CPU of the Week – New Pentium Overdrive 133Mhz Retail Boxed

Pentium Socket 4 Overdrive 120/133Mhz

Welcome to this, the second in a series of posts about vintage CPUs that I’ve encountered and collected over the years into our museum. We have more than 1200 CPUs, some of which are extremely rare. We will share information and photos of some of these in the coming months.

This is a rare CPU indeed; with a very narrow marketplace. It was designed as an upgrade path for the socket 4 Pentium P60Mhz or P66Mhz. It doubled both the speeds to either 120Mhz or 133Mhz. In practice, you’d just set the motherboard to 66Mhz to give the 133Mhz speed regardless.

It’s basically the ultimate in socket 4 technology. It was part of Intel’s strategy to try to sell 2x CPUs for at least some PCs that were sold, whilst acting as a consolation prize for those of us who at the time made a very expensive snafu when deciding what technology to have in our new PC. After so many years of things being comparatively static around the 486 socket 3 tech, it was a bit tiresome that the first socket out of the gate the powers the much vaunted Intel Pentium chip was a bit of a dead-end. However, people were starting to get wise(r) about such tactics. One of the reasons that this Overdrive chip is so unbelievably rare nowadays is simply because Intel didn’t sell many of them! Its a better bet to bite the bullet and get a new motherboard….