I was using the P1 133 with 16MB of ram until early 2000, it felt really terrible by then, also I was running Win95.

but with more ram, and a higher clocked MMX I'm sure for non gaming it could be used for a while longer... for the latest games, well it was kind of poor in 98 already I think the 233 MMX, some games from 98 even felt a little slow on the PII 400, and in 99 you had games that made P3 Coppermine look slow already, like UT, things were moving really fast.

I had a Pentium 90 in 1994. It felt really fast for 1994 games and also very adequate for 1995, but I feel that by 1996 it was already starting to show its age and games felt slower. I don't recall playing many games in 1996 apart from HOMM2, and also Duke 3D and Quake that I had to play in low-res. 1996 is also the year I bought a Sony PS1, so I was doing most of my gaming on this platform which I really enjoyed.

In 1997, I don't remember playing any more on the Pentium and I was using it for Microsoft Office, Internet access and CD burning. It felt slow even for these tasks and in 1998 it got replaced with a Pentium II-333 440BX system.

Retrospectively I think I was kind of a socket 5 early adopter, but that my friends who used their 486 machines until 1995 and got a Pentium 133 or 166 machine got much better mileage from their system than I got from my P90. 😦

I was stuck way behind the power curve for years, so my input on this is a little strange. I started with an 8086 box - a Tandy 1000 SL - then upgraded to a 286 in 1995 or so. I finally traded that for a 486DX4 machine in about 1997. It was already behind the times, but that was what I consider my first "Real Computer" - it could run an OS with a GUI (OS/2 Warp, then eventually Win95), and it could play some modern games, but in 1997, there were precious few games I could buy off the shelf that would run well. Just a few years prior, it would have run many of them, if somewhat haltingly.

I traded that for a K6-233, but because I lacked a good graphics card, that only opened a few doors. I could play Master of Orion 2 much better, for example - it worked, but stuttered and kerchunked on the 486. When I upgraded that to a K6-2/350 with a Rage 128, things got better. I could actually look at modern games! But that was in 2000, so it was a fairly limited slice of "modern". That's basically a Pentium MMX on steroids, and it was feeling distinctly low on chooch factor in 2000 and 2001. In 2002, now finally pulling in a junior NCO's salary, I could afford to trade up to an Athlon-750 with a G400 MAX, which was finally in the running as a "modern" machine for its time.

(The real revelation for me was Homeworld. It was playable on the K6-2, just barely. The Athlon hardly even blinked even at heavy action scenes.)

A thought in retrospect - getting that 486 machine when I did was actually a huge, expensive blooper. It was an end-of-the-line build for a 486, with PCI and 32MB of RAM. I suppose it could have gone up to a 5x86/133 and 64MB, differences that would have mattered very little at the time. I should have plopped down the extra bit of dosh for a Socket 7-based rig, even with an el-cheapo P75 - would have been infinitely more future-resistant. But then, live and learn, belike, and that's half the point, now, innit?

Wild card.

What about the Pentium pro?

To add my own experience -
1996 - Can't run Quake because 486SX-33. Ran coprocessor emulator for fun until...
1996 - Bought Pentium 100
1998 - Jumped to Pentium II - 266. Voodoo2 SLI
Late 1998 - PSU blew and took out RAM, mobo, proc
Late 1998 - Got Pentium III 500 MHz

So I was a bit late to move to a Pentium system, but the two year swing from 1996-1998 was insane because of the adoption of Win9x, direct-x, and the utter boom in system requirements thanks to the leaps in RAM and clock speed.

Going from IBM 5150 to 286 to 386 to 486 (for gaming) felt like a steady push over a short period, but the late Pentium to early Pentium 3 push was a whirlwind.

I've been going through the CGW magazine archives and checking out what their killer rigs were through the late 90s and the recommended specs on the games they review. Using the January 2000 issue as a cutoff (As it would have been out before the new year), their Killer/Lean/Budget machine builds are built with P3-700/P3-500/Celeron-500. A good chunk of the reviewed games in the issue require a P2 at minimum, P3 recommended, but a few RTS/Strategy/Sports/Puzzle games still have a 233MMX as the bare minimum required.

I'm going to go back a bit and see where they stop using the MMX in any form in their budget build and I guess we can call that an average point to upgrade to at least a P2?

EDIT: So I found the February 98 issue and the budget rig was a 233MMX based machine. This was the last time that this particular magazine recommended a CPU that wasn't P2 or above. The other two "Killer Rigs" were a P2-300 and P2-233.

So there's the expert opinion on when to stop considering an original Pentium for gaming, at least from one magazine's point of view.

Jade Falcon wrote:

Wild card.

What about the Pentium pro?

My memory of the Pentium Pro is mostly that the window where a PPro machine made any sense for a gamer was very narrow. I knew a few people that had them, but those were all expensive (and usually company-owned, or at least company-subsidized) graphics workstations first and gaming machines second.

