for the comp nerds among us

wasn't some 486's actually better than the P75?

Depends on what you mean by "better." Some of the AMD 486 clones worked with existing motherboards (thus didn't need an upgrade in this respect) and had higher benchmarks.

Kinda like saying that the Alfa Romeo 75 TS is better than the BMW 328i. On a twisty country road with tall hedges I strongly suspect both will be fairly well matched. On a drag strip the BMW would be quicker. Substitute general application use with high FPU use and you get the idea...

Absolutely not, even a P60 kicked a DX/2 50 so far up the arse it's tonsils wobbled.

Lordy.UK wrote in news:MPG.20837e527c7b7fcc98a326 @news.ntlworld.com:

my DX4/120 with 512k secondary cache plugged in was pretty nippy.

Christ, I'd forgotten they went up to that high a speed. My ageing memory is still pretty sure that a P60 was loads quicker than even that though.

I seem to recall that some of the competitors (such as Cyrix) could compete respectably in benchmarks against the new Pentium chips, but they were s*it when it came to actually doing anything useful - which in those days was basically just playing multiplayer Doom II :)

yeah a friend of mind claimed to have a pentium it even come up in the bios as pentium when he ditched the system we took it apart and found a cyrix!

didn't the cyrix have a s**te FPU? or something i think it was s*it at office stuff like excel or something and i think from memory people even found it got sums with large numbers wrong.

ah i see...

Yes, the weakness was in the FPU side, the strength was in integer use.

For many people, it didn't really matter, it was a x86 unit, it worked - if you see what I mean.

For most users, a P60 or P66 wasn't a better option than a DX4/100 (of course, really a DX3/99) and had comparable performance. Then you throw in the higher speed 486s (AMD's 120 and 133 MHz units), these kicked butt.

Oh and the 486 didn't melt like the early Pentiums either.

I remember having an edition of PC World (nowt to do with the shop) magazine with "120MHz Pentiums - Fastest PCs ever!" on the front.....

'Monitor and mouse not included...'

In twenty years time we'll be looking back and laughing at the Core 2 stuff doing the rounds today...

I had a P60 on a preproduction Batman board, it was far faster than a DX4/100 as long as you threw memory at it.

If I recall correctly it had no FPU ;)

Indeed. These days of course they'd just give it a calculator and a hug.

Why wait, I laugh at it now. Especially when people I know who barely know how to switch a computer on buy an all-singing all-dancing one with

sydicate was the nuts! they did a update to it later but it was never as good. loved that game!

remember that! i was going to a comp fair about around the day it happened and bought myself 2 64mb sticks and a spare 2 64mb chips which paid for mine when the prices rocketed. the only time i ever got free ram haha.

bigfoot that was seagate and i think it was a 10gig job wasn't it? it was also 5 1/4 too wasn't it?

same here i was in pc world yesterday watching an x box 360 run a demo of the new sonic game on a 40" HD telly and i can remember being 16 seeing sonic on the mega drive looking a lot more s**te!

my cardboard is full of console history and the loft still holds 2 amiga's! a 1200 and 500, i've got a SNES an early PS1 and a dreamcast in the wardrobe and my old x box crystal still sits under the telly next to the 360 :)

Nooooo, Quantum made the Bigfoot. They were mostly 3.5" and came in loads of different capacities, I still have a 4.3 tucked away in a draw full of computer bits :)

Charlie says, "ya and how much did memory cost then, like, ohmygosh."

I remember paying £100 for a 2 Mb SIMM...

In news:461a835f$0$21841$ snipped-for-privacy@news.zen.co.uk, DervMan wittered on forthwith;

"Oh my Gosh".

That's a phrase that is highly likely to make me want to attack the person saying it with something not quite sharp enough - like a chainsaw running at

Arghh. I *hate* twee sayings.

This has been a public information post.

Nah the bigfoot was 5 1/4". Massive things and failed on a regular basis.

Fraser