Pentium 133

[LCGuy]

So today I went to the tip shop, as i often do, and went way up the back, as I usually do where I saw an old PC. Little AT box, power supply, video card, CD-ROM, floppy, everything seemed to be there. Went and asked the shop attendant how much was on it, 5 bucks. I bought it, thinking that it likely doesn't work, but even so, I'll still be able to get more than $5 of parts out of it.

Bring it back home, plug it into my SyncMaster 3, and a keyboard, and powered it up. Booted straight into Windows 95 on the first try. A quick look reveals that its a Pentium 133 with 16MB of RAM (two 8MB 72 pin SIMMs), a 1.25GB HDD, 24x CD-ROM drive and a 1MB S3 Trio64 running Windows 95B. Not bad for 5 bucks, I thought.

I'm mostly thinking of stripping it down, giving it a VERY good clean (God its dusty inside), maybe sticking it in another AT box I have, and adding some extra RAM, and a bigger hard drive, and sticking a clean install of 95 on it for some retro gaming goodness.

 

[z180]

I had a few used Pentium I some time ago.

Some Northbrige(i430TX) can even handle 256MB ram and others often 128.

The 133 or slower CPU can even be passive cooled,I had one.

Pentium boards could sometimes be upgraded to a AMD K6-2 that is

almost Pentium II compatible(is slower at FPU calcs and is missing cmov instruction,so i686 compiled linux doesn't boot).Windows ME installation wants 150 mhz,friends of mine tried.

The MMX CPUs (Tillamook) are also faster in non MMX software.

I had a USB 1.1 PCI card in one computer,but that isn't very compatible with 95 and for windows 98SE I recommend 32MB.

Have fun at gaming!

 

[Unknown_K]

I have one p233mmx for DOS gaming, and some 133's for other uses and as spares. The Intel HX chipset was the better one to have because it can cache 256MB or 512MB of RAM while the cheaper TX chipset only did 64MB (using any RAM out of the cache range was slow as hell). The VX chipset also sucked, granted the HX was the server one.

MMX chips had double the cache built in, so yes they are faster.

 

[LCGuy]

I agree with your opinion on the 430TX chipset, z180. The Gigabyte board I have in the K6/266 has that very chipset, and I'm most impressed with it. I've owned quite a few Socket 7 systems over the years, so I'm no stranger to them.

Anyway, I've been playing with the Pentium 133 a bit, gave it a complete teardown and dusting - damn the thing was dusty inside! Every single part in it was caked in dust. While I had it in bits I also installed another two 8MB SIMMs (the board only has 4 72 pin SIMM slots, no support for SDRAM), and dropped in a Pentium 200. Machine runs a lot faster, although it now freezes up and reboots randomly. I'm thinking something might be up with that RAM...

 

[Unknown_K]

Retro games do not need that much RAM, so you can stick the old RAM back in.

 

[LCGuy]

Yeah, I still have the standard RAM in, I just put in an extra pair of SIMMs. I know that old games wouldn't need any more than 16MB, its just a case of, "I have it, i may as well use it"

 

[madmax_2069]

you do have to watch out in adding to much memory on those P1 chipsets cause on the 430 MX, FX, VX, TX, and HX with sertian types of memory could cache max of 64mb ram, so adding anything over 64mb ram would result in the system operating slower. altho some could support up to 512mb ram

i have a P1 system and it has a mobo with a 430VX chipset in it and i installed 128mb ram in it amd i did see a performance drop. altho it did benifit in having more ram (not swapping to the HDD as much) it did slow down the overall performance.

but still it was a nice system to use to play old games on that will not run on a faster system.