In 98 I ordered a p3 500mhz with 128mb and planned to upgrade to 384mb. before it even shipped out to me Intel announced the 550mhz irrc or 10% faster. two years later at least 50% faster with the 700mhz and copper mine.

Things moved rapidly back then.

500 was released in February 99. 550 4 months later, 700 five more months later. $700 worth of CPU performance from February 1999 could be had in a low end March 2000 system with $130 CPU. In 2001 500MHz system was already obsolete.

Yeah. My first PC build was in 98: PII 300MHz / 128MB RAM. No way a P3 500 was available at the time.

No Pentium 2 could be overclocked much above ~500MHz due to the way they were all manufactured. 10% is not really much higher.

I vividly remember pushing 233 to 300.