Neon_WA said:
They ran on a 50MHz bus speed also P100s ran on 66 or 50MHz
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k2x4b524[ said:
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.
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k2xb4524,
Thanks for the offer, it's much appreciated, but I don't think I will resurrect this machine. First, there seems to have been some collateral damage on the motherboard, and secondly, I didn't really keep the system running because it was near-vintage - it was simply because I had that system set up for a specific purpose (mail server, cvs server, other things) years ago and I just kept it running because it was a tricky setup to port to a newer system (a _very_ intricate sendmail setup, which would not work on a newer version and so on). So now that my virtual machine version of the system works (at least for the important parts) I'm happy.

-Tor
 
I have a Compaq Deskpro XL560, 60Mhz Pentium running NT4.0 server on a 535 MB SCSI HD. I don't use it, just collects dust right now. It came from a High School.
 
Unknown_K said:
From what I remember the Pentium took off (home use) around the time the P133 was released, before that systems were kind of pricey and people were still using high end cheap 486's. The older models (especially the 60/66) were not that common and judging by what I had seen at recyclers most pentium systems were 166 and 233MMX with a few Cyrix in the mix.

So how many people actually have the older models in their collection (machines not just CPU) and what do you use them for if anything?
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I had a gigantic (hugest tower case I've ever seen) Acer Altos 9000 Server. It had a Dual Pentium 60 processors with fans and heat sinks (the small tiny ones). It was gigantic. I acutally just found a picture of it online (although looks rather gutted in this picture)

server1a.jpg

In any case, I've long since gotten rid of it. I'd have loved to keep it, but it was so huge that it really didn't make sense for me to keep it.

The thing had 8 removable hot-swappable full height 3.5" drive bays. It had a built in Ultra-Wide SCSI controller, a normal SCSI-2 controller, two IDE ports (4 IDE devices), a floppy controller, 6 or 8 ram slots (I think), three external 5.25" drive bays, and a single 3.5" drive bay.

The thing had four legs that would swing out at the bottom to help support it. It also had wheels in the back, and a handle in the front on the top that you would pull out and you could wheel it around like a huge 50 pound suit case. The thing weighed a ridiculous amount... probably around 50 pounds. It really sucked on the rare occasions that I had to move the computer somewhere (like to go play Network Doom or something).

The picture above doesn't show it, but the computer also had two doors that covered the drive bays top and bottom.

Strangely enough, I actually have another Acer Altos server... no idea what model it is, but it's basically a slightly newer version of that computer above, and without all of the hot swappable drive bays. It's like half the height, and while it does have the legs that swing out, it doesn't have wheels or a handle.. hah... I guess it's somewhere in between a full tower and a mid tower.
 
That system reminds me of my Zenith Data Systems Z Server EX tower. A picture of what it looks like is here:
http://altern8.envy.nu/alt8/x86/zenith/index.html

The bottom has 8 HD bays, the CPU and RAM have their own pull out boards, and the case is probably the biggest I have in my collection. A very nice full EISA Pentium 90 system. There is a door that hides the floppy and CDROM in front. I think they also came in 486 versions.
 
Unknown_K said:
That system reminds me of my Zenith Data Systems Z Server EX tower. A picture of what it looks like is here:
http://altern8.envy.nu/alt8/x86/zenith/index.html

The bottom has 8 HD bays, the CPU and RAM have their own pull out boards, and the case is probably the biggest I have in my collection. A very nice full EISA Pentium 90 system. There is a door that hides the floppy and CDROM in front. I think they also came in 486 versions.
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Yeah, Zenith always had really quality stuff in there. You can tell that, even though it's old, it was built really well.
 
That Acer tower looks awesome, think I need to find one so I have a case that is measurable to an Antec Plus 1080AMG ATX case, a huge and heavy server case, 35 pounds empty but it's the best case I've found so far, not using it now though because I have a Dell XPS 410 that was given to me.
 
