October 1999. Which one are you realistically picking?

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Johnny2076@reddit

I picked the K6-3 450.

And upgraded when the 750MHz Athlon came out a few months later.

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proczak@reddit

P3 600 all the way, I overclocked it to 900 with water cooling and a bucket of ice

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BoranijaZaRucak@reddit

Cyrix for the win. It was dirty cheap, overheating and unoptimized. My friend had it… cooler was the size of modern days cooler for e.g 7600X

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Well, if I would have built a system in '99, I‘d had chosen the Athlon 500, because CPU speed was increasing so fast these days. With today’s view reflecting the growth in CPU speed, I‘d choose the K6-3 450, knowing that it would be totally deprecated 2 years later…

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eulynn34@reddit

I would probably still be rocking my Celeron 300A @ 450Mhz though I am struggling to remember what I had exactly in '99. I upgraded my PC a lot in those days.

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Lonely-Problem5632@reddit

2 of those on a BP6 for sure :P

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Tony-Angelino@reddit

Celeron 300A boosted to 450 MHz is the right answer.

Overclocking back then meant picking a budget component and push it to the premium performance to save a lot of money.

These days overclocking is done on premium components to go to extremes.

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Danthemanz@reddit

Yes but by this point they were gone. The celerons listed didn't clock well, basically because they had the same clocks already. Personally I bought a P3 450mhz and overclocked it to 500mhz.

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Atomm@reddit

I loved my 300A. I got one of the really good Malay chips. Was able to boost it slightly o er 500Mhz. Ran it 24/7 forever and no hick ups.

Best bang for buck chip I ever bought.

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uwslothman@reddit

This was the way.

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kungfu1@reddit

Same. And if memory serves, 2x Voodoo2's in SLI.

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CartographerEvery268@reddit

Hell ya. I remember going from 1 to 2 12MB Voodoo2s and Need for Speed III allowed me to run at 1024x768.

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Heavy-Perception-166@reddit

I think all of us from that era can remember the pants shitting moment we first saw games running on a Voodoo card, which began the era of actually attainable 60 fps 3D while at the same time looking incredibly better than anything we’d ever seen on a PC. Then we shit our pants again when 3DFX said “fuck it, buy two of these bitches, hope you bought the big case and the full size board because half of it will be full of graphics cards”.

It is hard to put into words how dominant 3DFX was from 96-2000. Both visuals and performance were so far ahead of the rest of the market until basically the GeForce 2.

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kungfu1@reddit

Those were the days.

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Heavy-Perception-166@reddit

This. You didn’t want the 400-500 because they were multiplier locked and a higher multiplier meant it was much harder to overclock to a 100 mhz bus.

300A was still the hot ticket here with the 4.5x multiplier. 450 mhz was almost guaranteed and with an Abit BH6, 464 or 504 was usually very doable with a stock HSF. It was only a few years ago that I learned about the Abit BP6, which actually allowed dual overclocked Celerons at a time when multiprocessors were for 10k machines. Had I known I would been all over that. Sure, pretty much no operating systems or games at the time supported SMP, but still…

A year or so after this Abit released a board that allowed bios changes to the bus speed by 1 mhz increments, which allowed you for the first time to really dip in exactly how much headroom your chip had. Considering most boards at this time still required jumpers to set clock speed, Abit’s BIOS based overclocking was light years ahead. It is a super shame that they went out of business in the mid 00’s.

I kept my Celeron “504A” setup for a long time, I held out all the way to upgrade into an Athlon 1800 XP.

As I recall, my Celly setup was:

300a at 504 MHz Abit BH6 Either 64 or 128 mb of SDR PC100 ram A Savage 4 graphics card that I got for a song SLI Voodoo 2’s, I ran these for a long time because lots of late 90’s games only ran glide and even in the early 2000’s a few games still ran best on 3DFX stuff Soundblaster Live

This was absolutely one of my favorite ever builds. A second favorite was a desktop build using a Barton core Athlon XP-M chip on an Nforce 2 motherboard. AMD actually sold their mobile chips as socketed processors for a little bit and they were binned from the best of the best silicon that would run reliably at low voltage. Put standard voltage in them and they would overclock to the moon and back, I think my 1800 MHz chip ran rock solid at 2.5 ghz. That mixed with the awesome Nforce board (realtime Dolby digital encoding which nothing else did for the next decade, grr) made for a great system.

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Therosiandoom@reddit

I really didn’t appreciate how much of a steal it was to get a socket 370 chip and motherboard for maybe $100 in the summer of 2000. Did exactly the same and held on to it until upgrading to an Athlon XP in 2003.

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aussiepunkrocksV2-0@reddit (OP)

A friend at the time had one of those but his parents forbid him from overclocking as it was the family PC. I think they later upgraded to a Pentium III 500...

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S_Rodney@reddit

In 1998, I've built my first computer (which was the 2nd I've ever owned) with an AMD K6-2 400

In 1999 I would have upgraded for another K6-2 (as a drop-in upgrade) but I was satisfied with the 400's performance... so I waited.

AMD Released the K6-2 550 in early 2000 and that's the one I went for as what I thought to be the best possible CPU I could install in that system.

Fast forward years later, like mid 2010s, I find an ebay listing selling "new old stock" of the fabled K6-2+ 570. This is the current chip that in the system... that, to this day, still works flawlessly... even at 600Mhz ! (For retrogaming)

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Eldergonian@reddit

My birth month and year. Realistically my dad would have bought it

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Alternative-Shirt-73@reddit

If I’m being honest I DID pick the K6-2 400 and clocked it to 550 with the clock jumpers of my Asus P5A socket 7 motherboard. I remember it like it wasn’t 25 years ago. 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee AGP card and a SB Live! I was balling on a budget lol

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xXZer0c0oLXx@reddit

Man and we complain about high cpu prices now. I forgot how expensive new p3s where...1000 bucks for 100 more mhz

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SimiShittyProgrammer@reddit

I bought my PIII 450 the week of release. The 500 was wayyyyy too damn much more for that higher speed.

Shitty fucking ATI drivers were my biggest annoyance.

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Heavy-Perception-166@reddit

Intel was having major yield problems on their fastest CPU’s. AMD managed a die shrink a generation ahead of Intel making it much easier for them to create fast chips in volume while Intel had to bin the shit out of theirs to get a handful of processors for the top end market.

Part of the story that is not told in ads is that the availability of top end P3’s was very minimal. They were seldom in stock. It got even worse over the next year to the point where reviewers were calling out the fictional releases of P3’s when they started approaching 1 ghz. Intel was announcing faster processors and sending out testing samples to reviewers that were handpicked silicon required to run with voltage increases to match AMD in the MHz race, meanwhile there was almost zero volume released to the consumer or even OEM market. This culminated in Intel releasing a 1.13 GHZ chip to beat the Athlon 1 GHZ release that required bumped voltage and a significant microcode update to even run- and even then it wasn’t stable.

It was a precursor to what is unfolding now- Intel dominates market for several years, gets complacent, then finds themselves lagging in tech and responds by releasing a furnace disguised as a processor to try and keep up.

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SimiShittyProgrammer@reddit

I had an Athlon 1Ghz but I also had a dual PIII 933 (Abit VP6 was the best board ever).

Once you go dual processor it's hard AF to go back. The computer feels unresponsive in comparison.

So around the fall of 2001 I had a Dual 933 with RAID 0 Ultra ATA hard drives and 1GB of RAM.

Took until 2006 before I felt the need to build a new machine, lol. Built a Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz (Had a Centrino 1.7GHz Thinkpad as well from 2003, just single core though so the desktop still won, T42p maybe, long time ago...).

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WildVelociraptor@reddit

And then Cyrix at $75, now I understand why they were appealing.

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Heavy-Perception-166@reddit

Cyrix got screwed. The 6x86 was an absolutely great chip in 1995, running circles around the Pentium clock for clock. It was more similar to a Pentium pro/P2 in architecture, but better optimized than the P Pro for 16 bit code- the Pentium Pro sucked if you weren’t running a 32 bit OS and 32 bit programs and little on the consumer market was- Win 95/98/ME still used a ton of 16 bit code.

So you could buy a cheaper, faster chip. Oh yeah, except the FPU wasn’t great. The Pentium had the nifty fully pipelined FPU that needed code specifically optimized for it and because it was the market leader developers did just that. Meanwhile the 6x86 had an FPU similar to the 486 with some decent improvements. But the 6x86 is a consumer chip and games and consumer software of the early 1990’s didn’t need a whole bunch of math shit done, so focus on the integer performance and put a “good enough” FPU in there to round things out.

And then a little game called quake fucked everything up for Cyrix. Not only was all the 3d geometry super FPU intensive, but John Carmack the coding mega chad wrote the Quake engine to wring every ounce of performance out of the Pentium FPU making the performance difference even more stark.

My first PC I built with a Cyrix 6x86 P200. Quake was a slideshow. Even with a Voodoo card I could only get 25 FPS at 640x 480.

Cyrix tried to stay in the market for the next few years but they had no real money to fix the architecture and the lack of a decent FPU in the new 3D world doomed them to the absolute bargain basement PC market and nothing else. If you could afford to spend anything more you’d spend it and not buy a Cyrix.

The FPU performance of the K6 was much, much better than the 6x86. It was still slower than the Pentium, but more like 66-75% as fast vs 30%. Many of us bought K6’s to drop in to replace our Cyrix’s once it was clear that FPU performance was a non-negotiable.

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LonelyRudder@reddit

I still have one Cyrix M2 on Asus motherboard in storage, it was a decent processor for half the price of comparable AMD.

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Human_Wonder1113@reddit

They are great budget CPUs, I had a PR233, good for almost anything, but they sucked for gaming.

Looking at those prices, a Celeron 400 is the best price/performance ratio. PIII 600 - omfg, almost 10 times the price of Celeron 400? And performance isn't probably even twice, wow.

Athlon 600 is almost as expensive. Early Athlon were super expensive, and slot A motherboards were even more expensive that slot 1 motherboards, I wonder how some bought that.

Later socket A was much more affordable, I remember picking an Athlon 900 on socket A at a fraction of the price of a Pentium 4 sk 423. And it performed better in some games.

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saiyate@reddit

Yeah, everything changed around the year 2001ish when the under $1,000 computers hit.

Back in the 90's, you generally spent $2,000-$3,000 just to get your foot in the door.

You have to understand how amazing this stuff was at the time though. Everyone knew it was worth it, it was so new and exciting. Everything was slow, but it didn't matter. The whole world was waking up and connecting, all these digital experiences and new ways of doing things.

Like I remember the first time I was on a T1 connection, not even full it was like 1.5Mb. I sat for 12 hours straight, just browsing around the web. Infoseek, Lycos, Geocities, Angelfire, ICQ, hotmail. I was just in a daze, my brain was just buzzing from the excitement.

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34HoldOn@reddit

Geocities

Because nobody ever capitalizes the "C" (and I remember someone in high school pronouncing it this way), I always pronounced "geocities" the same as "atrocities". Not realizing until well after the life of GeoCities that it was pronounced "Geo-Cities"

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Charnaviel@reddit

Is that you, Megamind?

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MWink64@reddit

Around 2000 is when you could get a low end PC virtually free* (with 2 years of Prodigy or various other ISPs).

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alsoDivergent@reddit

First time I saw 14.4 in play, I cried and rent my robes for days. For I had never yet seen beyond 2400 baud.

Ironically, fastest POTS modem I ever owned was my precious external 38.8.

High speed cable internet was a thing before I ever felt the need for 56K.

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studyinformore@reddit

Yes and no, you could spend 700-800 on used parts and have an ok machine. It wouldn't be anything in this ad, you'd likely have a voodoo 2 or something similar and not a 2d/3d in one video card and a cyrix cpu.

Good enough to play unreal tournament and quake 3 arena on low settings. But thats about it.

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giantsparklerobot@reddit

Note these are AU prices and not US.

That being said, neither the Pentium II or III were cheap. It's why some Celerons were such a good buy. They were the same exact CPU core but with a smaller L2 cache. The Celeron 300A was a legend because it was super cheap but easily overclocked to 450MHz.

The Celeron was a better performer than similar prices K6 chips and a Dorito was more powerful than Cyrix's chips (sorry Cyrix fans). The Athlon changed the calculus though. It could beat the Pentium III in some places while being cheaper.

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1leggeddog@reddit

And so many of them could be just overclocked stupid easily by changing the fsb speed so you'd buy lower tier cpu and did just that 😎

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Aaylas@reddit

It's especially egregious until your realize we're talking about kangaroo bucks

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Henchforhire@reddit

That was what why I planned on saving for an AMD cpu they were cheaper and my friend in high said they were better for gaming than a P3.

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Smart_Election7288@reddit

Not on that list, but my build was 2 Celeron 366 on an Abit BP-6 overclocked to 550MHz (604 when had a 20” fan blowing straight into the case)

One of the best computers I built, still felt better than newer computers years later.

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Photo-Dave@reddit

I could never afford Intel. All my PC’s including my Xt Clone had Non Intel Chips. My Pentium level clone was a K5 & K6-2 450 MHz to run Photoshop in our studio.

I never had an actual Intel Pentium until I bought my first used Dell PC.

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kg7koi@reddit

Maxed athlon. Like I did back then lol

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Andassaran@reddit

In Late 99 / Early 2000, I was still using a 333mhz k6-2 because I was poor and buying used. Still was okay for most things though. After that it was a 550 p3.

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kpmgeek@reddit

The incredible thing to me is I built my first custom system in October 2001, exactly two years later, and I definitely didn't pay over $200 for a Athalon XP 1700+ that even at stock clocks was more than twice as fast as the most expensive of these chips.

I feel like my 256mb of DDR ram was vastly cheaper too.

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atomlab77@reddit

I can tell you I picked the k6-450 back then. ;-)

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teknosophy_com@reddit

Ohh man. Back then, a neighbor buddy of mine convinced me to loan him $600, which was everything I made from my summer job. He claimed he was going to buy P3s in bulk and resell them and make a huge profit. Well, he failed at that and never paid me back. Eventually he gave me random tech clutter from his basement, like a Win95 upgrade on floppies that smelled like cat barf, and this really cool NCR 386 early tablet PC running Win 3.1.

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Nateadelphia@reddit

That’s a cool tablet! You should share photos if you full have it. You might even be able to make back your $600 now selling it.

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teknosophy_com@reddit

Ohhh yea if I still had it, I could've made my money back! That was one of the few things I sold back then. Also still kicking myself that I gave away my clear Game Boy Pocket. That was the nuts.

Anyway, here it is. The fact that there was no floppy or CD drive made it a PITA. You had to use LapLink to transfer games/docs onto it, and if you ever had to reinstall DOS or 3.1, you're toast. http://oldcomputers.net/ncr-3125.html

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coltonreddit@reddit

Pentium III, max clock speed I can afford, with a really good GPU and a nice multisync CRT to go with it

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QuirkyImage@reddit

I had the riser version of the P3 I have never had so many over heating issues with a CPU.

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Kleinkenny84@reddit

K6-2 450 , 128 MB RAM then wait for the first Intel Core2 Duo.

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PleasantCurrant-FAT1@reddit

The AMD K6-2 400mhz for $125 was the realistic choice for a low-end computer.

I’d had my run of Cyrus CPUs by that point. I’d build low-end systems for friends on a budget and warn them about performance issues up-front, try to get or recycle RAM.

Intel has always been too pricy for me.

^(*Except in my latter professional software development years; a few years back I started investing heavily in Xeon for workstations.)

This, the natural choice was AMD, and the price point for mhz at that time would have been an acceptable option, especially with a (Tyan) MoBo handling more RAM that I could pick up later.

The $125 price point would have been 2-3 days of full time work, and has generally been my threshold for any individual major system component in a build before the more recent GPU era.

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One_Floor_1799@reddit

An Amiga A4000T

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Bi0H4z4rD667@reddit

I had (and still have) a K6-3 450 MHz, so o guess that one?

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kbder@reddit

Where can you find old adverts like this?

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aussiepunkrocksV2-0@reddit (OP)

archive.org https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22ACP+Computer+Publications%22

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ruscaire@reddit

AMD Athlon the first consumer GHz CPU

Needed an extra power supply but in 1999 we didn’t care about power consumption

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SirOompaLoompa@reddit

Right around the millennia-shift, I was in my most cutting edge PC-building part of my life (working in a shop importing and selling components helped, a lot).

This was my beast-of-beasts: * Dual P3 Katmai 500Mhz clocked to 660MHz * 2GB of RAM * 2x Ultra-SCSI harddrives * 1x Plextor SCSI CD-RW drive * 1x Cant-recall-the-name SCSI CD-Drive * Diamond FireGL graphics card * 2x Diamond Voodoo2 cards in SLI

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saiyate@reddit

Dayum, some serious flex

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SirOompaLoompa@reddit

I'm much more modest these days. My "gaming" computer still has a 1080 non-Ti in it.. ;)

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TheMightyTRex@reddit

an amiga

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moorbo3000@reddit

Back then I had a P3 600 mhz

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ryfromoz@reddit

Celeron 300A 🥰

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ken_the_boxer@reddit

I picked a Duron 650, and a pencil.

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cryptoanarchy@reddit

living on the edge with that bus speed!

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ken_the_boxer@reddit

actually, that was the standard setting for the K6-2/333: https://theretroweb.com/motherboard/manual/va503plus-user-manual-rev-a4-60b63747dd8a4777462618.pdf

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cryptoanarchy@reddit

Ok. I forgot about this era of boards. So speeds over 100mhz would be the over speed settings for the bus.

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ken_the_boxer@reddit

There were many possibilities, also as so many differen cpu's were around at that time.

