My first PC had a Cyrix CPU, a P166+, running at 133MHz. PC vendors building middle- to low-end PCs liked them, because they were cheaper than Intel, and for mo

My first PC had a Cyrix CPU, a P166+, running at 133MHz. PC vendors building middle- to low-end PCs liked them, because they were cheaper than Intel, and for most stuff people did with their PCs back then, it offered acceptable performance. Unless you wanted to play Quake, that is. ;-) But the integer performance of these chips was rather impressive. The other problem was that Cyrix CPUs used more power than Intel's, so they generated more heat and therefore needed a better cooling system. PC vendors often used cheap low-end fans that were well-suited for Pentiums, but caused many, many crashes due to the system overheating. Once I replaced the fan with a bigger one, the crash-rate dropped by about 90%.