feipoa wrote:

I remember it was a pretty big deal, or maybe more of a status symbol, to own a Matrox Millennium back in the day.

I think that's a bit overblown. Matrox was perhaps somewhat of a 'Mercedes' among video cards... but it certainly wasn't a 'Ferrari', if you know what I mean. Even 'budget' manufacturers like Diamond had S3-based solutions in the same pricerange of a Millennium.

Scali wrote:

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.

You were both quite right. My first 486 was a Cyrix DX-33 (upgraded from a 386SX-16) and that was around late 1994. Last 486 I had was a Cyrix 5x86-100 and that was around mid 1996. My first Pentium was a 120 and it was around very early 1997 (MMX was around but prices were not affordable by me). During that period, I was working for a state owned research facility (in defense - so money was not a big issue), and even that place (*) received first Pentiums in 1995-1996 (60s first, then 90s).

(*) Real work was being performed on UNIX based workstations (HP, Digital, SG, etc), though

Scali wrote:

feipoa wrote:

I remember it was a pretty big deal, or maybe more of a status symbol, to own a Matrox Millennium back in the day.

I think that's a bit overblown. Matrox was perhaps somewhat of a 'Mercedes' among video cards... but it certainly wasn't a 'Ferrari', if you know what I mean. Even 'budget' manufacturers like Diamond had S3-based solutions in the same pricerange of a Millennium.

Back in the days, around where I live, budget meant S3/CL based no brand cards. Diamond was at least a BMW 🤣

tayyare wrote:

You were both quite right. My first 486 was a Cyrix DX-33 (upgraded from a 386SX-16) and that was around late 1994. Last 486 I had was a Cyrix 5x86-100 and that was around mid 1996. My first Pentium was a 120 and it was around very early 1997 (MMX was around but prices were not affordable by me). During that period, I was working for a state owned research facility (in defense - so money was not a big issue), and even that place (*) received first Pentiums in 1995-1996 (60s first, then 90s).

Yes, what the younger generation perhaps doesn't understand is that back then, most CPUs didn't reach the mainstream from day 1. These days, when a new CPU is introduced by Intel, AMD or whoever, they have a full product line-up, including affordable models for regular users.
The high-end models end up in the Xeon or Opteron range, and are mostly ignored by regular consumers.

Back then, there was no separate Xeon/Opteron range... and when a new CPU was introduced, that basically *was* the high-end workstation/server CPU.
So the first 386, 486 and Pentium machines that you found, shortly after the CPU was introduced, came with insane pricetags (like more than a new family car). Usually the prices didn't come down until a new 'halo' CPU was introduced... If you see, the 486 hit the mainstream in 1994, so shortly after the Pentium was introduced. The Pentium hit the mainstream in 1996, which was after the introduction of the Pentium Pro.
That was the pattern.
But the Pentium Pro's name already shows that Intel was starting to think about 'pro' and 'consumer' CPUs. The Pentium Pro never actually hit the mainstream at all. It was modified into the Pentium II for the mainstream, and the first Xeon was introduced for the workstation/server market.
So that was the transition point to the model we still know today.
It probably has to do with the changes in CPU design and manufacturing, making it easier to get a new CPU to market, and having various configurations aimed at various price-points (different cache sizes, number of cores etc). In the early days, all you had was a few different clock speeds.

tayyare wrote:

Back in the days, around where I live, budget meant S3/CL based no brand cards. Diamond was at least a BMW 🤣

I don't recall there being too much of a price difference between no-brand and Diamond cards. S3 and CL were budget chips anyway. I think Diamond-based S3 cards were by far the most common option in those days.

Scali wrote:

Why do you keep going?

I'd point out that after a week no one has confirmed having had a pentium 60 with a matrox millennium during that era. Clearly not a common combination around here and a question clearly worth asking. Asking questions about me is less useful in this context and indeed I'd warn you against making a particular assumption a part of your ego. You don't want to defend the assumption as if you're defending yourself.

vvbee wrote:

I'd point out that after a week no one has confirmed having had a pentium 60 with a matrox millennium during that time. Clearly not a common combination around here and a question clearly worth asking.

I'm sorry, I never considered it important enough to actually provide some kind of 'proof', and even if I did, I couldn't be arsed to go through old PC magazines or whatnot to find Pentiums with Matrox cards (which I'm sure I would). And I'm quite sure the same goes for the other people in this thread.
I think you're the only one who's so hung up about this thing that you require tangible proof to turn your disbelief around (if you even will... I wouldn't be surprised if we'd get yet another episode of your cognitive dissonance).

I was of the impression that for everyone (aside from yourself obviously), the case for a Pentium with a Matrox Millennium has been discussed to a point beyond reasonable doubt, and no further proof was warranted.

Edit: Okay I lied... I could be arsed to do a quick Google... and I got a hit right away:
https://books.google.nl/books?id=CF2kTIIwVUgC … lennium&f=false

Gateway Pentium 60, equipped with a Matrox Millennium card.
Case closed.