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Heavy-Perception-166@reddit

I’m amazed somebody actually ran a k6-2 333 at 95 MHz bus instead of just making it into a 350 using the ubiquitous 100 MHz setting…

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ken_the_boxer@reddit

Oh, I tried. It wasn't stable in my cramped 486 case. Good thing is, I still have that machine standing around, in its complete original configuration. Including a still working Quantum 2550 Bigfoot.

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AnswerFeeling460@reddit

I'm remebering waiting 1999 for the last game in my favorite game series, Ultima 9 (roleplaying series).

I bought myself a pentium 3 with 500mhz and a vodoo 3, IIRC. Unfortunately the game was horrible bugged (until today in some scenes), and I could have taken me a few more years with my old setup.

I remember buying me a iMac-like case, the most pretty one I ever had in my career.

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saiyate@reddit

Ahh Ultima 8 was so fun! open world! Ultima 9 was such a mess, it was cool but it lost it's magic going to 3D.

I played Ultima 8 for years before I realized there was a story progression. Finding that mace that caused a lightning strike was so awesome.

It was practically Diablo before Diablo.

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redhawk1975@reddit

I run on AMD K6-2 550MHz @ 650MHz 32MB SDRAM and 6.4 GB HDD

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This-Requirement6918@reddit

550 P3. What I always do with hardware. Buy the second best option (because the best is always just a bit much) then run it for 10+ years. Realistically I probably would have ran a P3 till 2006 after Core2 came out. I am still actually running a quad core Xeon from 2008 in an old Dell I bought new for $3k. I've been trying to kill that machine for 10 years now, it's a damn work horse.

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phantomtypist@reddit

Can I assume you have really cheap power?

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This-Requirement6918@reddit

Yeah always been all bills paid.

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toocoldtothink@reddit

I just got a P3-450 a couple weeks ago. Still kicking.

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pyrulyto@reddit

Another one picking the K6-2. With the price difference from the Athlon I could get more memory, a better sound card or monitor. Hard to beat that.

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witecat1@reddit

AMD all the way. The PCs I owned with their chip sets never gave me issues.

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Hour-Bunch@reddit

Definitely the P3 600! I had a few K6-2's and played MOHAA on them with my Radeon 9800 Pro. I always found AMD to be more buggy especially back then. You got the power and the speed but kind of swiss cheese performance sometimes. Celeron and Athlon were rough if you were using anything other than notepad. I got my hands on a P3 1.0Ghz and with my 9800 and a launch day copy of Battlefield 2, it only took 9 minutes to load a map! 😂

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FAMICOMASTER@reddit

How realistic are we talking? In 1999 my dad had a used Mac plus.

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Maxfli81@reddit

Back when AMD was first starting to give Intel a run for their money

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edmond-@reddit

I have not said the word pentium in probably 15 years, maybe 20.

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doubletwist@reddit

I went K6-2 and Athlon at the time, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

And then once the Athlon64 was out, it took a REALLY long time for me to go back to Intel.

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ksuwildkat@reddit

Well at the time I choose PPC

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Karbo_Blarbo@reddit

Gimme the Pentium III; it has a badass iridescent sticker.
(We need more iridescent pieces on every computer part, and I stand by that.)

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PixelZer0@reddit

Exactly what I purchase in 1999 PIII 550

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waldojim42@reddit

I would say that at the time I really liked my K6-2. And later the Athlon-XP 1600+ (OC'd the crap outta that thing).

But when I want to run a widely compatible machine from Dos to Win98 today, I use a PIII 450 with a voodoo 3 and Intel board that has a built in Yamaha sound card.

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ObsessiveRecognition@reddit

I love the K6-2 450

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NikosTX@reddit

Celeron 300A baby

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jumbocards@reddit

Strictly from this page I’d just take the p3 500mhz.

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Metrobolist3@reddit

My first PC was a year or so before this I think and was a cheap Cyrix P200 equivalent type thing. Around this time I think I had upgraded to a P2-333 in that weird slot instead of socket setup.

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fariqcheaux@reddit

AMD K-6 3 400Mhz. That's the one I actually bought in my first PC in 1999. I still have it.

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hohokam@reddit

I had a PII-400 and a 3dfx voodoo 3. So sick :D

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CraftedKittens@reddit

waiting until 2002 so my hardware isnt obselete after a year lol

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Enxer@reddit

I remember being at the Edison NJ computer show and thinking. Nah. I'm just going to upgrade my IBM Craptiva to a 333mhz and see how high I can software clock that CPU.

Answer: 400mhz but I had 64MB ram, TNT and voodoo 2 12MB card so I could play Unreal reasonably well.

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grizzlor_@reddit

I was there, and I picked the Celeron 466 (overclocked to 583) + a Voodoo3 3000 (which was also overclocked by necessity -- you overclocked the Celeron by upping the front side bus speed from 66 to 75/83/100mhz, which also affected the AGP port).

It was a solid machine built on a high school student's budget. Wish I could have afforded the legendary Abit BP6 (first inexpensive dual-CPU motherboard; most popular build was 2xCeleron 366@550). I had the Abit single CPU equiv of the BP6 (model number escapes me at the moment).

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stromm@reddit

I had a BP6 with dual Celeron 366 overclocked to 500. It wasn’t stable above that.

You had to run Win NT or 2000 to get dual cpu support and then only for the few programs/games that were written to take advantage of them. It ended up as my W2K Domain Controller and it stayed that up into W2008 SBS till 2012 when I replaced it with an i5 system. I still have it in a box.

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grizzlor_@reddit

Yeah, it was largely luck of the draw in terms of getting a Celeron that was stable when aggressively overclocked. My buddy had an identical rig purchased at the same time and his was only stable at 525mhz.

I had been using Linux on the desktop for a couple years by ‘99 (with a Win98, later 2000 dual booting for gaming) so I would have had decent SMP support.

You’re definitely right that individual programs were definitely not written to take advantage of multiple CPUs (heck, that’s still an issue today with many programs).

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SpartanMonkey@reddit

I was on an AMD kick back then because I was poor and just stayed with AMD with the systems I personally built since then, but I did have a Lenovo gaming laptop with Intel a while back. I prefer cheap. :)

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Nateadelphia@reddit

I was on a Celeron at that time, probably around 600mhz from a Dell prebuilt. That baby chugged but it served well for years.

