vvbee wrote:

There's indeed a reason why I was dubious about the pentium 60 and millennium being a common combination, not least when the millennium was fresh. A cost-cut video option should be well more likely in that context.

But the Mystique wasn't available until later. Also, I don't think the Mystique was as popular as an OEM option as the Millennium was.

vvbee wrote:

There's indeed a reason why I was dubious about the pentium 60 and millennium being a common combination, not least when the millennium was fresh. A cost-cut video option should be well more likely in that context.

That said, for gaming and related tasks, the niche for my millennium is software rendering and win 9x 2d. Not too common a build either and you need a decently fast cpu, more likely something from the late 90s than the mid ones.

Ehmm, you have your dates mixed up I think. Pentium 60 was released in 1993 and the first Millennium was released in 1995. Mystique came in 1996 but it had a much inferior DAC at 150MHz that could not properly drive a second monitor. Mystique 220 and Millennium II followed in 1997. So basically, between 1995 and 1997 the top workstation card for 2D was Millennium.

I suppose the really good reason to use Millennium in a build is if you are putting together a 1995/1996 Win95 PC for pre-3D games. Not a very practical build, but who am I to judge, I bought a Dell Dimension XPS D333 with a Permedia 2 card just because it was something I used during my internship for I-DEAS work.. I was in love with the PC.

Naturally there are cost-cut video cards beyond and before the mystique, and cost-cut can also mean a card that used to be expensive but has since been reduced in price.

The permedia's nice for early opengl. I recently ran all of nehe's opengl tutorial programs on the permedia 2 and much of it worked quite well.

appiah4 wrote:

So basically, between 1995 and 1997 the top workstation card for 2D was Millennium.

I think there is also some confusion because we talk about 'the Millennium', while in reality, there were multiple configurations.
The cheapest model had only 2 MB of WRAM. The most expensive one was 8 MB.
If people only look at the prices of the 8 MB model, they may get the wrong impression. The 2 MB model was relatively cheap, and would probably be the most obvious match for a Pentium 60 ($339 street price in september 1995: https://books.google.nl/books?id=GL59pngdbfQC … %201995&f=false)

appiah4 wrote:

...but who am I to judge, I bought a Dell Dimension XPS D333 with a Permedia 2 card just because it was something I used during my internship for I-DEAS work.. I was in love with the PC.

When was that? My first I-DEAS workstation(?) in 1999 (or 2000?) was the old company server (Pentium Pro 200 on an Asus board with integrated sound/SCSI card, some tremendous amount of RAM (for the date - 256MB?) in a Asus T10 case with a 3DLabs card, not Permedia but Oxygen something. It was running NT 4.0 and IDEAS was running under an X-Windows front.🤣 I had a monster Sony 24" (?) display, too. Awww, the nostalgia!

tayyare wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

...but who am I to judge, I bought a Dell Dimension XPS D333 with a Permedia 2 card just because it was something I used during my internship for I-DEAS work.. I was in love with the PC.

When was that? My first I-DEAS workstation(?) in 1999 (or 2000?) was the old company server (Pentium Pro 200 on an Asus board with integrated sound/SCSI card, some tremendous amount of RAM (for the date - 256MB?) in a Asus T10 case with a 3DLabs card, not Permedia but Oxygen something. It was running NT 4.0 and IDEAS was running under an X-Windows front.🤣 I had a monster Sony 24" (?) display, too. Awww, the nostalgia!

It was the year 2000. My first exposure to I-DEAS was in 1999, running on very, very shitty Pentium Windows 98 PCS at the university's computer lab, and yes it was running under an X-Window front. I believe it was I-DEAS 8 and I later got a pirate copy of I-DEAS 9 running natively on Windows 2000 on my own PII PC at home but I digress. I did 3D modeling work as an intern at a major white goods producer's washing machine plant in the summer of 2000. The machine in question was a Dell Dimension XPS (which was very strange because the group that owned the company also had a PC company of their own..) - it was probably a preconfigured workstation.

Heh, the company I'm working for was a supplier to the same company (most probably), since I-DEAS was their "mendatory" CAD suit, even for the suppliers. We were suppliying parts for their oven, refigirator and air conditioner plants though, not washing machine. Actually air conditioner manufacturing unit was in the washing machine site (before moving to another OSB), so I was visiting there regularly. 🤣 I worked for that company between 1997-2001 so we were probably at the same place at the same time, more than once 🤣

It most certainly is a small world. 🤣

I did a brief usenet survey via google groups for mentions of the pentiums with the video cards the op mentioned, sans the trio. I did this separately for three pentiums and the years 95 and 96. I put the number of hits for each below as the rounded percentage of the total across all cards for that model of pentium that year.

