I had a P5-75 tower that my neighbor gave me back in 2003. The case was definitely top notch; standard AT but heavy, gigantic and with plenty of room for expansion. I don't remember if the motherboard had any cache but the system ran Windows 98 pretty nicely. I even frequently usedthe internet on it though this was almost a decade ago. I don't see shipping with low RAM as being a limitation as that's easy and cheap to fix. Even without cache, it should, for most purposes, be speedier than a 486 system.

If memory serves me right, a typical Gateway system in the mid 90s like that had the various MS Entertainment Packs, Encarta, MS BOB and some other stuff I don't see any reason to care about. Unless you bought one towards the end of it's production life, it probably had Windows 3.1 preloaded.

I just saw one at my local thrift store saturday. they wanted $5 for it but I diddnt really have the room or desire to get it.

I'm surprised the thrift stores in your area still house computers of this age. Where I am, old computers like this completely bypass the thrift shops and head off to the IC recycler. This is sorta counter-intuitive since the impressions of most tourists to Canada are that "it feels very 80's."

*moment of deep insight*
There aren't any P75's at thrift stores in Canada because they are all still in regular use.

*second factor of insight*
P75's didn't come out 'til the 90's. We still have a few years to go!

I've got a P120 right now but never saw a P75 in the flesh.

The slowest socket 5/7 Pentium I've felt-up in person, and in its natural habitat, was a P100 back in ~1994, and again in 1998.

It seems like the P75 came out after the P90/100/120 CPU line to grab the interest of budget shoppers. It was probably an Intel effort to compete with the high-end 486 bugdet group.

I have a P75-based system (not a Gateway, but an HP Vectra) - it feels slower than a 486DX2/66, hopefully because it has no L2 cache 😀.

feipoa wrote:

The slowest socket 5/7 Pentium I've felt-up in person, and in its natural habitat, was a P100 back in ~1994, and again in 1998.

It seems like the P75 came out after the P90/100/120 CPU line to grab the interest of budget shoppers. It was probably an Intel effort to compete with the high-end 486 bugdet group.

Or else they were binned parts that were originally meant to run at faster speeds but failed quality testing.

Typically, a Pentium 75 can easily overclock to 90mhz. Also, a lot of them have the FDIV bug that's more commonly associated with the 60 and 66mhz Socket 4 chips (I'm not sure exactly when the FDIV bug was fixed but it seems if the chip lacks a gold heat spreader, it's new enough to not have said bug).

Whatever the case, I think the main reason for the sluggishness of that particular chip comes down to the 50mhz bus speed on top of the fact most computers that the chip was shipped with typically had crap hard drives and other components.

The Gateway P75 tower I used to own featured an Intel motherboard (I think a Plato) and I'm pretty sure there was an L2 cache though it was probably on the smaller side. To date, that, an IBM Server 95 and a ThinkPad 755CD are the only computers I have experience with that had a 75mhz Pentium.

About a year ago, I'd been experimenting using a P75. If I remember correctly, it was able to run up to 133MHz, with no problems. Then sometime I accidentally placed it on a board, which was set for a 233MMX, without a heatsink just for a few seconds, and a burning smell came. But it still works fine...

Markk wrote:

About a year ago, I'd been experimenting using a P75. If I remember correctly, it was able to run up to 133MHz, with no problems. Then sometime I accidentally placed it on a board, which was set for a 233MMX, without a heatsink just for a few seconds, and a burning smell came. But it still works fine...

The magic smoke didn't leak out. 😁

Pentium chips are pretty resilient. I remember having a Pentium box in which I accidentally broke off one of the tabs on the socket that holds the heatsink on so I literally just Elmer's glued the heatsink to the cpu (no fan either). I had it overclocked from 133 to 166mhz and never had a bit of trouble with it.

True, I had a Packard Bell P75 and a Compaq P133 at various points in time. Both only had heatsinks (no fans), and got hot enough to burn you, but they both ran fine..

I think something called "Action!" was bundled with it. I'm not sure if it was Macromedia or not.

The Gateway P75 was originally announced in Nov 1994, but was rereleased in Aug 1996 with Windows 95 and a different bundle, but the specs pretty much unchanged and the price *STILL* in the two thousands.

I don't know. I'm a little bit nostalgic of the Gateway 2000 P75