Hate to say it dude but the question was how common or uncommon it was for people to go for that combination when the millennium came out in 95. That you could put them together in the 90s is a given.

I had a Mystique(2MB) in my Pentium60 rig... remember being quite happy having gotten rid if the "lousy" S3. Date cold have been December 1996.
Owning a Millenium back in 95 would have been beyond "cool".

vvbee wrote:

Hate to say it dude but the question was how common or uncommon it was for people to go for that combination when the millennium came out in 95. That you could put them together in the 90s is a given.

As I predicted, more cognitive dissonance.
To everyone else it is obvious by now that multiple large OEMs sold Pentium systems with the Millennium as the standard video card. Given that they were large OEMs, it is a given that they would have sold a reasonable amount of these systems (if anything, large companies would buy such machines by the thousands in an upgrade-cycle, as the Compaq Deskpro's with Matrox cards that I got). Ergo, there would be a reasonable amount of Pentiums with Millennium cards in use, not even taking into account the people who bought a Pentium 60 first, and then upgrading the video card to a Millennium themselves.

As for 'how common or uncommon'... When I first pointed out that certain OEMs shipped Pentiums with Millenniums, you were so surprised that you couldn't even fathom that ANY such machine was ever sold (not to mention that you tried your best to pull things out of context and set up a strawman in the process). That is different from 'how common or uncommon'.
I mean, obviously everyone will understand that budget configurations would have been more popular, and as I already said, the most popular option would probably have been S3.

Hate to say it, dude, but you have issues.

If nothing else, it's very annoying that everytime someone points out some evidence of Millenniums being used, the goalposts are moved again, and more 'proof' is demanded, in some rather nasty way, with some negative connotations and thinly veiled condescension.
And again, not sure what your beef is anyway. You're not the one who asked about what video card to put in a Pentium. You're not the one who makes the final judgement on which video card will be used. So why are you so hung up on this?

amadeus777999 wrote:

Owning a Millenium back in 95 would have been beyond "cool".

Not sure if 'cool' is the right word here. I don't think Millenniums had much of a 'cool' factor. They weren't particularly excellent at gaming. It's not exactly a 3DFX or anything.
For DOS and any kind of software rendering, they were fine, but barely different from other decent performers such as S3 (and actually worse when it came to SVGA stuff and VBE support). They excelled at Windows acceleration, but I don't think that's particularly 'cool' or 'sexy' to most people.

Scali wrote:

amadeus777999 wrote:

Owning a Millenium back in 95 would have been beyond "cool".

Not sure if 'cool' is the right word here. I don't think Millenniums had much of a 'cool' factor. They weren't particularly excellent at gaming. It's not exactly a 3DFX or anything.
For DOS and any kind of software rendering, they were fine, but barely different from other decent performers such as S3 (and actually worse when it came to SVGA stuff and VBE support). They excelled at Windows acceleration, but I don't think that's particularly 'cool' or 'sexy' to most people.

Your comparison is not fair I think. 3DFX was an add-on card and almost a separate category by on its own. Not any of the other brands had proper 3D support yet either during that times (yeah, I still have the S33D version of Terminal Velocity but I'm not counting the card specific half arsed attempts).

To me it was an object of desire... When I first decided to build a dos/W9x rig in about 2008 (had no idea about vogons yet), the first two things that I purchased was a Millenium II PCI and a Voodoo2 (although I had more than one S3 cards already on hand). Both were unreachable things back in the day (to me), and were quite sexy I belive. 🤣

Again, "locale" is an important factor. As I said before, where I live, even Diamond cards was expensive enough to be considered as luxury. Mainstream was white box with no brand cards.

tayyare wrote:

To me it was an object of desire... When I first decided to build a dos/W9x rig in about 2008 (had no idea about vogons yet), the first two things that I purchased was a Millenium II PCI and a Voodoo2 (although I had more than one S3 cards already on hand). Both were unreachable things back in the day (to me), and were quite sexy I belive. 🤣

For me it was different. I owned a number of Matrox cards myself over the years, various friends did as well (mostly those who were into computer graphics like myself), and I also have worked at companies where many machines were equipped with Matrox cards.
So yes, they were nice cards, and 'special' in a way, because we knew they were among the best money could buy for image quality and Windows acceleration (things that most people probably didn't care about, and wouldn't see the point of... I think the bigger issue for a Matrox card was the expensive monitor you'd need to pair it with to make use of the high resolutions and refresh rates, and see the added image quality... when you were just gaming in 320x200 or 640x480, monitor wasn't very relevant). But they weren't unreachable.

3DFX turned out to be 'unreachable' for me... Its heyday was poorly aligned to my upgrade cycle, so I bought a Pentium 133 shortly before the whole 3D accelerator craze... And by the time I upgraded again and got my first proper 3D accelerator, 3DFX had fallen by the wayside, and I got an NV card.

Scali wrote:

amadeus777999 wrote:

Owning a Millenium back in 95 would have been beyond "cool".

