[dspillett]

> I tried a 233Mhz Cyrix 6x86. That chip was garbage.

Those chips were excellent value for mostly integer work, but had incredibly poor floating-point performance which was a problem for gamers as the 3D era was really getting going around that time. I had one, it did me good service for a few years.

[nobleach]

Yeah, I was all about recording music/running the first iteration of software synths. I was a Graphic Design major at that time so Photoshop/Illustrator/QuarkXpress were my jam. Those suprisingly didn't run that bad - in real Graphic Design, no one used Eyecandy (the reason everything on the web in 1998 had drop shadows, outter glows, lens flares) so rendering "3D" rarely came into play.

[oleggromov]

Not only performance, I strongly suspect there were issues with implementation too as the apps would just freeze/die frequently.

[dspillett]

They were practically overclocked coming out of the factory, so if you had any issue at all with cooling, or attempted to clock them up even higher, they would be unstable.