← Back to context

Comment by gattr

1 day ago

My classmate kept his Amiga 1200 a bit longer! ...eventually he got a PC with Pentium 60 MHz.

Yeah, there were holdouts of course but the DX/2 really seems like the breaking point.

(Also, a Pentium 60 is barely faster than a DX/2 66 at many tasks — it is a Bad Processor — but that’s another conversation ;)

  • Pentium is a bad processor? It's way faster than 486, especially on FP it's not even close.

    • The original Pentiums (socket 4, 60 or 66 MHz) had the infamous floating point division bug, had underwhelming perf for anything not FP bound (most things), ran hot, and were too expensive for what you got. A DX/4 100 was nearly always a more rational choice.

      Second gen Pentiums, starting with the 75 MHz, were great.

      6 replies →

  • Many tasks perhaps, but running Quake was not one of them.

    • Yeah, it does alright and is a significant difference to a DX/2, but Quake came out in ’96 and the P60 came out as a super expensive workstation class CPU in ’93. If you were a gamer in ’96 it is unlikely you were rocking a P60 because it was not ever good value for money.

  • You could play 320x200 Quake acceptably on a P60. On a DX4 too, though barely - my family had both in the mid 90s. I'd be surprised if Quake is playable on a DX2.