Very nice! This topic is something, what I have on my todo list fort the Packard Bell PC, which I restored on my channel last year. That one gets also incredibly slow as soon as L2 cache is installed and I assumed the same problem as what you've mentioned. Unfortunately that PC runs on an absolutely unknown ACC chipset, with no documentation whatsoever. Will be hard to mod it properly I guess, but would be a funny project. Thank you for sharing ;)
Oh man you guys are doing the metaphorical Lord’s work. You’re an oasis of civility, brains and good-spirited collaboration amid the soul-crushing wastelands that have spread to 99% of the internet. Thanks for your work, it quite literally kept me going during a rough patch.
Thank you for sharing this! I think I might have this issue on a Forex 386/486 board suffering also from low performance. I might just pop in one extra cache chip and see if it makes a difference! Great video and thanks for sharing this information!
Thanks for watching! I was quite surprised to see how many boards from this era have this problem. Definitely worth a try if it has a second tag socket 👍
Interesting issue. I guess it wouldn't even be noticed by someone who is a compulsive socket/slot filler, so it's good to know it exists. As cache became cheaper later on in the 486 era, these kind of 'options' weren't as economical as they used to be and only one tag socket was required. I have one with two sockets and it's a pain.
I used to sell those boards when I was a PC repair tech back in the early to mid 90's. Even owned one for a short time. I turned 47 on the 15th, and seeing this is what makes me feel old!
Great video. Adding the additional SRAM also improved the memory performance for my FIC 486-VC-H board, which is quite similar to the HD variant. Continue the great work. Thanks a lot.
This doesn't work on every board, but some BIOSes that force you into setup if the battery voltage is low, if you exit without saving changes it'll continue booting normally. Picking "DO NOT WRITE TO CMOS AND EXIT" is the key because that doesn't force a reboot, it just continues the boot process. That got added towards the end of that style of AMI bios though, so it's possible it won't work on that board.
Great to see more FIC boards of that era getting attention! I have a similar board, the FIC 4386-VC-HD (and you do, too ;) were I did not have these cache issues. When I found the board in my attic, it had the same amount of cache as yours (128K without the Alter RAM, maybe it was some kind of factory default configuration). First thing I did was upgrade it to 256K without Alter RAM as my manual also says that it's "optional" and I didn't really pay it more attention. After reading about Alter / Dirty RAM I realized that it has a performance impact and so I added an Alter TAG chip as well. While the performance did increase, it wasn't nearly as impactful as yours: Memory throughput increased by about 2 MB/s from 16.22MB/s to 18.21 MB/s on my 386DX40 according to speedsys. Sadly I don't have cachechk values from before I added the Alter TAG anymore. Maybe you can test with your 4386-VC-HD as well and see if it was just a peculiarity (or BIOS bug?) on the 486-VC-HD
Thanks for watching! Yeah my 4386-VC-HD didn’t have the alter socket populated either. I really didn’t take a close look at performance on that board but will definitely look more into it the next time I take it out 👍
@@MarcoGPUtuber Oh, maybe the Benchmarq IC, but it is just a drop-in replacement for the Dallas 12885/887, which is still made by Maxim. I checked and they’re available.
486 SX 25 was the very first CPU on the very first PC I ever used so very nostalgic! I think that board had no cache to start with, we added some later but don't really recall seeing much difference in games. It was an IBM 486 SX 25 system.
another excellent video! I also happen to have this board in it's 386DX configuration (actually inside an olivetti system) and I have bought the bits to add the 486 socket and missing jumpers/resistors - it is very nice to find we can have some more speed from it :)
This is the kind of board I'm looking for putting into a pizza box style case :) 486, the 6th slot from bottom is a 16 bit ISA, and it's not too wide. Something more narrow, like some 386 boards that are just an inch wider than the ISA slots, would be even better :)
Thank you for the information! ^_^ I have now found these topics on Vogons forum and read them. How lucky I was at the time that my first Am386DX-40 computer was on the ALi M1429/1431 chipset and I overclocked through the BIOS of all timings on the Fastest and ISA bus up to 16 MHz, with an AVGA2 video card, even watched MS Video 1.1 videos normally. ISA overclocked to 20 MHz (yes, there were such dividers are in the bios), but the sound card on the ESS688 chip was already starting to wheeze. Although Doom still started to slow down towards the end of the game, and Doom 2 severely slowed down, starting from the 5th level. But maybe they lacked 8Mb of RAM..
