chinny22 wrote on 2023-12-02, 22:21:

Most of my friends had 486's till around 98-99. Hardware was so expensive and became obsolete so quick it was impossible to keep up.
Internet and office work side of computing was good enough. Gaming is where we became stuck and I grew to hate the message "Pentium Required" when trying to run games from demo disk.

Never really got many sub 200Mhz machines in garage sales, etc. Typically it was 486 and below or P200 and higher.

Yes, Computer stores were selling Inexpensive CPU/Motherboard Upgrade combos deals for 486 computer owners who wanted to
Upgrade their computers. The AMD K6 and Pentium 150 and below were selling for affordable prices for budget conscious computer builders.

By 1998 the Pentium II became main stream. This is when I purchased my HP Vectra Kayak workstations with Dual Pentium II CPU’s with Win-NT 4.0
HP also made the Single Pentium II CPU Kayak workstation for Win98.

It seems to me that you are exaggerating a little, why the Pentium90 and not the Pentium100? In addition to having the fastest bus, it was also the first with a 3-digit speed. On the Apple subject, however, you were enormously wrong, the Apple switch was there many, many years later. If anything, the Pentium convinced them to switch from the 680xx architecture to the PowerPC one, which at least until the G4 was extremely competitive, if not even faster clock for clock.

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2023-11-28, 18:49:

I am going to build a 1st generation Pentium 90 megahertz computer.

Only if you change your username.

🤣 ! That was unexpected, but I like the spirit 😀

AlessandroB wrote on 2023-12-05, 20:36:

It seems to me that you are exaggerating a little, why the Pentium90 and not the Pentium100? In addition to having the fastest bus, it was also the first with a 3-digit speed. On the Apple subject, however, you were enormously wrong, the Apple switch was there many, many years later. If anything, the Pentium convinced them to switch from the 680xx architecture to the PowerPC one, which at least until the G4 was extremely competitive, if not even faster clock for clock.

But wasn't the 100 the top model at it's time of release? Meaning that market penetration was very low - and the 90 being only 10% faster, and the average user didn't know about bus speeds etc.?

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2023-12-05, 10:07:

Yes, Computer stores were selling Inexpensive CPU/Motherboard Upgrade combos deals for 486 computer owners who wanted to Upgrad […]
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chinny22 wrote on 2023-12-02, 22:21:

Most of my friends had 486's till around 98-99. Hardware was so expensive and became obsolete so quick it was impossible to keep up.
Internet and office work side of computing was good enough. Gaming is where we became stuck and I grew to hate the message "Pentium Required" when trying to run games from demo disk.

Never really got many sub 200Mhz machines in garage sales, etc. Typically it was 486 and below or P200 and higher.

Yes, Computer stores were selling Inexpensive CPU/Motherboard Upgrade combos deals for 486 computer owners who wanted to
Upgrade their computers. The AMD K6 and Pentium 150 and below were selling for affordable prices for budget conscious computer builders.

By 1998 the Pentium II became main stream. This is when I purchased my HP Vectra Kayak workstations with Dual Pentium II CPU’s with Win-NT 4.0
HP also made the Single Pentium II CPU Kayak workstation for Win98.

Funny fact is that because of FSB, in some scenarios, the Pentium 133 actually outrun the 150 ...

Another Funfact is that almost any Pentium 75Mhz also runs 100Mhz at 66Mhz FSB.

matze79 wrote on 2023-12-06, 21:51:

Another Funfact is that almost any Pentium 75Mhz also runs 100Mhz at 66Mhz FSB.

Sadly very few really knew that until the p75 was basically obsolete anyway. Some early board and cache combos barfed above 60mhz FSB limiting you to 90mhz OC unless your chip had a 2x multiplier.

This is sort of like the cheap later sx25’s and sx16’s that crazy overclocked and only cost a few bucks. The one sx16 I had overclocked to 60mhz on the one odd PCCHIPS board I had with a stable 60mhz FSB.
By that point 60mhz was very obsolete so it didn’t much matter anyway.

I was a bit fixated on FSB speed back then, so I was put off by the very existence of the P75.
If I was getting a Pentium back then I'm sure I would have preferred a P66, just because the faster bus would make me feel smarter or something, but I would have been wrong.
I realize now that the lowly P75 was a great entry point into socket-5/7 which could then allow a future upgrade. P60/P66 were a dead end.
Was the P75 always a good overclocker, or just after it had become an older product?

Back in those days I was on a 486DX2-66. I had no complaints with the speed but if I saw my games run on a P90 or P75, I would have changed my mind fast.

I'm not sure the Pentium had much impact on the professional workstation market (Sun, SGI, HP etc), but I think the Pentium Pro certainly put a lot of pressure on it.

IBM OS/2 ran on the Pentium 90 too and was used in Nation Wide computer Networks.

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2023-11-28, 18:49:

It was Highly recommended for its Performance, price, support, and reliability.

This CPU could do it all back in 1995-thru-2000

Definitely

Probably already mentioned before but between all that praise from OP this needs mentioning to rectify context. It did not exactly hit the ground running.

The original release of the P100 was pretty expensive, and was mostly used in servers and workstations. The P90 was far more popular. The P100 didn't really sell in meaningful volume until after the P133 came out. A P90 build would better represent a high-end solution for 1994.

I also remember not being impressed by the P75. Sure the bus speed wasn't the fastest, but the PCI clock was the deal breaker for me. However, had I known how easy they were to overclock, I may have bought one. Unfortunately, the people in my local PC shops were a bunch of turds who would test stacks of CPUs in the backroom binning the good ones for themselves and their friends. They most likely would have set me up with a dud.

I had a Pentium 90 in 1995 with a Intel Zappa i430FX mainboard without any L2 Cache. I don't know the stepping anymore, but it was the not so beautiful ceramic version...
It ran stable with 100 MHz (66MHz FSB). 120 MHz also booted, but for example in the game "The Need for Speed" the PC hung up every time after a few minutes, even at 3.5V VCore. 133 MHz only gave a black screen.
This is the only I still know after nearly 29 years! The Pentium 90 was my very first overclocking try as a kid!

With the Pentium 75, especially the early stepping versions only ran stable at 90 MHz.

Okay, I am going to put together the Most compatible 1995 compoment computer that will be plug-n—play hardware compatible with
Win95, Linux, OS/2, x86 Unix, Novell, and Win-NT.
This computer should be able to run most games Pre-2000 with good quality and performance.
And run most programs and application too.
Will support most Networking Protocols, Hardware and Topologies from 1993-2000
You could have put this computer anywhere in the USA and it would have worked for gaming.
It would have had network connectivity to connect anywhere for playing networked games anywhere in the World.

Hardware Specs:
CPU - Intel P90
Motherboard - Basic Intel chipset Socket 5 motherboard
Graphics - S3 Vision 864 PCI video
Sound card - Crystal Audio
Memory - 32mb EDO
CDROM - IDE
Floppy drive - 2.5 IDE
Network card - 3com 3c509b
Hard drive - IDE 4gb.
Modem - US Robitics Serial port 56k

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2023-12-10, 11:51:

Graphics - S3 Vision 864 PCI video

This graphics chip came out a couple years earlier than 1995. If you're going for a 1995 graphics card, wouldn't an S3 964 or Trio64 be better?

Yes, But I am going for Plug-n-Play compatibility with all the operating systems and compatibility with most games too.
These operating systems come with drivers to work with this selected hardware out of the box.

I am going to take the idea of the IBM “Select-a-System” PC to the Next Level.

IBM Post link:
IBM Desktop P-750, Pentium 90 ( Select-a-System ).