Dreams of the pentium pro in a laptop, fueled by the movie Hackers, resulted in my having consumed many a bag of peanut butter cups and cheetos while slamming down MtDew and flipping through the 800pg behemoth that was computer shopper back then.
Heh, that was so long ago that Angelina Jolie was actually still mildly hot in that weird "boyish and yet has big perky boobs" sort of way.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EKF/is_n2153_v43/ai_19102186/
Found this article dated 2/97.
Good ol' days.
One of my college friends had enough money (at the time) to afford a PPro 200 with 256k. He swore by those procs.
It had a couple beasty ALU's and a monster FPU for the time. Regular Pentiums and especially the K6 had pretty weedy FPU's in comparison.
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definitely. i remember my father used to get ES chips,and i was given a k6-200 in 1998 or so. which was well an amazing processor at the time. i remember it was so cool because it had a black heatspreader.
but the k6-200 probably had the fpu of a pentium 150 or so. so it was not the quake 2/3 fps god it coudl have been.
Work had a crapload of those HP Kayaks that they upgraded to Overdrives. There was close to 100 Pentium Pro CPU's stacked in a big box that's probably still in the warehouse somewhere.
That company used to just piss money at anything remotely high tech.
You guys are right it was like 400 or 500 dollars I believe.
The Pentium 450mhz processor was a god send for UT99 lolol
mmm Pentium Pro...
I remember having mine referring to regular Pentium users as amateurs. :biggrin:
Yes it was blazing fast in 32 bit. Who needed MMX? There was a penalty with 16bit code due to a lack of a segment descriptor cache IIRC. Did not matter and in DOS 32bit extenders still took advantage of its speed. 3D speed was king on this CPU.
I collect old cpus and have quite a few of these. I would like to take a shot at taking the cover off one day like this:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Pentiumpro_moshen.jpg
Definitely a work of art for its time.
I knew a guy (real hardcore NERD!) that had a belt buckle made out of a socket 8 ZIF assembly with a working lever and place for the chip. Had a 1MB 200MHz CPU from one of his servers. This was around 2002. I thought that was one of the neatest things.
I have to wonder why Intel keeps using the 'Pentium' name on its bargain cpus these days. They have nothing in common with fifth generation x86 chips - at all! Let it die already!
I want to see the inside of one of the 1MB L2 cache PPros.
Edit: found a pic...
There was a Pentium II at 450MHz but it was expensive and not popular in the hands of the enthusiast when a $190 Celeron 300A at 464MHz beat it in those games you mention! :biggrin:
lol, I had one, it topped out at 504 MHz but it was fast at the time.
I had one PII 450 @504, one 300A @464, and a dually 366 @ 504.
My friends affectionately dubbed it the "tower of power". (they were all clustered together into a beowulf for computational chemistry purposes)
^ that picture wasn't a pose-shot, that really was how they were stacked and operated (without case-sides) because of the aggregate heat output.
Ug. Ribbon cables were the. worst. thing. ever.
Lol people used to have two brands of GPUs in the same PC? I was relatively young at the time but I remember both my AST computer with Pentium I 100 MHz and 16 MB RAM and my IBM Aptiva with Pentium II 400 MHz, 64 MB SDRAM and a Vooodoo2 card. My parents threw away the latter unfortunately.IIRC, wasn't Pentium II an attempt to bring PPro's general architecture to the masses? A rearranging of cache, but generally the same thing with some tweaks here and there? The real fun started when .25mu hit though Those chips were absolutely blazing fast for the software at the time. I remember when there was nothing you couldn't run with a PII or Celeron Mendocino at 450Mhz+, 256MB SDRam, and a combo of TNT1 + SLI Voodoo2 12MB cards.
Lol people used to have two brands of GPUs in the same PC? I was relatively young at the time but I remember both my AST computer with Pentium I 100 MHz and 16 MB RAM and my IBM Aptiva with Pentium II 400 MHz, 64 MB SDRAM and a Vooodoo2 card. My parents threw away the latter unfortunately.
Yep. Outside of some relatively rare and not-that-great models, virtually all of the cards with 3dfx voodoo1 or voodoo2 chips were 3d-only, leaving you with the need for a 2d video card. The new BX chipset with AGP4X and plenty of PCI slots was the perfect starting point, as the AGP TNT1 was blazing fast for 2d, and competitive or even better sometimes in certain 3d games (early D3D stuff), while the Voodoo2s would crank away beautifully at glide 3d/opengl titles. Quake II at 1280x1024 with SLI Voodoo2 was like butter, and was amazing at the time. It wasn't truly until TNT2 Ultra and particularly the first Geforce cards that single-board gaming returned to the top of the heap, and the lack of 32-bit color started to really put pressure on 3dfx. I also don't really miss the complicated pass-through vga cables for those old cards. It still was a great run though. A pair of Voodoo2's could play games extremely well for years, and they're still popular in classic gaming rigs.
But in the end I can't argue the case that I was after aesthetics with my builds: