We got that exact upgrade for our packard bell legend 25mhz sx. The performance boost was huge. It was like getting a whole new computer. We upgraded from 4 to 16 mb of ram and put in a sb16 and cdrom too.
Hello fellow 25mhz SX user. My grandpa gifted me what must have been the cheapest IBM at the time because it only had TWO megabytes of ram and the CPU wasn’t socketed so no dream upgrades like this haha. It let me get on local BBS tho and the rest is history!
@@idadru back then there were 3x CD-Rom interfaces on sound cards, dont be fooled that they are IDE, the Sony, Mitsumi & the Panasonic - IDE CDRoms came later and didnt need the audio cable after DAE became a thing.. I preferred the Panasonic drives back then no messing around and worked without issues, the sony ones were the most problematic, they didnt even have a motorised tray lol they just spat the tray out half way under spring pressure... lol
That's just about the biggest upgrade possible without changing the motherboard! The first PC upgrade I bought was an AMD 5x86-133 for my family's old 486. I also replaced the motherboard since the new one had PCI slots, which also allowed me to upgrade the video card. And I also played a lot of Doom, Doom II, and Duke 3D on that machine! I do like the look of those memory modules you used. The blobs over the chips are a little ugly, but the look of the PCB makes up for it, and it does mean they're very low-profile, which is also nice. I recently soldered up some new modules based on some NOS Toshiba chips I bought from the US America last year and some other NOS Mitsubishi chips I bought from eBay in 2020 for the parity bit, using an updated version of my 4MB memory module design. While the modules failed testing in my SIMCheck, it was just the parity bit, and the Toshiba memory tested fine at 40ns despite being rated at 60ns. These would be very good for overclocking if I can figure out why the parity bits failed (or just use them without the parity bit chips). It's possible I just happened to get a couple of bad chips in a row, so I designed some modules that took SOJ test sockets which would allow me to test all the chips before soldering them onto the modules. I also ordered them from the US America, but they sent me sockets that took 0.35" wide chips instead of 0.3", so they don't work. I think I might have to order the sockets from a genuine reseller in Europe or the UK, rather than some random dodgy website in the US America. But such is the trials and tribblations of designing electronics for vintage computers.
Thanks great video brings back memories of the good all days I had a 386 and upgraded to a 486 so I could play .mp3 files smoothly and multi task in windows.. then a 586 and Cyrix 686 for gaming.. Today I have an awesome 13900k system with ddr5 and it blows my mind what technology can do today. I can’t even max out the system for productivity or leisure… back during the golden era of computers, playing a single .mp3 file with Winamp, would max out cpu!!!!
What’s amazing is how far we’ve come since, but great to see these CPUs such a nice reminder of how fast I remembered as I went from 286 to 386-16 to 486-33 then Pentium-100. Greta times.
Thank you very much for the shout out and for this video. Very exciting, as always. That Kingston CPU is very funny, not only they didn't bother to use a heat spreader, but they also glued the fan directly on the chip, so it blows only at the edges, but the die in the middle is where no air is coming to :D I'm impressed to see this CPU, since it is very rare, but I'm a little bit confused by the engineering job Kingston did on that :D
You are welcome! For me I can say your channel is the best retro channel out there! And I was also very surprised about the cooling engineering on the Kingston. 😅
Imagine having that 16MHz 486 back then, and spending hundreds of pounds on cache and RAM... and seeing no improvement. I was impressed by the number of tweaks on this motherboard, though. It would be amazing with VLB included. Thanks for the video!
My 1st PC had the same CPU, only it was 25Mhz. Eventually, I upgraded to the 83Mhz pentium overdrive CPU, though I think I had to run it at 63Mhz bc that was the highest speed the board supported. It was a Packard Bell PC. It was cool because I remember using the built-in tutorials to learn DOS commands and how to copy disks,files, and stuff.
I loved the subtle background music that you faded in with Norton Sysinfo. It really built up some tension. But then it prematurely ended ;-) No 160MHz today? 40MHz FSB really make all the difference in the world for L2 and mem throughput. And 10x the speed CPU upgrade would also be pretty unique ;-)
Impressive setup. In the old days I owned a 486SX-25 I could easily OC to 40 MHz. I also upgraded ram from 4MB to 8MB. The graphic card was a Cirrus Logic 5428 VLB. It performed so well so I played through Blizzard Diablo.
Glad you're back! Unsubscribed just maybe 3-4 weeks ago when I finally assumed that Channel was done :( So happy to see you again, keep up the good work :) btw; your 486SX/16 was most likely SO heavily CPU-limited that no amount of tuning won't help. Tuned a lot of early PC's since 1987 and seen a lot of quirks in 1990's and some chipsets behaved very strangely. 11MHz AT-bus _should_ help a lot but with 486SX/16... apparently not.
Is there any software to tune that 5x86 Kingston you tested? You can only go so far with AT-bus overclocking until MB goes unstable. Sadly Overdrive-Pentiums were pricey even then. I later had Cyrix CPU's quite a while and those had a lot of tuning-sw available.
Seriously… It made it 4-5x faster in a few minutes. No wonder Overdrive/Turbochip upgrades sold like hotcakes. You’d save at least $1000, which is about $2000 today!
I remember pentium 2 being just stupidly expensive when released. It was much cheaper by 1998. Same with pentium; the P60 and P66 was very expensive and almost nobody had one.
I upgraded my first PC from a 486 SX 25, to a DX 33, to a DX2 66 to a DX4 100. Yes it made stuff faster but it's a law of diminishing returns because the rest of the system like the bus, memory, storage etc becomes the bottle neck. I still got 4 or so years out of it, upgrading bits and pieces until I did a reset for my move to Pentium.
@@drxym For games I'm not sure anything above the DX 33 helped if you had some horrid trident ISA graphics thing. If you have a really fast ISA card I think you'd still see gains from the DX-2/66 and above that you'd really want a VLB or PCI card (some very late 486 motherboards actually had this). You'd still get a higher score in FPU intensive stuff, but you can't really play those games comfortably anyway on a 486 (e.g. Quake). You'd also want L2 when you're getting up there in speeds, which many cheaper 486s didn't come with.
I was lucky enough to own one of the Turbochips back in the day - I installed it for a friend who was still running a 486SX/33 in 2005 and didn't want to throw it away as it worked for their needs - the performance increase was amazing - gave it a new lease of life!
Upgrading my 486 DX2 66mhz to a AMD 5x86 133 running at 120mhz (due to a strange board issue that would only apply a 3x multiplier instead of 4x) was a good upgrade for my 1st PC. I also use a 5volt to 3.3 volt socket adapter in my setup and bought all the parts individually before Kingston started selling the Turbochip upgrades in the US. I still miss that 486 machine. I used it for a little over 5 years in all!
Very interesting. I totally share what you said concerning the benchs results that are strictly identical after the BIOS optimization, I've faced the exact same effects on several systems, and jut can't explain why. The 486SX-16 became a piece of collection, pretty hard to find on eBay (at a reasonnable price of course). And so does the Turbochip !
Love seeing epic performance boosts! In those days I was running a 12 MHz 286, and would have given anything for that kind of machine. Also, FYI, "quadrupled" (kwah-DREW-pulled) means "multiplied by four." In the context of CPU clocks, I understand this is usually clocked by a PLL (phase-locked loop) oscillator. Makes sense, given you're going from ~33 MHz to ~133 MHz. 👍
In advanced tab on BIOS setup, what the option "80486 DX2 CPU (50MHz)" does? It force the FSB to 50MHz? And if so, you can get the CPU to run at 150 MHz? What POST card do you use? I never seen one so tiny. You can populate Banks 2 and 3 (72 pin) RAM to increase the max amount of memory (4/16 M 32 pin RAM sticks are hard to find) and make a nice Win 95 machine...
It's interesting that a 486 @17Mhz was roughly equivalent to my 386DX40. Great video again, good of you to give a shoutout to Necroware, gave them a sub.
I built a couple 386 and 486 machines using parts salvaged from the computer/storage room at my dad's office back in the late 90s, but at home I learned programming and computers in general on already an old but still fun Apple IIGS and Mac IIci, both loaded with the best upgrades you could get because they were gifted from my uncle that saved them from the design and printing place he managed the computers for. I missed out a lot on DOS and Win 3.1/95 and when we did build a computer for be at home I went straight to a Pentium and 98SE. That said, I still use the IIGS and IIci for fun programming but haven't really gone back to older PC stuff (love videos on it though). I never played a ton of games, I just read books on Assembly and C, the two options I had the tools for on both, so I don't have the same nostalgia a lot of people do. I focused more on writing graphics/music programs, my own games, and IIGS demos.
5:53 Such memories... I had this bios in my first pc in 1993 (386 dx 40mhz). It is funny feeling, when you're messing with settings there, which I still remember.
The way you said quadrupled actually makes more sense than the actual way its said. Very nice video like watching these retro tech (well retro to me) videos keep it up.
An interesting comparison would be 286-16 vs 386-16 vs 486-16. It would also be interesting to see the weitek 4167 up against the 5x86-133 - especially the weitek benchmark programs.
olden golden memories - the weitek... 5x86... Weitek equipped boards had a thing with the Xcom IIRC. I dont know, not I can imagine why. They loaded the above 640K memory loaded correctly but then froze when the XCOM started. Same with Xcom 2.
I had 486dx2 66. Was a fun time as it was my first pc in 90s. Always need repair here and there. I didnt mind because it made me who I am now. As an IT Tech. Have done all from desktop support to server level.
I Recently got given two 486 cpus by a friend of mine along with a bunch of other cool tech (including an old 5:4 monitor that actually ended up replacing my newer 16:9 one due to just how good the image quality is) that he "had no use for anymore" I was thinking about selling them but after discovering this channel I'm now convinced to get them running someday, thanks for the inspiration!
Awesome work! What great times back then in the 386 days. One needed intelligence to be able to get games running, and what pieces of art those games were! I se you included Raptor, also amazing memories!
It was. AMD actually marketed the chip as "PR75," meaning in integer operations at least, it could match a 75 MHz Pentium. The Cyrix 5x86 could interface with a 486 socket and was faster, but had major compatibility issues. The AMD part was just a really fast 486 and could be made to work in any 486 socket. If you had an old board that couldn't support 3.45v operation, this TurboChip had the onboard regulator, and used the excess to power the fan.
Really interesting upgrade, but yeah the ISA bus is definitely causing the CPU some bottlenecks! I would have loved an upgrade like this in the early 1990s when I had a 486-33. By 1996 I was using an AMD 5x86-133 (OC to 160Mhz) in a motherboard with a proper PCI bus and it performed extremely well.
The ultimate powerpoint machine. We used to say sx was garbage but by then we'd get dx4-100 for free from people moving on to Pentium 133-166. I hate myself so much I didn't keep any of these and not even my 3dfx.
When I think of all the old gear I had that I had held on to for so long but inevitably got rid of I kick myself. The foolishness of youth I suppose... My old Creative MPEG2 accelerator would be so interesting to play with again 😔
2:32 Home sick from work today with a migraine and I still laughed out loud at "And to scare the shit it of this mainboard" love your content keep it up.
Loved the video. I would of loved to have one of the Kingston or PNY upgrades(have both now) when I still had my Tandy 3200 Machine. I wonder what performance gain it would have got. I also Ordered a Weitek 2265-060-GCD ALU to add to my collection. Got to say Thank You Peter for this channel and your channel has really pushed my love of vintage computers and components and I have been collecting more and more vintage parts and especially old CPUs. Thanks again and have a good one.