I seem to remember Athlons from around that time being cranky, but I don’t know why I have that thought. Did the instruction set crap out on certain software or games? Please prove me right or wrong on that.

If I were building then, I’d probably have saved up for a PIII.

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Mageowl@reddit

I would have gone with the Cyrix, I always found those to be great cpus. I had one computer running one for over a decade without any trouble.

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texan01@reddit

Oct of 99, I had a pretty decent performing Intel P1-200mmx with a Diamond Stealth 3d card. I had just bought it the year before and was a huge step up from the 486dx2-66 that was the workhorse for my studies.

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RealModeX86@reddit

The K6-2 400 or 450. I would have already been running the super socket 7 board, and that would tide me over for Athlon pricing to come down from there a bit.

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lcarsadmin@reddit

My first build from scratch was a dual PIII. That was a sweet machine.

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Albedo101@reddit

I chose Celeron 400, and it really was in October '99!

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gfkxchy@reddit

Celeron 300, on a motherboard with a 100MHz Front-side bus. 450Mhz!

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terryd300@reddit

First, the 386 would be a hell no!

From the ad, the fastest Athlon available.

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MC68328@reddit

It literally did this back in the day... holy shit, no wonder I got the mere 500 MHz Athlon, that price jump is insane. (Wait, that's 'stralian money, but I assume the difference would scale the same.)

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wwvierg@reddit

Wasn’t quite 99 but I ran a dual CPU Athlon MP setup for a number of years.

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otakunorth@reddit

The Celeron 433 was my first new processor, I paired it with 32mb of ram and a Voodoo 3 2000 and it was some of the best gaming of my life

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ExpectedBehaviour@reddit

The one I did pick – dual PPGA Celerons. ABIT BP6 FTW!

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FlyByPC@reddit

My machine at the time was a K6II-400, so I'd go with that for budget reasons.

Fastest Athlon available, if money's no object.

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nostalgix@reddit

I bought the AMD Athlon 550 MHz back then. I just got some money from a job before I attended university and spend all on that CPU, motherboard and RAM. I didn't regret it. I had the fastest PC on campus for some time

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Kl0neMan@reddit

I was PowerPC and Motorola prior to that, so none of the above CPUs.

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No_Transportation_77@reddit

If money is no object, the 600MHz Athlon wins. Maybe tied with the Pentium 3. If I can do a dualie, then dual P3, but that means I'm dual-booting NT4 or Linux to take full advantage of the second CPU - Win9x can't use it.

OTOH, Win2k is right around the corner, and Win2k will run a lot of Windows games, so maybe if money is really no object, a dualie P3, two disks, dual-booting Win98SE and WinNT 4.0, with the NT4 disk using NTFS, then upgrade to Win2k later.

Or maybe I add SCSI and also multi-boot with OPENSTEP 4.2.

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curi0us_carniv0re@reddit

P3 if I had the money.

Realistically I'd probably buy the K6.

Though I never had one of those. I went from Pentium 2 to AMD Duron

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TerminalJunk@reddit

I actually had a K6-2 450mhz around that time so for nostalgia sake would go with that one.

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cryptoanarchy@reddit

Celeron, cheapest one. Then overclock it!

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BeginningNovel9703@reddit

I am looking at the memory and thinking "that is cheap". Only a few years prior to the add and memory was 35usd per MB.

I remember my college was robbed overnight. All the PCs were opened up and the 16MB of RAM they has was stolen. Yup, they were night machines.

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greenscoobie86@reddit

Celeron 466 was in my first “new” computer. I covered the PIII’s but my folks didn’t have the cash.

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LateralLimey@reddit

P3 on 440bx. Simple and rock solid, I actually had at the time a P3 600Mhz on a Intel SE440BX-2.

VIA chipsets at the time were so fussy and problematic especially with the chipset drivers. It VIA a long time to catch up with Intel.

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prosper_0@reddit

well, lets be fair. the 440BX was the greatest of all time. Even intel themselves never really surpassed it

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LateralLimey@reddit

Yeah the i815 could have been, but Intel cutting SMP, no ECC, and limiting the RAM to 512MB was a bit crap, but given that the i815 was a reaction to the market and the failure of the i850, and i820 chipsets with their RAMBUS memory, and the utter disaster that was the Memory Translation Hub (MTH) that would allow SDRAM use on the i820 it's hardly surprising the i815 has a rushed product.

Still it was solid chipset.

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NHzSupremeLord@reddit

Celeron 466 and 256mb ram

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Psy1@reddit

K6-2 due to Athlon being too pricey and the form factor for P3 making cooling a bit weird. A big ass heat sink on a P3 would run into other component where with AMD you have plenty of room upwards.

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tblazertn@reddit

I miss the old TigerDirect catalogs we got back in the day. That and the original Pricewatch.com

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osidar@reddit

I actually got the Celeron 400mhz, was just released and an upgrade from my 200mhz pentium.

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aussiepunkrocksV2-0@reddit (OP)

Would have been a great upgrade! I know I was over the moon going from a K6-2 300 to a Duron 600!

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osidar@reddit

Yes very lucky, my oldee brother just started working, i think, and he bought himself the P3 600mhz and me and my younger brothers the celeron 400mhz. With the two older p2 200mhz and 233mhz we had we connected them via 10BASE2 coaxial Ethernet and played a lot of lan games. Was fun times.

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2748seiceps@reddit

Summer of 99 is when I got a job to build a 'real' computer that wasn't just a hand me down. K6-2-350, 120MB of RAM, Riva TNT, and a whooping 10GB HDD.

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IllTransportation993@reddit

Athlon for sure.

I was helping someone with computer wholesale business at the time and I still remember that LOTS of el-crapo power supply couldn't work with Athlon. Lots of retailers started to frantically search for a good PSU. Eventually everyone settled on CWT 300W ATX power supply.

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TxM_2404@reddit

Probably a K6-2 because it has 50 more mhz for the same money as the Celeron, so it must be faster, right?
And probably a Voodoo Banshee.