First thought when seeing a surface mount 486SX 25 - I wonder how much it can overclock? Excited to see what it can do! Sure sometimes not much, but other times... they can surprise you. Bonus if you can hedge the voltage up a touch if needed. Always fun to see what some of these "unloved" later budget "fill in parts" like this can do if you can get the shackles off, since technically they were also made on the "latest" process at the time. Pentium 75 is another one that's fun to see - a "back fill" part sure but the core is the same ;)
Nice to see this. I have a couple of 486 motherboards from the same manufacturer also with VIA chipset and both behave the same way you're describing here... I'll see if they support AlterRAM.. thanks for sharing!!
i just got a very nice opti 895 board, sadly i cant enable wb l1, but i get more ftps than my M912 with wb lol. still, at first it was running sooo slow, i got frustrated. turns out it was the turbo jumper that was disabled. lol
Necroware also did a video about how to properly de-pot the integrated modules so you can properly desolder the old battery, instead of Dremeling through the epoxy and soldering a career battery to the old battery, which i can't imagine is good since it'll charge a non rechargeable battery.
To fix devices, you must have an activated win version with uts wn dvd, code, and the amount of win istalled that us allowed. A satellite does the fix offline. Maye your hair dryer comes first on the list, later the 486. My amd x2 cache took 6 monts to become fixed. It's like an ssd, and when clicking on icons, the hdd desn't move, the cache opens the windows, the cpu is at 0%. When the cache runs out, the hdd opens the files. About I can get used to 2x 512 kb cache.
First 🙂 I guess some people will be verry sad if they ever find out, that their youth could have been so much more enjoyable. That said crappy PC systems arent a thing of the past. Some systems man. 10% more budget would bring 50% more performance. Same storry over and over again.
Very nice! This topic is something, what I have on my todo list fort the Packard Bell PC, which I restored on my channel last year. That one gets also incredibly slow as soon as L2 cache is installed and I assumed the same problem as what you've mentioned. Unfortunately that PC runs on an absolutely unknown ACC chipset, with no documentation whatsoever. Will be hard to mod it properly I guess, but would be a funny project. Thank you for sharing ;)
Thanks very much! I was following your work on the Packard Bell PC last year. Would be really cool to see a cache mod on it. Cheers!
@@vswitchzero love seeing my 2 fav retro PC youtubers together :D
@@vswitchzero I'm going to go through my 486 collection and check for this, starting with my 2 Packard Bells. @necro_ware I can't wait for your video!
Oh man you guys are doing the metaphorical Lord’s work. You’re an oasis of civility, brains and good-spirited collaboration amid the soul-crushing wastelands that have spread to 99% of the internet. Thanks for your work, it quite literally kept me going during a rough patch.
@@MOS6582 Thanks so much for your kind words. It's really appreciated and really mean a lot! 😃👍
Thank you for sharing this! I think I might have this issue on a Forex 386/486 board suffering also from low performance. I might just pop in one extra cache chip and see if it makes a difference! Great video and thanks for sharing this information!
Thanks for watching! I was quite surprised to see how many boards from this era have this problem. Definitely worth a try if it has a second tag socket 👍
Interesting issue. I guess it wouldn't even be noticed by someone who is a compulsive socket/slot filler, so it's good to know it exists. As cache became cheaper later on in the 486 era, these kind of 'options' weren't as economical as they used to be and only one tag socket was required. I have one with two sockets and it's a pain.
