Reply 20 of 31, by Old Thrashbarg
First of all, just saying "late 1995 to late 1996" covers a hell of a lot of different hardware... the gaming system you'd have gotten in November '95 was a quite different thing from a system from November '96. During that time, processor speeds nearly doubled, hard drive sizes did double, memory prices plummeted after the DRAM shortage ended, and 3D accelerators came onto the scene.
Flipping through magazines will give an idea of what was available at what time, but it doesn't really show the full picture. Whitebox/homebuilt systems were quite common... probably as much as they are nowadays, percentage-wise. Sure, the Compaqs and Dells were more common for the average person, and those were the ones you would see advertised... that hasn't really changed... but also like nowadays, you could often build a better system for cheaper if you went with a whitebox. And many people did just that.
And as a side note, overclocking wasn't entirely uncommon either... I don't remember ever hearing that word until the '00s, but nevertheless, it was pretty well known that the P75s (later production ones, at least) would do 90, and usually even 100mhz, the 120s would all do 133, and the 150s would do 166. I never actually owned a 'real' P100, 133 or 166 until fairly recently.