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RogerWilco486@reddit

K6-2 on a QDI Titanium 1B motherboard. It was an outstanding value at the time.

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fernblatt2@reddit

I sadly hitched my wagon to Cyrix... Lol

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retrojw88@reddit

K62 450 I would have if given the chance. I know deep down would loved the athlon. If not I would wait for it out and cheap out, till duron 2+1ghz was upon me.

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Megaman_90@reddit

As a 9 year old I wasn't picking anything. I think we had a Pentium I at this point.

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geforce2187@reddit

I had the Cyrix M-II 300 Mhz from about Spring 1999 to Fall 2001 when I got a Pentium 4 1.5 Ghz

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Ridcully@reddit

Dual overclocked Celerons on an ABit BP-6 motherboard with Windows 2000. That was the stuff...

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aussiepunkrocksV2-0@reddit (OP)

With hindsight I'm leaning towards Celery although at the time I probably still would have been cheap and picked a K6-2!

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Least_Sun7648@reddit

Yummy Celery!

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Jussins@reddit

It’s even better with peanut butter. Just put it under the heatsink on top of the celery.

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aussiepunkrocksV2-0@reddit (OP)

To be fair Mendocino was quite reasonable. Of course all that changed for Celeron in general when the Duron was released.

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greenmky@reddit

Back in the day I did the k6-2 350

I got my hands on some older hardware in the late 2000s though and finally did the celery 300a @ 450 for a win98 build, and it was pretty cool too (I think it was an emachine).

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kenef@reddit

Celeron would be exactly what I had, tho I OCd that by like 35% using a golden orb cooler (those slot 1 Celerons overclocked like champs).

While OC isn't realistic, the Celerons did perform really good for the cost even not overclocked so a lot of people chose them.

Throw in a rage 128 AIW, 192MB ram and basically you got my late high school/early college build lol.

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zeprfrew@reddit

I bought a Pentium 3 500MHz in 1999. At the time I thought it was screamingly fast.

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OldschoolSysadmin@reddit

You gotta overclock the Duron with a pencil.

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saiyate@reddit

Celeron 300A with 128KB of Full speed cache, overclock 50% from 300Mhz to 450Mhz and beats the pentium II 450Mhz with it's 512KB of half speed cache!

I did mine back in the day by covering the B11 pin on the back of the Slot 1 CPU with electrical tape!

(LOL Cyrix, what a POS)

32MB SDRAM, Abit BH6 with the 440BX chipset. Started with a 3DFX Voodoo Banshee 16MB PCI and eventually went to an AGP ASUS v3800 nVidia Riva TNT2 Ultra 32MB with s-video input that had zero latency so I could plug in my SNES and play games in a window. To this day there is no way I've seen to do zero latency video input except for Thunderbolt Share. You could even set the video input as your wallpaper. No CPU overhead either, happened all in overlay on the card (unless recording of course).

Later I went to an Abit BP6 an odd duck Dual CPU system and ran Windows 2000 (Win 9X didn't support Dual CPU) I had Dual Celeron 533Mhz.

The TNT2 was the last card before the first Geforce, the Geforce 256, which was the first Direct X 7 GPU and although they didn't coin the term "GPU", they did popularize it with the phrase "The world's first GPU".

3D accelerated Games: Quake 1, 2, 3, Diablo 2, Half-Life, Dark Forces II: Jedi Outcast (My favorite), System Shock 2, Unreal, Midtown Madness and Motocross Madness were so awesome with the Microsoft SideWinder Freestyle Pro, which let you steer by pitch and yaw (like PS six axis).

Those were the days. Dream computer back then was a Silicon Graphics (SGI) o2 (They invented OpenGL).

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lazygerm@reddit

K6-3 450. Which I had before I updated to a 1GHz Athlon when the first came out.

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tjeerdnet@reddit

Probably one of the last ads where a Cyrix CPU was seen.

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Questioning-Zyxxel@reddit

I did run a dual-processor PII 400 MHz until AMD released their 1.2 GHz Athlon. A few fortunes in computers. Nowadays, it's mostly graphics cards that are silly expensive. Then it was everything.

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_trebhor_@reddit

In October of 99 I had just bought an HP with the card slot P3. That was a great machine and I'd get it again.

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Markaes4@reddit

I did that. Built a computer in 99 and went with the Athlon 600. Thing was obsolete in like a year, but it was a fun year.

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Plaidomatic@reddit

That was when I bought my Athlon 500. I got a better deal than that though.

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cx______@reddit

I had the cyrix, bummer

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DryTurkey1979@reddit

I actually did choose the K6-2 450. It was all I could afford. I remember there was an earthquake around 1999 or so? And RAM prices were through the roof. It was my first pc build.

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Balc0ra@reddit

I had the same. My first AMD as I had a Intel 166 MMX before it

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Jon3141592653589@reddit

I upgraded my overlocked K6-200 running at 225 (75*3) to a K6-2 running 375 on a Shuttle HOT-603. That turned out to be my last PC (except for some big Xeon systems at the office 2014-2019), which I kept running until 2007.

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jdxnc@reddit

I had a K6-2 450 as well and I splurged, paid over $300 for a 10gb hard drive, I didn't know what to do with all the space!

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RogelioP@reddit

I'll be the Boomer and say "none of the above". 1999 I was far FAR more interested in acquiring a few Hitachi 6309 CPUs to upgrade the Motorola 6809s in my collection of Tandy Color Computers 😎

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zeissikon@reddit

Double Pentium II 600 MHz with 512 MB Ram if memory serves right

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ViG701@reddit

Man, I forgot about Cyrix.

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vamadeus@reddit

I think I had a Celeron at the time, which was actually the family PC's as I was in middle school. It performed pretty decently for a budget processor. The 400 MHz Celeron looks like a good value for the price there.

If I were shopping and had a bit more money than just for the Celeron 400mhz the K6-3 400mhz would probably be my next choice.

