For me it was about 5 years. I went from a Pentium 90 MHz in 94' (cost $3,000 from Dell), which I gamed with through to early 99' when I bought a Celeron 300a, which I overclocked to 450 MHz.

During this same period hard drive sizes were climbing rapidly as were cdrom speeds. Early CD burners were released (and expensive), and 3D video cards were ramping up along with early competition to voodoo - so between all of these you always had something to spend money on.

Cpu-wise, I can't remember feeling like performance was the bottleneck; software was still tightly coded and light weight back then.. even when windows 95 came out.

That's an interesting question and I bet you'll get different answers based on how old (or wealthy) the user was. I'm basing my thoughts around socket 7 since you mention MMX and thinking about the average gamer, not somebody who had thousands to spend every year on a new machine. S7 was also in my mind THE system of the late 90s multimedia age, freaking everybody owned one.Real world experience doesn't match up with magazine ads from the time usually, like who in their right mind actually could afford a Coppermine P3 in late 1999 😜.

I used a Pentium 133 until the year 2000 when I was gifted an upgrade to an ss7 and k6-2 350mhz (which is what I played diablo 2 on like an addict in high school). It was very common up to the year 2000-2001 to see the average person still running a Pentium chip, or it was for me as a high school student when most of us inherited our fathers old PC while they upgraded to Pentium III or Athlon systems. Pentium 2 systems weren't too common and P3 rigs were prohibitively expensive until the 2000s.

From 2001 to 2003 consumers saw the massive clock speed explosion happen, leaving anything socket 7 right in the trash bins (literally). My ss7 rig was finally retired in late 2001 when I got an Athlon XP.

I would say late 2000 to 2001 was really the end of the useful life of an mmx for "gaming", but with the mindset I had for gaming back then where extremely low FPS meant playable. D2 ran like crap on ss7 setups but tons of us did it anyway. If you needed buttery smooth performance between 1999 and 2001, you had to spend thousands. 2001 was the point where Athlons and 370 pentium IIIs and early pentium 4s started showing up in the average home.

I'm surprised you could tolerate Socket7 in 2001. By that time I had a Tualeron 1200, and even that was considered slow. In my mind, 1999 was really the year the MMX became undesirable.

My own experience was somewhat the same. I had a p200mmx from mid/late 97 through till at least 2003 when I bought myself an already low-end socket 478 celeron 2ghz HP machine. I didn't do a lot of gaming beyond 1999 or so though, so I was kind of out of it, and even on that celeron machine I didn't play much. This is kinda why I asked the question. Considering how far I should push one of my builds here in terms of what era of games I should just run on a newer machine and where to pin the sweet spot for the current hardware.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I'm surprised you could tolerate Socket7 in 2001. By that time I had a Tualeron 1200, and even that was considered slow. In my mind, 1999 was really the year the MMX became undesirable.

I expected this reply, but may I ask how old you were in 2001? I was 17 and didn't start working until the following year. We had what we had in those days!

I couldn't tolerate even ss7 in 2001 and finally upgraded that year due to AAA games I wanted more performance out of, but I knew plenty of people still sporting Pentium MMX machines. This was also the time where overclocking became a fad in computer circles for the younger (my) generation. I wanted to upgrade since 2000 when Diablo 2 was the thing. Prior to Diablo 2 (early 2000) I would have been perfectly content with a pentium mmx 200+. Of course EVERYBODY wished they had a P3 😜

senrew wrote:

My own experience was somewhat the same. I had a p200mmx from mid/late 97 through till at least 2003 when I bought myself an already low-end socket 478 celeron 2ghz HP machine. I didn't do a lot of gaming beyond 1999 or so though, so I was kind of out of it, and even on that celeron machine I didn't play much. This is kinda why I asked the question. Considering how far I should push one of my builds here in terms of what era of games I should just run on a newer machine and where to pin the sweet spot for the current hardware.