Lovely video, congrats. However I think the slow graphics performance on the original CPU was partly due to the clock divider was set to run the ISA bus at a 1/3 of the system memory clock, and once the system got switched to 33MHz, the ISA bus got a very needed boost as well.
I bought one of those Kingston upgrades in the late 1990s to upgrade a Dell tower with an SX-33. It was like night and day, even compared to an SX twice as fast as yours. I ran that machine into the early 2000s before the motherboard failed.
Really interesting to watch! I'm currently getting an Apricot FT//e machine back up and running, and it has the same Turbochip. I'll be using Phil's DOS benchmark (like you) to see how well mine does!
13:10 as teenager in 1993, and then also later I didn't know what is difference between Cache write back (w/back) and w/trough. I know only two first settings on the top - and rest of it below - It was always the mystery for me - what it is doing...- In 1996 I had access to internet in school for the first time, but I never checked it, and forget it later. but now, when you set up those settings with commentary (it looks like you know what you are doing) - it is such a nice feeling, to finally understand it better.
The TurboChip actually IS based on a low powered laptop chip, as you mentioned. It has a small spreader on top of the chip. It's a small piece of metal that's embedded in the top, and it's flush with the rest of the chip. It runs slightly warm. (not hot) You technically probably don't even need a fan - even under load. In my experience, it runs slightly slower than a full 5x86 133, but it's still very fast for a 486 class chip. I think those boards were for 286 users, that still considered high end 386 computers expensive, but wanted to start with a 486. I think they were pretty inexpensive. You also got the prospect of future upgradeability. I am currently using one in a computer that was designed around a DX 33, so the Kingston dropped in & ran just fine. There were some Cyrix options, but they occasionally ran into timing problems.
Funny thing, while Duke doesn't care about FPU performance, if you don't have an FPU you're not going to have a good time in some very specific spots of some of the maps. That's because slope rendering code does an integer FPU load and then store back as a float to then do some further integer magic on that, looks like approximate 1/z calculation, and it does this once per pixel. That's the only FPU instruction used and it's basically non-arithmetic. This function that does this is also called to generate random numbers or something like that but not enough to matter for performance. There's also no alternative implementation for any of this, so if you don't have an FPU, you get it emulated by the Watcom runtime, handling the NM exception, which is predictably slow.
Thank you very much for this interesting Retro video, I enjoy those very much. About your question on intel and the 486/487SX series, I always imagined intel used this as an opportunity to sell a CPU which failed the quality test in production. The 486SX failed on numeric coprocessor function at least, and the 487SX simply failed the speed tests. The chips were packaged different (pinout) to sell them with different mainboards. But I personally at least once saw an 487SX on an adapter board to place it in a regular socket for 486DX. The same reasoning was with the special DRAM module. A partially defective DRAM chip was bonded directly to the PCB, so it could be used with lower capacity still.
I was expecting it to run even faster after the installation of the Kingston Turbochip. I run it on a microchannel IBM PS2 77s with an onboard S3 of 1MB and Doom runs extremely smooth. 3D Bench reports a score of 76 frames per second.
Спасибо что показываете нам такие штуки. Для кого-то ностальгия по прошлым временам, а кто-то и вообще таких в живую и не видел даже. У Вас очень хороший уровень английского языка, без шуток. А мне, как русскому, даже легче воспринимать английский с немецким акцентом. Все четко и понятно.
Very nice, those Turbochips are quite amazing. :) Were those 16MHz chips some sort of OEM special thing, do we know? I worked at a PC-builder in the early 90s and the cheapest chips we could buy was the SX-25. Never did see a 16 and we bought our parts from a huge distributor so if it was available they would've had it. At the time our entry-level PC used AMD 386DX-40, which I'm still fond of today. It wasn't that much slower than the 486-25 as I recall, and the 486 setup cost a lot more.
Yeah, you'd surely view a 100% ISA board as low-end, but it also has a whopping 8 SIMM slots, something I only saw on more expensive boards, and one of the more configurable examples of AMI BIOS. An industrial application makes the most sense to me, somewhere expansion was important, but clock speed wasn't. At the same time though, this era produced some weird and wonderful things, and it wouldn't shock me to learn it was from a name-brand desktop offering.