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DamienCIsDead@reddit

I hung in there with a P2-350 and pair of Voodoo 2 12mb cards until I got to college in 2001 when I got a Duron 800 that did the pencil trick on to overclock to 900MHz, paired with a Geforce 2 MX400 64mb.

I feel like hardware was a little easier to stretch back then. For me, games ran fine right up until after the Quake 3 era. I remember I upgraded because both the Urban Terror mod and Return To Castle Wolfenstein both ran like ass on the P2.

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yrcmlived@reddit

P3 450mhz, I think that was my target

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sh3t0r@reddit

I got a Pentium III 500 PC for Christmas 1999. Two days later we had a several days power outage because of a cyclone.

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GoblinLoblaw@reddit

I got a PIII 500 around the same time, my friends were so jealous.

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rpocc@reddit

All I had in 1999 was a computer based on AMD 486DX4-100, maybe 16MB of RAM and one 640MB Maxtor drive. I got wirking floppy drives, even a CD-ROM drive, an SB card, a popular CL-GD5429 or 5428 VLB video card and that was my first PC right after our local Famicom clone and my Atari I had since 1989. Pentium and older computers were too expensive for my teenage budget and I wasn’t even thinking about that.

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a_mandrill@reddit

My athlon's were never stable, capacitor plague or overheating northbridges or whatever. Retrospectively I'd be aiming for tualatin P3's if I could find the money for them.

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prosper_0@reddit

I bought an Athlon 700 in 1999. I also bought a dual celeron Abit-BP6 system, which I still have on my desk today

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soulless_ape@reddit

I got the AMD K6-3 450 since it was a drop in place replacement for my K6-2 CPU.

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captaininfosec@reddit

In this timeframe I moved from a K6-2 350 to an Abit BP6 with dual Celeron 433's. The ability to run dual CPUs was a big, big deal at the time and the BP6 opened up the market for consumers to do inexpensively! The more frugal way to do so would have been Celeron 300's overclocked to 100 mhz FSB (becoming 450's), but I was a bit more conservative on overclocking.

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nosuchguy@reddit

In 2000 my family bought a computer with Slot 1 Pentium 3 533Mhz, unfortunately I lost it after moving, pity

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rosmaniac@reddit

October 1999? Hmmm, I was running a cast off Sun Ultra 5 with an UltraSPARC IIi 360, running Red Hat Linux 6.1, which was freshly released. I ran that hardware for quite a while, at least until 2003-2004 when it suffered a hardware failure. That was my main desktop for a while, replacing my built AMD K5-90, dual booting Windows 98 and Red Hat Linux 5.2/Mandrake 5.3; it was given to me from a side gig as part of my payment for a contract. The Ultra 5's got lots of use at Walmarts as photo kiosks.

So put me down with a 'none of the above.'

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bhmcintosh@reddit

IIRC in 99 I was still running a VL-bus box with a 5x86-133 and a contrary Adaptec SCSI adapter that kept getting into interrupt fights with the Gravis Ultrasound. Tried OC'ing to 160MHz but had to back off when the SCSI adapter pitched a fit and the machine wouldn't boot. That box ran System Shock at max detail pretty nicely.

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2raysdiver@reddit

That may have been the year I got the incredibly overclockable Celeron.

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OpeningLetterhead343@reddit

'99 to '00 had the cyrix 333. Later in '00 i got the k6-2 450. '01 I got a p3 800 complete system, but only because it was £125 for the whole thing

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NiPPonD3nZ0@reddit

I loved these ads... Would spend lots of time "building" machines on paper with these ads... Build "performance", "budget" and "sport" models... I miss 1998...

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aussiepunkrocksV2-0@reddit (OP)

I do too. Was very happy to find this archive! I remember seeing all the ads in these magazines for Voodoo 2 and TNT etc, but only being able to afford an Intel i740. To be fair, that did open up quite a lot of games.

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Temetka@reddit

I had a Pentium 2 350 MHz machine with 256MB RAM, an 8GB HDD and a Rage128 with 16MB.

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AudioVid3o@reddit

My super socket 7 system currently has a 500 mhz k6-2 that I overclocked to 550 mhz, but with these prices I probably would have gone for the k6-2 450 if I had a super socket 7 PC at the time.

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aussiepunkrocksV2-0@reddit (OP)

AUD from the Adelong catalogue that was always in Australian Personal Computer magazine

https://archive.org/details/apc-199710_20200810/mode/1up

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Ok-Current-3405@reddit

At that time I was running a Celeron 300A up to 450 MHz. In year 2000 I bought an Athlon 600

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BidSmall186@reddit

Crazy how expensive that stuff was

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Ill-Commercial-8902@reddit

Had a K6-2 450@500 at that time. Ran it fine until Valve switched CS from Won.net to Steam and performance tanked. Ended up grabbing an Athlon XP and Radeon 9600 Pro.

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squidcommand@reddit

Holy fuck Pentium 3a were $1475 in ‘99? Adjusted for inflation that’s ~$2830 today!

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penis-tango-man@reddit

Nice early Pentium III there missing the text on the front of the plastic. It’s either a 450 or 500 and likely manufactured prior to Week 10, 1999.

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JamieEC@reddit

https://youtu.be/UE-k4hYHIDE?si=LmMrC8bv5UwrngyG This is a great video on that era. Dual celeron would've been the most accurate for the period.

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LithiuMart@reddit

I bought a 450Mhz Pentium 3 with 128MB of RAM in June of that year.

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exrasser@reddit

The prices in this image seams out in the woods.

I was running a Slot 1 Celeron 300A at 450mhz and later bought a Slot 1 Pentium III 700 Mhz to replace it for 420$ witch was expensive, but it lasted a long time, and made me avoid the P4 and later got a AMD XP1600 instead.

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bikingmpls@reddit

I would have gone with Pentium II even though it’s not listed here. If I remember correctly it was still sold.

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moron10321@reddit

I had a p3 500 slot 1.