Although I suppose for the bleeding-edge heatseeker with deep pockets, a dualie Pentium Pro might have been very interesting when it was new, even if precious little took advantage of that second CPU. But I think the PPro petered out as a gaming CPU about the same time the classic, non-MMX Pentium did, which is to say a short while into the Pentium II era.

jade_angel wrote:

Jade Falcon wrote:

Wild card.

What about the Pentium pro?

My memory of the Pentium Pro is mostly that the window where a PPro machine made any sense for a gamer was very narrow. I knew a few people that had them, but those were all expensive (and usually company-owned, or at least company-subsidized) graphics workstations first and gaming machines second.

Although I suppose for the bleeding-edge heatseeker with deep pockets, a dualie Pentium Pro might have been very interesting when it was new, even if precious little took advantage of that second CPU. But I think the PPro petered out as a gaming CPU about the same time the classic, non-MMX Pentium did, which is to say a short while into the Pentium II era.

The last mention I find of the PPro being recommended is somewhere in early 97 in the CGW archives, so there's that.

senrew wrote:

I've been going through the CGW magazine archives and checking out what their killer rigs were through the late 90s and the reco […]
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I've been going through the CGW magazine archives and checking out what their killer rigs were through the late 90s and the recommended specs on the games they review. Using the January 2000 issue as a cutoff (As it would have been out before the new year), their Killer/Lean/Budget machine builds are built with P3-700/P3-500/Celeron-500. A good chunk of the reviewed games in the issue require a P2 at minimum, P3 recommended, but a few RTS/Strategy/Sports/Puzzle games still have a 233MMX as the bare minimum required.

I'm going to go back a bit and see where they stop using the MMX in any form in their budget build and I guess we can call that an average point to upgrade to at least a P2?

EDIT: So I found the February 98 issue and the budget rig was a 233MMX based machine. This was the last time that this particular magazine recommended a CPU that wasn't P2 or above. The other two "Killer Rigs" were a P2-300 and P2-233.

So there's the expert opinion on when to stop considering an original Pentium for gaming, at least from one magazine's point of view.

That's a pretty good analysis, but I think it misses one salient metric - there's a point at which a given spec (a PMMX, say) will still run most new releases, but you'd never consider building a new machine with that spec. In 1999, it seemed to me like a PMMX could still run most things, but I'd agree it didn't make much sense to build one. (A K6 might have made sense, though, especially on Super Socket 7.) It seems to me the line for a classic, non-MMX Pentium and the Pentium Pro was a little earlier than that - 1998, maybe. After that it seems like most games really wanted MMX, one way or the other.

So, I'd say the line for the PMMX, depending on which line you're looking at, is late '97/early '98 to build one, late '99/early 2000 to keep using one you already have.

jade_angel wrote:

That's a pretty good analysis, but I think it misses one salient metric - there's a point at which a given spec (a PMMX, say) will still run most new releases, but you'd never consider building a new machine with that spec. In 1999, it seemed to me like a PMMX could still run most things, but I'd agree it didn't make much sense to build one. (A K6 might have made sense, though, especially on Super Socket 7.) It seems to me the line for a classic, non-MMX Pentium and the Pentium Pro was a little earlier than that - 1998, maybe. After that it seems like most games really wanted MMX, one way or the other.

So, I'd say the line for the PMMX, depending on which line you're looking at, is late '97/early '98 to build one, late '99/early 2000 to keep using one you already have.

Yep, that's what I would take away from this as well. The recommended build info in the magazines was more for a starting point. I'm looking through them now at the game reviews and where they peg the minimum/recommended and where the cutoff for the MMX will be. This may take a little longer 😀

By April 2001, almost every game required a P2 as minimum CPU. There were a few holdouts, Everquest and Blair Witch (reviewed in that issue) needed a 200mhz chip at minimum, but I think we can call it by early 2001 that new games upped the floor for CPUs to at least the slowest of the P2s.

senrew wrote:

By April 2001, almost every game required a P2 as minimum CPU. There were a few holdouts, Everquest and Blair Witch (reviewed in that issue) needed a 200mhz chip at minimum, but I think we can call it by early 2001 that new games upped the floor for CPUs to at least the slowest of the P2s.

That jibes with my memories, too. I had, as I'd noted, a K6-2 machine at the time, and I recall my general sense was "well, it'll run most newer titles, if by 'run' you mean 'plod', but you wouldn't want to". Anything less than a K6-2 would probably have been a non-starter.

Yes, there are already many games throughout 1999 that recommend better CPU's as their minimum spec and by 2000 Pentiums are subpar for most games.

1994-1998 is where they belong. Before Quake their gaming application was SVGA high resolution modes in stuff like Wing Commander III, System Shock, Magic Carpet. 1998 is also when D3D and OGL started to beat 3dfx's proprietary Glide in market share, then pretty soon you could sink an infinite amount of processing power into new games.