Possibly in some applications that required performance a bit better than 386 performance but lower power and some more features. I'm pretty sure that the 486SX-16 consumed less power than a 386DX-40. I could see it being used in laptops. And regarding the price, note that Intel reduced the price of the 486SX once the Cyrix 486SLC was released in 1992. To 119 USD, no less.
Something I just realized with the older motherboards is they don't use serpentine/matched traces. I guess it makes sense with the slow clock speeds, but it is weird seeing motherboards without them. I do remember my 333MHz computer had them, so the cutoff must be somewhere below that. Great content as always.
@@joefish6091 yeah. I design PCBs, but mostly as a hobby. The only length matching I have ever needed to do was for USB. It is fun watching videos on DDR3/4/5 though and realizing how slow the speed of light is to require length matching.
Wow! I would find lot more use for that computer in 16MHz configuration. Older 80’s to 90’s games problems with high speeds would run great with 386/33MHz or comparable - for example adventure games, Wing Commander series, etc. Having already i486dx4 and 5x86P75 leaves a spot at that range underneath. Also my 286 is breaking and a little slow anyways to restore.
In the age of 486 the Weitek FPUs usually weren't faster anymore but they were often required for expensive software because they used incompatible Opcodes. Think of them as dongles which actually do something useful.
Hi good video I wish i grew up in the 80s/90s it was probably awesome to experience these generational improvements. Also for quadrupled you say the u like ooo so its quadroopled
Overclocking a 5x86 to 160Mhz is actually really easy and stable. I have used 5x86@160Mhz a lot and still have one in my basement. So you could also call it a 1000% upgrade.
Thanks for the exploration! It's strange seeing an enthusiast using a motherboard with an intact barrel battery - most retro channels I watch treat it like an emergency to remove those asap before it explodes and gets battery acid everywhere within a five mile radius.
That works a lot better than I thought it would. I wonder how affordable that would have been at the time? I'm not sure of the exact timing but I imagine at that point many would be using early pentiums and the cost of upgrading was plummeting which if I remember made these types of upgrades disproportionately expensive. But, it does work very well.
i always find it hilarious that i can now download things faster than some of the processors in my old computers could even think. downloading a file at 80MB a second still makes me giggle.
I'm really curious how high that 486SX-16 would clock. I'm fairly certain it would do at least 33 MHz, and probably 40-50 MHz. I had an old 486DX-25 that ultimately ended up at 48 MHz, though it wouldn't work at 50 MHz. (In hindsight, it was on a "33 MHz rated board", so it could have been the motherboard not the CPU limiting performance). This was around 1993 or so.. My BBS + gaming + work setup consisted of several 486's...
I had a friend that had a 486sx20, never ran across a 16mhz chip in the wild though. The 20Mhz chip was terribad, i cant imagine slowing it down by 20% more. I eventually gave him my 5x86 build once i got my Pentium 120 system until he finally upgraded to a Pentium 200 a year later or so.
The university I was in early 90's had a lot of these 486 SX just the 25Mhz variation, lots os white Gateway PCs. Just 2 or 3 of them had 80487 Math coprocessors.
Great stuff! you may have a more fun experience with Wolfenstien rather than Doom on a board without VESA or PCI I've never come across a 16mhz '486 but I do remember building machines in the shop with the 25 & 33mhz ones, which both could be run @33 and some boards 40mhZ -, if I remember the UMC chipset boards were fairly quick like the ubiquitous PT-429 series, I remember some of the OPTI chipset boards with AMI's WIN-BIOS werent bad either, - thanks for the memory - those were the days of turbo buttons speed displays and setting by jumpers!
Mid-1992, which seems to be when the board was made, sure makes it rather late for a 16MHz machine. While it won't catch a PCI or VLB system with the Turbo Chip installed, I do often think ISA only boards are more capable than maybe some people give them credit for.
