appiah4 wrote:

Of those cards only the ET4000 is a contemporary to the P5 core, so that gets my vote. S3 Trio and Mach64 got released one year after the P5 IIRC, Virge, Millennium are also several years off.

What if he purchased his P5 in 1995? 🤣

PS: production of P60 and 66 continued till September 1995.

How many people would have been rocking the professional-grade matrox millennium with pentium 60s in 95?

tayyare wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

Of those cards only the ET4000 is a contemporary to the P5 core, so that gets my vote. S3 Trio and Mach64 got released one year after the P5 IIRC, Virge, Millennium are also several years off.

What if he purchased his P5 in 1995? 🤣

PS: production of P60 and 66 continued till September 1995.

If you bought a P5 in 1995, you probably also bought similarly dated equipment with it 😉

I certainly did - bought a P60 in January 1995, with a SiS 868 PCI (early 1994 vintage) VGA to go with it.

When I've bought systems, I usually would upgrade the graphics card a year or two later, sometimes 3 yrs later, along with the RAM.

Oh sweet a p60! What do you have so far? Post pics!

For people saying 1993 time period, if my memory serves me, they were still shipping with VLB video. AcerPower 9000 sold with a Diamond Viper VLB in 1/1994.

Honestly, I would say S3 or ATi would be fitting as well. From Q2 1993 until Q1 1994 only god's chosen owned P60/66 machines. Not because of the price just because of how limited they were initially, especially the 66, and PCI was still in an infant state. I don't believe major consumer brands (Gateway 2000) actually started shipping P60s until around 94. Many of us build 486 DX2 machines to be 1992-1993 period accurate, I personally see the Pentium as something to shoot for 1994 at the earliest, to each their own though!

I have a decent collection of PCMag from that time I can dig through though, but my gut is telling me most typical PCI machines in the $4000 realm at that time (1994) would have a PCI Mach 32 or similar 2mb PCI cards.

vvbee wrote:

How many people would have been rocking the professional-grade matrox millennium with pentium 60s in 95?

Probably not much. But the thing is, I was not one of them either, and retro computing to me is ability to do things that I couldn't have afforded (even in my dreams) to do, back in times. 🤣

vvbee wrote:

How many people would have been rocking the professional-grade matrox millennium with pentium 60s in 95?

Quite a few, I think. Compaq Deskpro's of the day had Matrox Millenniums as standard, and they sold tons of those (I've seen entire office buildings full of these machines, one on every desk). There were probably various other high-end OEMs that used Matrox.

Scali wrote:

Quite a few, I think. Compaq Deskpro's of the day had Matrox Millenniums as standard, and they sold tons of those (I've seen entire office buildings full of these machines, one on every desk). There were probably various other high-end OEMs that used Matrox.

They offered an option with the pentium 60 and a matrox millennium and buyers were there?

vvbee wrote:

They offered an option with the pentium 60 and a matrox millennium and buyers were there?

Option? Afaik there was no choice, they just came with Matrox cards, period.
Why is that so strange?
Edit:
They still have the support page up: https://support.hp.com/hk-en/document/c00355459
As you can see, they all have Matrox cards.

No need to be confrontational. If you or someone you know invested in a pentium 60 with a matrox millennium, that's fine. I suspect not many did.

vvbee wrote:

No need to be confrontational. If you or someone you know invested in a pentium 60 with a matrox millennium, that's fine. I suspect not many did.

I ask you why (which is not confrontational). Why don't you answer?
What is so strange about a Pentium 60 with a Matrox Millennium? Around 1994-1995, the Pentium 60 was one of the fastest (and most expensive) x86 machines you could buy. The Matrox Millennium fits perfectly with the Pentium 60.
I don't have the Pentium 60 of the Deskpro XL series, but I do have an XL466, which is a 486DX2-66 with Matrox QVision (special Compaq OEM model), and an XL6200, which is a Pentium Pro 200, wtih a Matrox Millennium.
I got both of them for free, as they were surplus at my father's old office. They had hundreds of these machines there, one on every desk. And I'm pretty sure that wasn't the only company that used Compaq Deskpros. Compaq was one of the biggest OEMs for a reason.

So again, why are you surprised that PCs (especially high-end ones) would have Matrox cards?
I would say that you come across as somewhat confrontational, because of the way you phrase things ('buyers were there?', 'invested in', 'I suspect not many did' etc), without explaining what it is you are driving at exactly.

I'm surprised by neither there existing a particular combination of hardware nor you saying there were no options when the page you linked to listed options, whether mandated or otherwise. But what drove you is secondary to solid information on who paired the first iteration of pentiums with the matrox millennium and for what purpose.