Today (2017) we're all spoiled by buttery smooth frame rates 60 or even 120-144hz, so when you go back and build a nostalgic retro system, sometimes you get a nasty surprise in performance. If you want to run late 90s to early 00 software I would just go ahead and get a Pentium III Coppermine or better rig with a Ti 4200 (or better) and be done with it. I would say for anything 1998 and earlier the MMX would be great for almost anything.

I went for a P166 (non MMX) when Quake became popular (ditched a 486/160 I had, went for a Cyrix 166 which I didn't like and traded it for the Intel version) and then jumped to a P2-300 running at 400 (66mhz to 100mhz FSB switch). The P2 was AGP and I purchased an STB Velocity 4400 TnT1 with it (before the drivers were ironed out unfortunately).

So the Velocity 4400 came out in June 15th 1998, the Cyrix came out in Feb 1996 and I think I snagged it around summer of that year. Total would be around 2 years which is probably correct since I had plenty of money and gamed a lot at that time.

I knew people I worked with that purchased one of those Socket 4 P60/66 Packard Bells new and ran it when I was running a P2 so they lasted a while for the non gamers. The MMX came late in the Pentium games starting with the 166 but the 200 and 233 were popular with people that had split voltage Socket 7 motherboards. People who paid decent money for a Socket 5 motherboard tended to hang onto them a long time.

Our family Pentium 133Mhz (a Packard Bell), lasted from late 1995 to Christmas 1998, when it was replaced with a Pentium II 400Mhz 440BX based system I had built from parts I had purchased from my high school job. That kicked along with various upgrades until April 2008, so I certainly got my money's worth out of that machine. It got me thru half of high school and all of college.

The Packard Bell saw some use for CD-R burning after it was taken out of main service, but it was done by 1999. The lack of L2 cache didn't do it any favors. CD-R burning was moved to a newly built Super Socket 7 K6-2 350Mhz machine at that point and lasted until 2003ish.

In February 99, at age 16, I went to live with my father across the country and had to leave my machine behind. He had a p2/350 based NEC and I played a few games on that; Thief, Jane's F-15, Blood II. When I moved back in with my mother later in the year, I was back to my 200mmx Compaq. The newest games I remember playing were all years older; Starfleet Academy, Rocket Jockey, Jedi Knight, the Journeyman games. There was a huge gap of time where I didn't really play any current games until I got my HP, and even then I think the only game I ever played on it while I had it was Warcraft III. I ended up selling that machine to a friend when I needed some quick cash and I went without a dedicated computer, or at least one that was even contemporary, until I got a G4 iBook in 2005, and the only real game I played there was Sims 2. It wasn't until 2 years ago that I built up any kind of contemporary gaming machine, and it was already pretty dated at the time (FX-6300/R7 370).

I'm still catching up and pretty much the entire period of time between 97 to just a couple of years ago is a mystery to me. I still have my fondest memories of the DOS and win9x years and that's what I've been concentrating my retro time on, but again, I don't really know normal people really had to use at the time.

BeginnerGuy wrote:

Today (2017) we're all spoiled by buttery smooth frame rates 60 or even 120-144hz, so when you go back and build a nostalgic retro system, sometimes you get a nasty surprise in performance. If you want to run late 90s to early 00 software I would just go ahead and get a Pentium III Coppermine or better rig with a Ti 4200 (or better) and be done with it. I would say for anything 1998 and earlier the MMX would be great for almost anything.

Actually, I'm just trying to see what kind of mileage I can get out of a 200mmx before I build up the next machine I have planned, a p3 550 or so. I figure that'll let me get a taste of what was higher end for the 98-2000 or so timeframe before I build up a p4 era 98/xp cusp machine for the next layer of games.

senrew wrote:

BeginnerGuy wrote:

Today (2017) we're all spoiled by buttery smooth frame rates 60 or even 120-144hz, so when you go back and build a nostalgic retro system, sometimes you get a nasty surprise in performance. If you want to run late 90s to early 00 software I would just go ahead and get a Pentium III Coppermine or better rig with a Ti 4200 (or better) and be done with it. I would say for anything 1998 and earlier the MMX would be great for almost anything.