I used to sell those boards when I was a PC repair tech back in the early to mid 90's. Even owned one for a short time. I turned 47 on the 15th, and seeing this is what makes me feel old!
It never ceases to amaze me how large the max L2 size was on these 486 boards
Great video. Adding the additional SRAM also improved the memory performance for my FIC 486-VC-H board, which is quite similar to the HD variant. Continue the great work. Thanks a lot.
Awesome! Glad to hear it helped with your 486-VC-H. Thanks for watching 🙂
The board may be slow but I sure clicked on this video quickly.
This doesn't work on every board, but some BIOSes that force you into setup if the battery voltage is low, if you exit without saving changes it'll continue booting normally. Picking "DO NOT WRITE TO CMOS AND EXIT" is the key because that doesn't force a reboot, it just continues the boot process. That got added towards the end of that style of AMI bios though, so it's possible it won't work on that board.
Interesting! Thanks for sharing. I’ll have to give that a try
Most folks would never have never found that missing performance.. Well done.
Works good. Stuck a Cyrix Cx486 in it. We have one around here as part of a test and burn-in station for our legacy products.
Great to see more FIC boards of that era getting attention! I have a similar board, the FIC 4386-VC-HD (and you do, too ;) were I did not have these cache issues. When I found the board in my attic, it had the same amount of cache as yours (128K without the Alter RAM, maybe it was some kind of factory default configuration). First thing I did was upgrade it to 256K without Alter RAM as my manual also says that it's "optional" and I didn't really pay it more attention. After reading about Alter / Dirty RAM I realized that it has a performance impact and so I added an Alter TAG chip as well. While the performance did increase, it wasn't nearly as impactful as yours: Memory throughput increased by about 2 MB/s from 16.22MB/s to 18.21 MB/s on my 386DX40 according to speedsys. Sadly I don't have cachechk values from before I added the Alter TAG anymore. Maybe you can test with your 4386-VC-HD as well and see if it was just a peculiarity (or BIOS bug?) on the 486-VC-HD
Thanks for watching! Yeah my 4386-VC-HD didn’t have the alter socket populated either. I really didn’t take a close look at performance on that board but will definitely look more into it the next time I take it out 👍
squeezing every last bit of performance out of these old rigs is like a drug!
Nice video! Learned something new today 👍
2:21 Necroware now has a more elegant solution that reuses the components inside the Dallas battery, which saves you from hunting dwindling stock.
Very interesting! Will have to check that out 👍
@@vswitchzero Yes, he uploaded an update about two months ago.
What dwindling stock? They’re still making the RTC chips.
@@nickwallette6201 On Necroware's video, he says the RTC chip he uses for his open source PCB is running out of stock.
@@MarcoGPUtuber Oh, maybe the Benchmarq IC, but it is just a drop-in replacement for the Dallas 12885/887, which is still made by Maxim. I checked and they’re available.
Looking forward to more videos!
486 SX 25 was the very first CPU on the very first PC I ever used so very nostalgic!
I think that board had no cache to start with, we added some later but don't really recall seeing much difference in games. It was an IBM 486 SX 25 system.
I don’t understand 80% of what you’re saying, but I like your videos.
Thanks very much! 🙂👍
another excellent video! I also happen to have this board in it's 386DX configuration (actually inside an olivetti system) and I have bought the bits to add the 486 socket and missing jumpers/resistors - it is very nice to find we can have some more speed from it :)
Thanks for watching Keropi! Would be really interesting to see the 486 conversion 🙂👍
This is the kind of board I'm looking for putting into a pizza box style case :) 486, the 6th slot from bottom is a 16 bit ISA, and it's not too wide. Something more narrow, like some 386 boards that are just an inch wider than the ISA slots, would be even better :)
Thank you for the information! ^_^
I have now found these topics on Vogons forum and read them. How lucky I was at the time that my first Am386DX-40 computer was on the ALi M1429/1431 chipset and I overclocked through the BIOS of all timings on the Fastest and ISA bus up to 16 MHz, with an AVGA2 video card, even watched MS Video 1.1 videos normally. ISA overclocked to 20 MHz (yes, there were such dividers are in the bios), but the sound card on the ESS688 chip was already starting to wheeze.