11995
2pentium-----60---90---120
3et4000      70   46    20
4mach64      26   52    74
5virge        0    0     0
6millennium   3    3     6
7
81996
9pentium-----60---90---120
10et4000      47   14     9
11mach64      28   25    23
12virge       12   34    44
13millennium  13   27    21

The high-end but older mach got more associations than the millennium, which was rarely hit through 95 in this context and in 96 still least commonly with the slowest pentium.

That said, I didn't vet the results, in many cases they were of duplicated lists of parts not necessarily related, there are varied reasons for why the two keywords could be mentioned together, limited availability of the millennium through 95 vs. the cards that had already been available, etc. I also didn't search for alternates like "mach 64" instead of "mach64" and "millenium" for "millennium". Not accurate enough, but I'd say not less accurate than what we had so far. About ok for mild curiosity.

vvbee wrote:

Not accurate enough, but I'd say not less accurate than what we had so far.

And what exactly do you think your data would add over what we already had so far?
What information does it give the OP that he didn't have before? What choices can he make, what choices can he rule out, etc?

Before, we had some notion of what magazines at the time were talking about, which wasn't much. Now we have some notion of what people at the time were talking about, which also isn't much given the uncertainties but adds the new facet.

vvbee wrote:

Before, we had some notion of what magazines at the time were talking about, which wasn't much. Now we have some notion of what people at the time were talking about, which also isn't much given the uncertainties but adds the new facet.

The only thing I get from it is some more confirmation that a Pentium 60 with Matrox Millennium is common enough to be statistically relevant.
But no new information or insights.

appiah4 wrote:

Scali wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

I own an original copy of the Mystique 220 driver CD, I can image it for you tonight if you want.

Sure, if it includes the MPEG video!

It should. I'll check tonight.

Any updates on this? I searched online and found a few CD images but none contained that video and I'm really interested in finding out!

Scali wrote:

The only thing I get from it is some more confirmation that a Pentium 60 with Matrox Millennium is common enough to be statistically relevant.

I know, you've been caught up in whether it could exist or not. It's safe to say that it's a statistic, for sure. But ask instead how common the different cards were in the home and vintage usenet data will be more interesting then.

vvbee wrote:

Scali wrote:

The only thing I get from it is some more confirmation that a Pentium 60 with Matrox Millennium is common enough to be statistically relevant.

I know, you've been caught up in whether it could exist or not. It's safe to say that it's a statistic, for sure. But ask instead how common the different cards were in the home and vintage usenet data will be more interesting then.

Why do you keep pursuing this line of reasoning? Even if popularity was a useful metric, we have no data regarding what was actually sold, just some data regarding what was available. Mining Usenet for mentions is nothing more than a statistical wank session. It's not a representative sample of ownership, just a sample of Usenet users.

vvbee wrote:

Scali wrote:

The only thing I get from it is some more confirmation that a Pentium 60 with Matrox Millennium is common enough to be statistically relevant.

I know, you've been caught up in whether it could exist or not. It's safe to say that it's a statistic, for sure. But ask instead how common the different cards were in the home and vintage usenet data will be more interesting then.

Erm no, you were the one who denied that people would actually have such configurations.
And the more I pointed out indications that they were a viable option, the more you kept shifting the goalposts, demanding more 'scientific' data and whatnot.
All I ever said was that I have seen such configurations in the past, and I knew that some OEMs sold machines with Millenniums. So as I said, I expected 'quite a few' people to have such configurations.
'Quite a few' is not a quantitative metric of course, but 'statisticially relevant' more or less covers it (by the looks of it, we'd get at least one in every hundred Pentium 60s equipped with a Millennium, which, given the huge number of Pentium 6 machines sold, would indeed be 'quite a few'. Say there were a million Pentium 60s sold... Then you'd get 10.000 P60+Millennium machines).

I think you mistakenly interpreted 'quite a few' as "This was the most popular card in the history of ever", or whatever your issue exactly is (you still never specified what it is you want exactly, or why, or how).

Did Matrox make any ISA, VLB, or EISA cards? I don't think I've encountered any.

feipoa wrote:

Did Matrox make any ISA, VLB, or EISA cards? I don't think I've encountered any.

Not Millenniums, afaik, but the predecessors Impression and Ultima were available in VLB, the Impression also in ISA.

Would be neat to see some comparative Impression ISA benchmarks against the other top ISA cards, like Tseng, GD5434, and Mach64. For some reason, I don't hear much about it when people are looking for fast ISA cards.

feipoa wrote:

Would be neat to see some comparative Impression ISA benchmarks against the other top ISA cards, like Tseng, GD5434, and Mach64. For some reason, I don't hear much about it when people are looking for fast ISA cards.

Probably because unlike the Millennium, these cards actually ARE extremely rare and expensive. They were mainly aimed at CAD/CAM workstations.