alt Hacker NewsI was a poor kid building computers in the mid to late 90's. I tried everything I could NOT to use a true Pentium. My first build (coming from an upgraded Compaq 386DX) was an AMD 486 "DX4". I had a Diamond Stealth PCI VGA card and 16mb of DRAM. After that I tried a 233Mhz Cyrix 6x86. That chip was garbage. I had to run some software pentium emulation to get Cubase to run. I went 300Mhz Celeron after that. That was my first time trying the new SDRAM! After that I FINALLY got a legit Pentium III 400Mhz! I could go on and on as this is a lovely walk down memory lane and there's been some fun dips back into AMD Athlon/Ryzen/etc.
> I tried a 233Mhz Cyrix 6x86. That chip was garbage.
Those chips were excellent value for mostly integer work, but had incredibly poor floating-point performance which was a problem for gamers as the 3D era was really getting going around that time. I had one, it did me good service for a few years.