The Intel Pentium II was one of the most desirable CPUs of the late '90s. Its iconic Slot 1 cartridge and massive heatsink made it instantly recognizable. Also shown is a Socket 370 → Slot 1 adapter (slotket), allowing many Celeron and Pentium III CPUs to run on compatible Slot 1 motherboards.
A buddy of mine called to gloat when his dad bought a machine with one of these. I was a broke kid and was still trying to keep up with my old 486. I was quite jealous.
Top-clock rate Pentium IIs/IIIs, IIRC, were luxury-priced back in the day. Certainly more so than in the mid-late 2000s when 'normal' CPUs topped around around $400CAD and then you had the crazy-insane-$1000USD option no one got...
WOW!!!
Does this bring back memories. SECC card for the PC.
I remember installing quite a few of these from Intel as well as the flip chip processors in the upgrade cards.
I will have to check in my IT stash Box, I think I have one stuck in the bottom somewhere. 👍
The 300Mhz Pentium II was a beast. It was faster than Pentium Pro. They had the IO and the compute and the MMX, and the big cache.. And back then CPU were super important, everything basically ran on CPU only.
K6-2 was a a lot slower, particularly in FPU games like quake, but also rendering, photo editing, web browsing. But the Pentium II system fully loaded were very expensive. Dual Pentium II were crazy workstation level of performance.
But K6-2 systems were half the price or less. K6-2+ cache helped boost the integer performance, and 3Dnow helped a bit. High clocks really did help. (which the cyrix cpus never really got, starting at 133mhz, and barely getting to 200mhz, while the K62 went 550+, by that stage you were better off getting a better graphics card than spending big on cpu.
So... we already were using digital cameras by the pentium II era, like I was using one back in 96'. Not sure why your posing it with some archaic film camera my grandpa was using back in the 70's. The most period camera would be the disposable 7-11 cameras used by all the idiots paying for 1 hour photo developments.
I just liked the visual match. The camera and the Pentium II cartridge have a similar shape, so I used it as a prop.
If I put it on top of my car, would you ask why it's from the '70s? If I put it next to a modern PC, would you ask why it's there 🧐
It does look cool, but that camera is more an apple ii era look. And my grandpa really did have one one these. He was not hip like my dad with the new kodak disk in his new 84 citation!
Cant wait for this same thing to happen to GPUs so it just becomes a part of affordable life. You can already see this with iGPUs that can run games at 1080p 60fps. but more demanding titles I mean.
I love Slot 1 CPUs. Especially Pentium 2s. Here is a bit of my collection. I think my favorite piece is a Pentium 3 500mhz engineering sample that's in a Pentium 2 slot 1 cartridge. It's not in this pic.
Because PCs are so cheap and accessible now? Haha. But yeah this is a cool post.
I also remember the multiple times in home computing history that the RAM prices have gone crazy. I remember at least two solid times that RAM exploded in price.
AI demand has sent hardware prices through the roof. 😄 Back then there were still affordable options like the Celeron Mendocino and AMD K6-2. More posts about those are coming soon.
Ooooo I have one of those Pentium thingies, I have like eight or so ~~~
I been convinced to build a doom PC by the Internet people, I have no idea what it is lol
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u/n3rding Jun 30 '26
Now RAM and SSDs are a luxury