Comments on: Intel Pentium II introduced May 7, 1997

By: Luyd Freitas

Luyd Freitas — Thu, 14 May 2026 12:16:03 +0000

I already commented on this post last year, I did the same.
Our PII 233 MHz (the first one released) was overclocked to 350MHz, the minimum to run YouTube videos in 2006 without crashing, that was in 360p, when 480p was still emerging.

Good times, it worked overclocked until 2013, when the processor finally died in peace, a total of 15 years of operation.

By: Magnum

Magnum — Fri, 08 May 2026 05:34:46 +0000

In reply to Magnum. I should have mentioned the reason I wanted dual CPUs was because I was running BeOS!

By: James

James — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:52:45 +0000

I remember learning that a particular stepping of PII-300 could be reliably overclocked to 450 MHz. I bought one along with an Abit BH6 motherboard and ended up with a screaming fast PC that I could afford on my burger flipping teenager wages. I ran that machine until I eventually upgraded to a 1.4GHz Athlon.

By: Magnum

Magnum — Sat, 10 May 2025 11:18:48 +0000

At the beginning of 1999 I built a PC with dual 450MHz PII CPUs and 256MB RAM. I still refer to it as “the beast”.

By: neo

neo — Sat, 10 May 2025 01:12:01 +0000

In reply to Dave Farquhar. i owned a celeron 300a on aopen 440bx over clock to 100mhz fsb 450mhz

By: Dave Farquhar

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 09 May 2025 19:03:41 +0000

In reply to neo. Yes it was. The Celeron is its own story that deserves its own blog post at some point. It's on my list.

By: Luyd Freitas

Luyd Freitas — Fri, 09 May 2025 12:28:05 +0000

My first PC was with this processor, the very first 233MHz processor, later overclocked to 350MHz, it served to learn about computers and hardware in more depth, it survived from 1998 to 2013, when it finally rested in peace.

Even though it was a processor clearly designed to run on Windows 98, it ran better on Windows 2000 in my experiments, after 2005 I used it as a secondary PC, and it survived longer than I expected.

It was on it that I tested YouTube, and I needed the overclock for the videos of the time, 2006, to run without problems.

By: neo

neo — Wed, 07 May 2025 14:44:05 +0000

is celeron 300a based on the Pentium II