For sure you can pair whatever with whatever else that fits and I do that too, though the people prior were somewhat careful about correctness.

vvbee wrote:

I'm surprised by neither there existing a particular combination of hardware nor you saying there were no options when the page you linked to listed options, whether mandated or otherwise.

The page I linked to did not list options.
It listed three ranges of CPUs, Pentium Pro, Pentium and 486.
The Pentium Pro and 486 only had one card listed.
The Pentium had two listed, but since there was a wide range of models, it is quite possible that some came with one card, and some with the other, but no actual choice for any given machine (just as with the Pentium Pro and 486 models).

vvbee wrote:

But what drove you is secondary to solid information on who paired the first iteration of pentiums with the matrox millennium and for what purpose.

For sure you can pair whatever with whatever else that fits and I do that too, though the people prior were somewhat careful about correctness.

Again, what is it that you are trying to say?
You haven't contributed anything concrete either way (unlike me, I at the very least have proven that Compaq machines of that era came with Matrox cards, even though perhaps not all Pentium models came specifically with the Millennium).
Yet you continuously want to imply that somehow Pentiums could not possibly have come with Matroxes. Why?

Come on. You're looking to provide information on who would've been using this combination in 95, ideally too for what purpose. You've got a start in pointing out that compaq at some point offered these two components but don't know whether they were put in the same model or in separate ones. My guess is they weren't offered in the same model unless you were able to customize. If you have more solid info, link away.

vvbee wrote:

Come on. You're looking to provide information on who would've been using this combination in 95, ideally too for what purpose. You've got a start in pointing out that compaq at some point offered these two components but don't know whether they were put in the same model or in separate ones. My guess is they weren't offered in the same model unless you were able to customize. If you have more solid info, link away.

Best Intel CPU in 1995 AFAIK was the Pentium 133, correct me if I am wrong, but it was also horrendously expensive at around $950 a piece. The Pentium 60 was still a higher end part in 1995. Let's remember that WB enabled DX4 was released in 1995 - 486 was still a thing back then, and I remember that I made my upgrade in 1995 to a DX4-100, unable to afford a Pentium. I actually ended up completely skipping the Pentiums due to them being too expensive throughout their life, but I digress.

Setting aside that Pentium 60 in 1995 was not a dog by any means, I'll just say that it's not an uncommon thing to have a decent processor coupled with a very good graphics card for Workstation PCs, especially ones that will be doing graphics productivity work.

vvbee wrote:

Come on. You're looking to provide information on who would've been using this combination in 95, ideally too for what purpose.

I think it's obvious enough that people could and would have used Matrox Millenniums in Pentiums around that time, and it should be obvious for what purpose: Matrox had an excellent reputation for Windows acceleration, display quality, offered high resolutions and truecolour. The machines I got, came with 17" high-end Eizo screens. Probably mostly for ergonomic purposes. They were mainly used as standard office machines. Windows NT, Word, Excel, that sort of thing.

appiah4 wrote:

The Pentium 60 was still a higher end part in 1995. Let's remember that WB enabled DX4 was released in 1995 - 486 was still a thing back then, and I remember that I made my upgrade in 1995 to a DX4-100, unable to afford a Pentium.

Exactly. 1994 was the year that the 486 broke the mainstream. I don't think Pentium broke the mainstream until 1996 or so.
It's not just the CPU that was more expensive... Pentiums also had a 64-bit bus, so required more expensive motherboards, chipsets, memory and all that.
Which is why Pentiums naturally were in the more high-end price range anyway. So many Pentium systems went 'all the way', by also including SCSI harddisk controllers and more high-end video cards (and come on, the Matrox Millennium wasn't THAT expensive, about $379 I believe? Not too big a deal if the whole system is in the range of $2000-$3000).
https://books.google.nl/books?id=ozoEAAAAMBAJ … um%2060&f=false

All this talk makes me want an original Matrox Millennium in my collection... I bet the prices will go up now. I remember it was a pretty big deal, or maybe more of a status symbol, to own a Matrox Millennium back in the day.

Assumptions will invariably be wrong in some aspects and those aspects will at times be fundamental. It's not super important for me what people used the millennium with but if it were, I wouldn't settle on just assuming.

And yes, I suspect the prices of it will go up in time.

vvbee wrote:

Assumptions will invariably be wrong in some aspects and those aspects will at times be fundamental. It's not super important for me what people used the millennium with but if it were, I wouldn't settle on just assuming.

Why do you keep going? What has Matrox done to you?