Sometime in late 95, early 96, there began to be a lot of "side channel" availability, OEMs dumping stock. Bare CPUs from the tray. "Retail" might have been $150 still, but they were under a hundred and dropping at fairs etc. Going into '97 they were practically "free" with motherboard and RAM, because on any but the cheapest lowest margin boards, you could get P75 plus motherboard plus 8MB for the same price as mobo and RAM separate as a combo deal.
Riikcakirds wrote on 2025-05-15, 22:22:
Anonymous Coward wrote on 2019-11-28, 05:18:
P75 was a pretty good deal when it came out, but I thumbed my nose at them because of the lowly 50MHz bus. Plus, before the Pentium was even released, everyone was already waiting for the clock doubled 100MHz version, and I refused to settle on anything slower than that. By the time the 100MHz Pentium became somewhat affordable the 166 was already out, and by then the 200MHz chips were on the horizon so I wouldn't settle for anything less than that!
Should have just got the P75 and overclocked it to 90 or 100 like everyone else and spared myself the 3 year wait.
P75 was a great deal and I remember back around December 1994 on Usenet, posts about people overclocking them to 133mhz. A good 6months before the 133mhz part was released. I bought one in feb 95 and it still runs at 133mhz when needed.
Some time in the early noughts, I'd found that 6 P75s had collected up, so decided to see how far they went because there were worthless around then. It was a spread of ages, but I don't think I had very early ones in there. The slowest still went 120, two maxed at 133, two maxed at 150 and one made it to 166.... and this was with "era apropriate" heatsinks, short little "basic pentium sinks" took them all to 133 that would go, and then for 150 and 166 they needed the "cyrix" sinks, slightly larger ones up to about 3/4 high. Possibly one of the 150s would have done 166 with a "super 7"/370 CeleronA sized one on, and the 166 might have gone further, if I could have been bothered trying it on a board that went past 83.
But yah, that was when I began to slightly regret buying a Cyrix 5x86 100GP at the end of 95. I too had been swerved away from low end pentium by the magazine writers hatred of the 50/25 bus. Not then realising that 60 was pretty much guaranteed, and 66 highly likely. However, there was another factor, PCI graphics were kinda spendy around that time. I guess if I had had a decent ISA card I might have made do with that, I didn't though, only a basic 256kB C&T VGA. Though it's surprising but when you think about that, less surprising, that I've come across several pentium systems since with an ISA Trident in.
Edit: ah forgot the actual on topic bit. Someone bought a stack of Computer Shopper back issues and boasted on reddit or somewhere that they were gonna digitise the lot, but it seemed that they got three issues in and stalled. Not sure if they picked it up again and there's more now or what.
Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.