Compgeke said:
That Acer tower looks awesome, think I need to find one so I have a case that is measurable to an Antec Plus 1080AMG ATX case, a huge and heavy server case, 35 pounds empty but it's the best case I've found so far, not using it now though because I have a Dell XPS 410 that was given to me.
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Yeah... it was pretty cool. I remember now what I did with it. There was a computer store chain located in Florida called "Computer Renaissance." Don't know if they still exist. Anyway, I brought it in there and asked them if they wanted it. One of the dudes in the back came running out and was all excited. At least it went to a good home! hah...
 
The Pentium 166, and later the 166 MMX, were the quintessential Pentiums. During their time, they were everywhere. I don't think anybody here didn't have one or didn't know someone who had one back then. The Pentium 150 was the same chip running on a 60mhz bus. I went from a 486 DX2-80 to a Pentium 150 and then overclocked that Pentium 150 to 200mhz when it started getting slow. That's a pretty big overclock and I wouldn't have attempted it if I hadn't read somewhere that they were the same chip. I probably could have overclocked it a little more as some people were getting even higher overclocks with 166 chips back then but I didn't want to press my luck. I don't think I knew anyone who was using a Pentium slower than maybe 133mhz. They were all still using fast 486's during the early Pentium days and didn't upgrade until the 133 released.
 
What people seem to be missing is the issue of price differential in desktops. The big-name manufacturers (HP, Compaq, IBM) all had products out that used P1s slower than 166MHz. I mentioned my HP Vectra using a P75 and I had a Tyan Tomcat board installed in a system with two P120s.

But a 486 for bog-standard Joe Consumer products still had a better bang-for-buck. It's the old story of "what do you want to pay for that extra power?" Do you want to pay for a Sandy Bridge Xeon EP board, or will a Pentium do?

P1 chips were quite a bit more expensive than the competition for quite some time. Quite a few of my P1-era motherboards were equipped with Cyrix or IBM 6x86 CPUs rather than Pentiums. I still have a K6 system on my workbench.
 
I think the K5 was competing with the Pentium 1's and did very badly. The original Cyrix 686 actually sold very well (except to gamers because of quake using the FPU) and probably caused Intel to actually be competitive with their CPU pricing for the first time. I don't think any larger brands used anything but Intel chips until the 686 came around.
 
Unknown_K said:
The original Cyrix 686 actually sold very well (except to gamers because of quake using the FPU) and probably caused Intel to actually be competitive with their CPU pricing for the first time.
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As a matter of vintage gaming I was running the full version of the original Quake, Doom, and Duke Nukem all on a P75 Packard Bell Legend. At first the computer balked at everything, but after eliminating all of Packard Bells bloatware, installing only Windows 95, and the software and games I waned, and upgrading the system from 4 Megs RAM to it's fullest which I think was either 16 or 32 Megs, these games ran fine.

My wife actually had a 486 computer which she purchased through one of those rent to own places. Oh yeah, she got ripped off BADLY! But, hers came with the same 4 Megs RAM, and a measely 100 Meg hard drive. Somehow she managed to install Windows 95 from floppy disk, then install Word Perfect. There was no room for anything else, but once we upgraded her computer to 32 Megs RAM and a 2 Gig hard disk, that computer blew mine away! The performance of the games was totally different. The 486 was a serious improvement over the Pentium.

These were the very first computers I actually openned up and did any work on. And it was because of what I learned by working on those computers at the time, I landed a nice position with a tech support company called MicroAge. Their main client was UPS. I won't go into the whole story here. Getting back on track, the 486 machines seemed to be much more stable than any of the Pentiums systems running up to 233 MHz processors. If I could, I would love to rebuild a decent 386 or 486 machine for vintage gaming. Something with at least a 66 MHz processor and up to 64 Megs of RAM would be nice.
 
Running "fine" means different things to different people. Quake ran better for me on a Cyrix 166 686 then it did on my earlier 486/160 but if you look at the link below:

http://www.soldcentralfl.com/quakecoop/compare1.htm

You realy needed a decent Pentium and/or a 3D card to get the most of the game unless you were into low framerates.

I never had much of a problem back in the day or even now with stability issues on any Pentium based machine (maybe I just use good ram and picked a decent chipset).
 
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