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cszolee79@reddit

I had a K6-2 back then (after MMX 166@250 and Cyrix M2). Later I got a K6-3 450@550, and eventually an Athlon XP (Barton) :)

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Global_Network3902@reddit

That Athlon 500 or that 550e

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Bolt_EV@reddit

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3#/media/File%3AIMac_G3_Bondi_Blue%2C_three-quarters_view.png

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setwindowtext@reddit

I’d pick whichever Athlon fitting my budget.

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miner_cooling_trials@reddit

Holy shit I actually worked at this place at the time this catalog was produced. Actually before they went with pretty publishing I used to update the parts price list word doc and fold the A4 sheets and put in a basket outside the shop. Blast from the past. Thanks for this 🙌

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-ST200-@reddit

Celeron 333 @ 633mhz! Too easy!! :D

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omega552003@reddit

K6-2 500 because I wasn't rich enough to get a CPU and mobo

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HoracePinkers@reddit

I was still playing counterstrike on my Ppro200 and voodoo2.

but did get upgraded to a celery 466 in the YEAR 2000! then to tbird then core 2 duo .. quad... and sea of i5s after that

Before the PPro i had a 486DX 25 and before that I had an olivetti 286 with a math coprocessor.

Before that I had a C64... I again have a C64 :) so much funz

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Mobile_Analysis2132@reddit

iIRC, the p3-450/500 have a different chip set than the later p3-550/600. The p3 used more power and dissipated more heat compared to a p3-600.

At least, it did on my builds from back then.

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Useful_Resolution888@reddit

The first computer I built myself had a k6-2 300, which I immediately over clocked of course. I can't remember exactly when that was, but maybe 1998? SuSE 5.3 (with KDE 1.0!) had just come out so I bought a boxed copy of that to install on it.

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Mr_Chode_Shaver@reddit

Did my first build in 2000. Went with a PIII 550mhz. Don’t regret it.

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Mynameismikek@reddit

Thats pretty much right in between me building a (rather scary to build) dual Celeron 300a and later upgrading it to a dual P3.

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pak9rabid@reddit

Athlon Thunderbird ftw

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ghostopera@reddit

Around this time, or maybe early 2000, I went from a K6-2 to an Athlon. It was also my first time playing with water cooling. My loop ended up failing, draining all the liquid. At the time, these chips didn't have any form of over temp shutoff and my Athlon basically cooked itself to death. I was very sad.

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rodyFL@reddit

Same here. Went from a K6-2 to an Athlon, though I don't remember which one. I do remember getting the new Athlon Palomino's when they came out as well. the 1800+

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WingedGundark@reddit

Athlons listed there aren’t Socket A Thunderbirds or XPs like you have on the pic, but Argon core Slot A CPUs. Slot A Pluto core was released in november 1999. Thunderbirds were released in mid 2000 and models up to 1GHz were released both Slot A and Socket A. Slot A TBs were mostly sold to OEM market.

I’d pick slot A from the offerings, it is currently my favourite platform for 99-00 system. Some motherboards and Irongate chipset have some issues and limitations, but my EpoX 7KXA KX133 MB is rock solid. I run 650MHz Pluto overclocked with goldfinger device at 800MHz.

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aussiepunkrocksV2-0@reddit (OP)

Yes unfortunately Slot A is still out of my price bracket even today in the used market though.... My only Slot A is in a HP Pavilion. So I'd have to stretch to a Socket A for a build (and I already have dozens of Athlon XP... But no Tbird systems currently)..

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Velocityg4@reddit

I was still an Apple user of the time. But given how much I was spending. I'd probably build something like this.

Pentium III 500Mhz
256MB RAM
17"-19" flat CRT (Trinitron or Diamondtron)
2x20GB HDD
ATI Rage 128 or 128 Pro (I was an ATI fan but that's probably just because I was Mac user. So, I may have gone with nVidia or Voodoo cards)
Windows 98 (Also would've messed with any other OS it could run NT, BeOS, FreeBSD, &c)
CD Burner
Page Scanner
Decent Photo Printer
Wacom tablet

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Zealousideal-Plate-3@reddit

Built a Celeron 366 and pushed it to 550 on an Abit BX6 2.0 around this time. Ran it with a Vodoo3 3000 PCI that I’m still running in one of my Win98 machines.

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mzrdisi@reddit

Had the Celeron back in the day, did everything I asked of it. 400mhz. I upgraded the RAM, added two CD-R drives, and added a video card.

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EternalSkullman@reddit

Honestly Athlon for me. I'm in the process of re-creating an Area 51 clone and Slot A Athlons always have a soft spot for me. It's why I have a slowly but surely increasing stash of working SlotA boards. (MSI's Irongate trio(6167, 6191 and 6195), ASUS K7M and DFI AK70)

Hope to find an ABIT KA7-100 that won't make my wallet scream in agonizing pain.

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retro3dfx@reddit

My system at the time was a Pentium III 550MHz with a Voodoo Banshee and Sound Blaster Live.

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Stuartcmackey@reddit

An AMD Athlon.. Because that's exactly what I DID build about that time.

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Inevitable-Study502@reddit

i remember having celeron 266mhz in slot, it did overclock to 750mhz...good old times....never understood why would anybody pay that much for few extra mhz

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Few_Departure_6830@reddit

I was a happy owner of 200MMX and Voodoo2. Crazy year, Star Wars and Matrix just came out. Hom3, AoE2, UT and Legacy of Kain was there, Brood War came while before and was kicking hard, and Blizz was doing D2. And its was just announced they filiming LOTR. That was a pinnacle of being NERD.

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ultimatebob@reddit

My dad was hardcore into system building at that point, so he would have sprung for an Athlon 700 and TNT2 Ultra graphics card.

I would have went for the Celeron 300 overclocked to 450MHz, because I was a broke college student at the time.

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jdxnc@reddit

To think I have pretty much ALL of that in bins right now and I'd be lucky to sell it all as a lot for $20 lol.

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O_MORES@reddit

I remember I had picked a K6-2/450, a VIA MVP3 motherboard, and a new ATX case, upgrading from a Pentium II 266Mhz/66Mhz FSB. It felt like a good upgrade for the money in the summer of 1999.

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AustriaModerator@reddit

k6-2 500

but only with a lot of L2 cache

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