Would a Pentium II PC have been feasible for £500-ish in the late 90s?

[Intel Celery 1000]

I always believed we had a Pentium II as our first family PC, I'm not sure why. Probably a sticker on the case, maybe I noticed it on the POST screen. Digging into old photos I figured that as of August 1998 we still didn't have the PC yet, meaning it would have been late 1998 or some point in '99 we got it. That's squarely in late Pentium II era.

Now what's complicated this is I asked my dad about it and he said his friend built it for him...and that at that time he absolutely wouldn't have spent anywhere near a grand cause he couldn't afford it (even though he was thinking of buying a laptop at the time which would have been mad expensive???). He says the figure that pops into his head on a whim is £300, but take that with a grain of salt. Considering it was a good friend of my dad, do you think it's possible he could have sold him a second hand Pentium II system with a CDROM and monitor/peripherals included anywhere near the ~£500 range?

 

[alex24]

I’d say it was possible. Based on timing the it could have been early Pentium III but I would have thought a new machine with one of those would be setting you back more than £500 as far as I can recall and since it was so similar to Pentium II then I would have thought the smart money would be some sort of Pentium II, possibly even new as they continued to be produced into very early 2000’s I think.

 

[Gray2233]

The Athlon Thunderbird and Pentium 3 were late 90's, doable with old stock maybe but I imagine it still would have been tight.

I remember getting a Athlon Thunderbird 800mhz, 128mb RAM, Geforce 2MX, 20gb HDD setup with a 17" CRT and mouse/keyboard for around the £800 mark in 1999.

 

[Intel Celery 1000]

I’d say it was possible. Based on timing the it could have been early Pentium III but I would have thought a new machine with one of those would be setting you back more than £500 as far as I can recall and since it was so similar to Pentium II then I would have thought the smart money would be some sort of Pentium II, possibly even new as they continued to be produced into very early 2000’s I think.

I just spoke to him again and he's adamant that even £500 would have been too much - it was definitely closer to £300. A Deschutes Pentium II 450 MHz CPU alone cost $669 on launch in August 1998, for reference. Even with subsequent discounts and lower tier models, there's no chance you could be putting together something new with the whole shebang for £300. At a stretch I could see if dad's mate had a Klamath PII lying around and an older 440FX or LX chipset board, he could have sold it off to him at mates rates. That would make some sense as the number 233 does speak to me, and that's the freq of the lowest clocked PII.

I played StarCraft, those Army Men games and a few other 2D titles that required faster Pentiums, so I can't see it being any older than a Socket 7. The only 3D games I remember playing on it were Dominant Species and Lego Rock Raiders, although with my standards at the time, I probably wouldn't have really noticed or cared if games were running at 10 FPS. It was also later "upgraded" to Windows ME when that launched.

This is the issue with those foggy memories. If there was a Pentium II sticker on the case, maybe that was there from a previous build and it didn't have one in there when we got it? Maybe it was just put it on there for no real reason. Maybe I did see Pentium II in the post screen...or did I see Pentium 200MHz/233MHz and think that meant Pentium II? Maybe it wasn't even Intel, could have been Cyrix or AMD. It's all a mystery. Don't ask why I want to know all this so badly, I don't quite understand myself either...

 

[Monkeynut]

Wasn't there a PII based Celeron that everyone was getting cheap and overclocking massively at the time? Might have had that.

 

[Intel Celery 1000]

Wasn't there a PII based Celeron that everyone was getting cheap and overclocking massively at the time? Might have had that.

Yeah the initial Celerons were terrible because they had no L2 cache. Intel fixed this with the legendary 300A that added 128KB L2 cache which ran at full speed, as opposed to the half speed 512KB of PII/PIII. On top of that with a motherboard that supported 100 MHz FSB (mostly 440BX chipsets), you could potentially overclock it straight to 450 MHz. If we say the $150 launch price converted nicely to £100 at the time, that would make the £300 total more plausible - if not for having that Celeron, then driving down the prices of other CPUs it effectively obsoleted. I mean even without overclocking it would have invalidated a lot of the PII Deschutes that launched only 4 months earlier, for 4-5 times less monies, let alone the '97 dinosaur Klamaths. If word spread on that then maybe PIIs were being offloaded for effectively pocket change. I don't know what boards and other components cost at the time though, especially in GBP. Sites in the 90s didn't seem too bothered mentioning that little detail.

 

[dowie]

I think you'd be looking at more like a grand.

IIRC my dad had a Gateway 2000 P5 166 in the mid-90s and that was easily over a grand maybe two grand even. Then later I ended up with a PII or PIII (can't remember which) and I think was 500 MHz and that cost a fair bit too, easily a grand+

You'd maybe have been able to get a Celeron down to £500 if self-build etc..

 

[Gray2233]

I think you'd be looking at more like a grand.

IIRC my dad had a Gateway 2000 P5 166 in the mid-90s and that was easily over a grand maybe two grand even. Then later I ended up with a PII or PIII (can't remember which) and I think was 500 MHz and that cost a fair bit too, easily a grand+

You'd maybe have been able to get a Celeron down to £500 if self-build etc..

You could usually get much better prices on builds from smaller shops doing custom setups and the like, companies like Dell and Gateway often had pretty hefty mark ups while bundling all sorts of stuff in that may not have been needed (printers, scanners etc).

The build I listed above was a CPU on par with the P3, faster in some scenarios unless the Pentium was using Rambus if my memory serves. I had it built by a local computer shop after giving them a parts list, although in fairness I didn't need a Windows licence as I already had one for W98. The monitor might have come from a reward scheme my at the time stepfather had going at work too, but I'm not 100% on that and I've no way of checking as we no longer speak.

 

[K.C. Leblanc]

Is it possible it was an original Pentium but running at 200mhz?

 

[JasonM]

Back in 1997, at a computer show in Bingley Hall Stafford, this is the days OCUK did not exist and shows were best place to buy directly.

For £400 exactly I purchased a Pentium II 266 CPU, 64MB of RAM, and an Intel LX motherboard. To confirm this was only these 3 parts.

 

[Tee Hee Johnson]

Wasn't there a PII based Celeron that everyone was getting cheap and overclocking massively at the time? Might have had that.

300A, awesome then and still is now… for retro activities of course!

 

[LewisRaz]

celeron 300A has to be the most famous overclocking cpu surely