Actually, I'm just trying to see what kind of mileage I can get out of a 200mmx before I build up the next machine I have planned, a p3 550 or so. I figure that'll let me get a taste of what was higher end for the 98-2000 or so timeframe before I build up a p4 era 98/xp cusp machine for the next layer of games.

That's the way to do it! Socket 7 was an era unto itself and if you're into retro gaming it deserves to be on your shelf, especially if you can get your hands on earlier voodoo cards. Also if you look backwards, you'll be able to play 98% of DOS era games as well. You could spend the rest of your life with the amount of games that MMX will run 😊. You may also have fun trying to run modern software on ancient hardware too just for kicks.

P3 builds are great too though, I consider them supercharged 90s rigs because you can still drop your ISA sound blaster in and play DOOM in glorious OPL3 then turn around and browse the web on windows XP.

you just have to think what game made you upgrade. I know today one just dont hit with a wall and upgrade before that happens

Off: my first computer had at some point an AMD 486 DX4 100Mhz and the game that showed the limitations of the PC was Carmageddon.

Later, with the K6-2 500Mhz (+AX59 Pro, 128MB Ram and TNT2 M64 32MB) was American Mcgee's Alice (jumped to an Athlon Thunderbird 900Mhz in mid 2001, i have never experienced the same difference again in terms of processing power)

dont get me wrong, i loved those CPU's but i knew that i had a pretty low end computer.
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Ontopic: to me the pentium became affordable in late 1995-mid 1996 when Cyrix 6x86 was launch. At the same time voodoo appearance made the 686 class cpu a must for games. So you can start from 1995 to late 1999 i think. The Sims made its debut in Jan 2000, and that game already needed a MINIMUM of a Pentium 233Mhz MMX

Pentium was useful after the release pf Quake and Wing Commander III until the release of Quake II and Unreal but could be extended with a Voodoo1/2

i was stuck using a pentium 1 until about 2005 , i was 15 and it was my only computer i had. i used it to play age of empires 2 online but in 2005 they stopped the zone servers support for aoe2.

The fastest Pentiums were slow for 3D games by the end of 1999, so they were not current anymore even with decent graphics cards. New RPG and strategy games continued to run "fine" until maybe 2001. I know I was pretty deep into the back catalog of retro games by then, with my P200MMX.

I was using a non MMX Pentium 100MHz in 1998. I bought a new Pentium III pc in late 1999. The old Pentium system became useful again when I upgraded to an AMD K6-2 around 2000.

I went from P90 (-95) to Cyrix 6x86 (96-97) to K6-350 by Christmas -98 and then finally to Duron in the summer of -00. Never have I since had such an upgrade speed as the last two were complete systems with monitors and everything. I'd say my comfort zone for Pentium would be 95-97, but anything beyond that...

I had the upgrade disease at the time. I was single with a job and few financial responsibilities. But I was also one who stuck with proven platforms for longer than the average person gamer. So I was using a 486 DX4-100 up til about 1996. In 96 I built my first Pentium, a P133, and I kept it for about a year and a half before upgrading to a 200MMX. I kept the 200MMX til 1999, at which time I got a Celeron 300a and ran it at 450Mhz.

My first PC was a Pentium 75 in 1995, eventually "upgraded" to an IDT Winchip 240MHz which I don't believe was much faster. I recall that by 99 I couldn't run very much new or demanding, but that possibly says more about the WinChip than anything. I remember trying to play Birth of the Federation and it would just crash out constantly in the 3D graphical sections.

Don't forget the troves of used Pentium system sold up until about 2004ish as web browser systems.
At least that was very common were I lived. Gaming aside Id say a Pentium system lost is usefulness some ware around 2003-2005 depending on what you did with it.

If you running something like quicken 98 the system may still even be useful today. But for most people would not be able to use such a system past 2005ish.
Keep in mind 98 was dropped in 2006, so as a office system a Pentium could have had a 10 year life span of use.

But for gaming, maybe 2001? with a top end system and a good OC maybe 2002, but most games past 2000 would be unplayable. Quake 3 and unreal games would really push such a system, but a few RPG and most RTS games would be OK.