Not sure if 'cool' is the right word here. I don't think Millenniums had much of a 'cool' factor. They weren't particularly excellent at gaming. It's not exactly a 3DFX or anything.
For DOS and any kind of software rendering, they were fine, but barely different from other decent performers such as S3 (and actually worse when it came to SVGA stuff and VBE support). They excelled at Windows acceleration, but I don't think that's particularly 'cool' or 'sexy' to most people.

Cool as in high end and great looking.
Matrox cards had a high end touch to them which set them apart from the competition. As far as I can remember the card was too expensive and even the Mystique was still pricey in 1996... around 300€, but I'm not really sure.
The fact that the card didn't have rendering super-powers was instantly recognized when nothing really fundamental changed in terms of speed... and by then it was too late.
I had zero idea back then about the intricate detail that lay at the heart of visualizing what I saw on screen... so I just assumed the Matrox would magically enhance anything thrown at it.

amadeus777999 wrote:

Cool as in high end and great looking.
Matrox cards had a high end touch to them which set them apart from the competition.

That is true, as I said above, like a 'Mercedes'.
There were a few others that also had this high-end image... Perhaps ATi and Number Nine.

The sad part is that Matrox was actually one of the first to offer 3D acceleration. For their first generation MGA (predecessor of Millennium), they had an add-on 3D accelerator, offering z-buffering in hardware and such.
The Millennium (not sure about the original, but certainly the II) also had some 3D acceleration features.
Problem is, they didn't support texturing. So once 3DFX came around, and offered filtered texturing on games, that's what everyone wanted.
The Mystique was Matrox' first attempt at making their hardware suitable for games, but although it had texturing, it had no filtering. On the bright side, it was reasonably fast... As opposed to S3's first attempt at adding 3D acceleration to their Trio64 chips, which had texture filtering and all, but performance was horrible.

Scali wrote:

You're not the one who asked about what video card to put in a Pentium. You're not the one who makes the final judgement on which video card will be used. So why are you so hung up on this?

Sure, I asked how common it was to have a pentium 60 with a millennium in 95 and you responded. What we found is that there was one pre-built combination with them in 96, and maybe something from compaq but that was unclear. You called it a settled question but I'd keep an open mind yet, even as you saw that as a sign of a mental disorder. I think it's the scientific education coming through.

vvbee wrote:

Sure, I asked how common it was to have a pentium 60 with a millennium in 95

Where 'how common' is an incredibly vague question obviously. Not a scientific question anyway.
What metrics? What criteria? Etc... You never specified.

vvbee wrote:

and you responded.

Yes, not answering the question directly (since it was too vague anyway), but pointing out that I knew of at least one very large vendor who used Matrox Millennium cards back in the day, extrapolating from there that this was probably not the only vendor who did so (which later turned out to be true, since apart from Compaq, a Gateway 2000 turned up in a PC Mag. And while I didn't mention it, I also found some HP machines with Matrox). Conclusion: there would have been quite a few of such machines around in the wild (although obviously nowhere near as common as eg the S3 options, but that is common sense. What is understood does not need to be discussed. There certainly was nobody who even remotely claimed that Matrox was anywhere near as common).

vvbee wrote:

You called it a settled question

Yes, there is enough of an indication that at least some Pentium 60s in the day were equipped with a Matrox Millennium, so it could be considered 'period correct', or whatever it was that the OP was after exactly.
In fact, one could go as far as to argue that since the machine turned up as a test machine in a review of video encoding/decoding software, apparently the authors of that review considered the configuration common enough to use it as a test machine.
Apparently the machine was both available to them, and considered representative for the test.

vvbee wrote:

even as you saw that as a sign of a mental disorder.

Yes, your obtuse behavior in this thread certainly differs from the norm (although 'mental disorder' are your words, not mine). Nobody else questioned the issue any longer. In fact, most other participants are actually quite supportive of the option of P60+Millennium.

vvbee wrote:

I think it's the scientific education coming through.

Pretty sure it's not. If you had a scientific education, you'd know how to do research, and you'd google for yourself to see if you could find Pentium 60s with Matrox Millenniums, which you could.
With a scientific education, you'd also understand that it is completely unreasonable to demand an answer in the detail that you require, given the relatively poor dataset that we can draw from, and as already mentioned, the incredibly poorly specified question.
With a scientific education, you would also have learnt how to conduct a proper debate, and you'd know about fallacies, and how unethical and not-done it is to use these in a scientific debate.

Nope, it wasn't a scientific question to begin with, and trying to reframe into a scientific issue is poor form at the least.

I see. Uncommon but existed. Props for the rant.

vvbee wrote:

I see. Uncommon but existed. Props for the rant.

Next time, Mr. Scientific... Firstly, phrase your questions more carefully, if you are looking for specific answers.
Secondly, if someone asks you to explain yourself, just explain yourself. If you really wanted a more accurate, scientific survey, you could have said so from the start (and you could have started by rephrasing your own question).
Instead you are just derailing an otherwise nice conversation about Pentiums and video cards, and are completely out of touch with the rest of us.

@Scali just a simple +1. What a painful exchange that was to read.