Livestream 10/12/2023 – Pentium 2 450 MHz

Since the new Pentium 2 build was complete (and a mighty fine build if I say so myself!), it was natural we’d do a streaming session to check it out. It’s a really fun time period to explore, and can be a bit eye opening. My point there is that many times in our minds when we played games like Half-Life for the first time in 1998, it ran flawlessly. The reality is less kind however.

It’s easy to look at some of the 90s games through the lens of newer machines. I’ll often reach for a Pentium 3 machine to play some of my favorites from the late 90s, and not a Pentium 2. Nothing to do with me just building one, point being a Pentium 3 will do everything for you looking at that period of games. And many of them run far superior on a higher horsepower machine, as they should.

So when we look at the Pentium 2 specifically, and even with such a “good” card as the Riva TNT from 1998, many games do struggle to keep up decent performance, with decent quality. But I’m willing to bet if you go back to that time period, that’s how games ran. Our memory has distorted that, however. But we still had a blast, trying to tweak every little bit of performance out of our machines.

That said, I love exploring specific time pieces, and this being nearly the ultimate 1998 machine (besides a Voodoo 2 SLI setup perhaps), it’s extra fun to play some games on. Check out the livestream replay below!