It’s similar for me and the Pentium III 600E with 128MB RDRAM and 10k cheetah drive + 21 inch CRT. Will never forget the day my boss dropped that bad boy on my desk. It was a HP Kayak and was such a leap in speed and capability (I was a multimedia producer at the time) that I still think in my minds eye that it’s the fastest machine I have ever used.
Heh... see, it was the distant past, fading from my memory. You're absolutely right. The machine in question was an early pentium box as I recall, and the fastest machine I'd ever used at the time.
That's kind of amazing given how rare those were/are. I definitely can't top that, but I had a dual Pentium III machine that ran R5 (and ZETA for a while, which I had problems with) in the early 2000's. That thing seemed faster than the machines I have today. Good times.
I remember seeing one of the first Pentium's, it was either a 60 or 66mhz, but it was STUPIDLY fast. Way faster than any 486 we had at the time. We were just watching someone play Windows 3.11 solitaire on it and laughing when they won because the card "waterfall" animation took what felt like 1 second to complete. It was probably longer, maybe 3-4 seconds, but on our 486's it was probably 10-15 seconds.
Around that time (maybe a year later?) I had an ABIT BP6 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABIT_BP6) with 2x Celeron II's. They were 500MHz but trivially easy to overclock to 800MHz and above (I think I could get it to just about 900MHz but it became unstable at that point). To this day I still consider that to be one of the best PCs I've ever used - let along owned.
My folks bought a 286-20 from Dell and it was the fastest machine I had ever worked on. Early in my career as a computer entrepreneur I incrementally upgraded it from mono/Hercules to VGA, added a '287 math-co and eventually a bigger hard drive. I think they got 10 years out of that box before jumping to a 486-DX-100.
For my honors thesis in college I splurged on an 80386-40 and ULSI math co-processor. It was a 386 running like a 486. For a brief and shining moment I had the fastest personal machine on campus. As always the moment was fleeting but I didn't replace that machine until Windows 95 came out.
It was I think dual core 1.5 G with a gig an a half of ram. It was an upgrade from 800Mhz Pentium III (this was a long time ago.) So it was doing normal personal computing things: Web browsing, photo manager, mp3 player, email, document editing (mostly latex, inkscape, gimp). I had a keyboard and an external monitor since the thing was too tiny.
The Pentium Pro is by far the CPU I remember being the most surprised about, and I was an engineer at Intel when it was released. Such an amazing design and manufacturing technique, and 200Mhz with 256 or 512k L2 cache! That seemed like such a huge cache at the time. Performance on video codecs with some tweaks was a 2x jump as well. Funny enough I still have a working Pentium Pro 200 system. good times!
Oh I fondly remember my Pentium MMX 200 Mhz with a Voodoo 2 and a whole 64 MB of RAM. It even ran Windows XP after upgrading to 128 MB of RAM! I was pretty sad when I found out it would not run GTA III :D
I had the same experience with a 900 Mhz Pentium III machine, and Windows XP SP3. It was lightning, blazing fast. It geniunely felt like the reactions for my mouse clicks were faster than I could finish the clicking motion.
I'm pretty sure that the subjectively fastest machine I've ever used was a Sparcstation 4/330 with a monochrome screen about 1990 or so (I'm pretty sure it had a ridiculous amount of RAM for the time, 72MB or something).
With SunOS and the vanilla X11R4 build it really was quite nippy.
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