Although Doom still started to slow down towards the end of the game, and Doom 2 severely slowed down, starting from the 5th level. But maybe they lacked 8Mb of RAM..
Thanks for watching! ISA bus Overclocks really work wonders for games like Doom! 👍
Great show!
First thought when seeing a surface mount 486SX 25 - I wonder how much it can overclock? Excited to see what it can do!
Sure sometimes not much, but other times... they can surprise you. Bonus if you can hedge the voltage up a touch if needed.
Always fun to see what some of these "unloved" later budget "fill in parts" like this can do if you can get the shackles off, since technically they were also made on the "latest" process at the time. Pentium 75 is another one that's fun to see - a "back fill" part sure but the core is the same ;)
Thanks for watching! Don’t want to spoil anything for the next video but will say I was very pleasantly surprised 🙂👍
Nice to see this. I have a couple of 486 motherboards from the same manufacturer also with VIA chipset and both behave the same way you're describing here... I'll see if they support AlterRAM.. thanks for sharing!!
Nice! Looking forward to the secret project with this motherboard! :-)
Very cool! Looking forward to seeing what your "true purpose" of this board is =D
Awesome!
Yeah, back in the day always make sure write through is enabled.
Wow! Another very nice video! Thank you for your great content! 👍
Thanks very much! 😁👍
Awesome vid. Far too long between dinks. But thankful for the content. Can’t wait for the next one. Keep it up. 😊
Thanks very much! 🙂👍
i just got a very nice opti 895 board, sadly i cant enable wb l1, but i get more ftps than my M912 with wb lol. still, at first it was running sooo slow, i got frustrated. turns out it was the turbo jumper that was disabled. lol
Nice find with the cache!
Spoiler: This probably goes for ISA doom records?
Necroware also did a video about how to properly de-pot the integrated modules so you can properly desolder the old battery, instead of Dremeling through the epoxy and soldering a career battery to the old battery, which i can't imagine is good since it'll charge a non rechargeable battery.
I guess because it isn't a DX2, the L1 cache isn't a huge amount faster than the L2 - or at 25MHz, the L2 can run about as quick as L1
Yep, at only 25MHz the L1 latency is pretty high. It goes down linearly as CPU core frequency increases. Thanks for watching! 👍
You can install pentium overdrive on this board ( even with a lack of contacts in the socket! )
To fix devices, you must have an activated win version with uts wn dvd, code, and the amount of win istalled that us allowed.
A satellite does the fix offline. Maye your hair dryer comes first on the list, later the 486.
My amd x2 cache took 6 monts to become fixed. It's like an ssd, and when clicking on icons, the hdd desn't move, the cache opens the windows, the cpu is at 0%. When the cache runs out, the hdd opens the files.
About I can get used to 2x 512 kb cache.
running the isa bus at the "proper" speed feels very tame now.
Haha so true.. more to come though 😉
Vogons is always good
And "Полигон Призраков" very good (use translator). www phantom sannata org
Never knew about alter ram..
6:54 0KNAB and 1KNAB.
Does anyone know where I can download the English version of CTCM v1.5 (like the one in the video) ?
You can find it on the elhvb "DOS Diagnostic Tools" page under the cache section: www.elhvb.com/webhq/download/index.htm
@@vswitchzero thanks for that!
First 🙂 I guess some people will be verry sad if they ever find out, that their youth could have been so much more enjoyable. That said crappy PC systems arent a thing of the past. Some systems man. 10% more budget would bring 50% more performance. Same storry over and over again.
Very true! Thanks so much for watching 🙂👍