We got that exact upgrade for our packard bell legend 25mhz sx. The performance boost was huge. It was like getting a whole new computer. We upgraded from 4 to 16 mb of ram and put in a sb16 and cdrom too.
I remember my first CD-ROM, I had to use the ide port that was on the sound card 😔
The good ol days lol
Hello fellow 25mhz SX user. My grandpa gifted me what must have been the cheapest IBM at the time because it only had TWO megabytes of ram and the CPU wasn’t socketed so no dream upgrades like this haha. It let me get on local BBS tho and the rest is history!
686 was my fav btw
@@idadru back then there were 3x CD-Rom interfaces on sound cards, dont be fooled that they are IDE, the Sony, Mitsumi & the Panasonic - IDE CDRoms came later and didnt need the audio cable after DAE became a thing.. I preferred the Panasonic drives back then no messing around and worked without issues, the sony ones were the most problematic, they didnt even have a motorised tray lol they just spat the tray out half way under spring pressure... lol
Happy to see new CPU Galaxy video's appearing since last week! I was missing them in my weekly youtube routine. ;-) Hope you are doing well.
Thank you! I am fine and will come up with much content during this winter. Thanks for watching! 😊
Greetings from South Africa.
You have blown my mind. This must have been amazing.
Thank you!
Not half as amazing as it was to do this exact same upgrade in 1998. It was literally like having a whole new computer.
Pretty fun to have both lowest end and then upmost end of processors of this socket running on the same board.
excellent thank you, like you've mentioned an 486SX 16 vs 386 DX33/40 would be very interesting.
That's just about the biggest upgrade possible without changing the motherboard! The first PC upgrade I bought was an AMD 5x86-133 for my family's old 486. I also replaced the motherboard since the new one had PCI slots, which also allowed me to upgrade the video card. And I also played a lot of Doom, Doom II, and Duke 3D on that machine!
I do like the look of those memory modules you used. The blobs over the chips are a little ugly, but the look of the PCB makes up for it, and it does mean they're very low-profile, which is also nice.
I recently soldered up some new modules based on some NOS Toshiba chips I bought from the US America last year and some other NOS Mitsubishi chips I bought from eBay in 2020 for the parity bit, using an updated version of my 4MB memory module design. While the modules failed testing in my SIMCheck, it was just the parity bit, and the Toshiba memory tested fine at 40ns despite being rated at 60ns.
These would be very good for overclocking if I can figure out why the parity bits failed (or just use them without the parity bit chips). It's possible I just happened to get a couple of bad chips in a row, so I designed some modules that took SOJ test sockets which would allow me to test all the chips before soldering them onto the modules. I also ordered them from the US America, but they sent me sockets that took 0.35" wide chips instead of 0.3", so they don't work. I think I might have to order the sockets from a genuine reseller in Europe or the UK, rather than some random dodgy website in the US America.
But such is the trials and tribblations of designing electronics for vintage computers.
I used to have this exact chip. I upgraded a 25mhz 486 with this and it was a huge upgrade.
I love this, thank you so much for all your work and cool videos!!!
Thank you 🙏🏻
Ooh, another fun retro upgrade challenge. It's awesome to see you doing new content. Thank you!
Thanks great video brings back memories of the good all days I had a 386 and upgraded to a 486 so I could play .mp3 files smoothly and multi task in windows.. then a 586 and Cyrix 686 for gaming..
Today I have an awesome 13900k system with ddr5 and it blows my mind what technology can do today. I can’t even max out the system for productivity or leisure… back during the golden era of computers, playing a single .mp3 file with Winamp, would max out cpu!!!!
What’s amazing is how far we’ve come since, but great to see these CPUs such a nice reminder of how fast I remembered as I went from 286 to 386-16 to 486-33 then Pentium-100. Greta times.
Thank you very much for the shout out and for this video. Very exciting, as always. That Kingston CPU is very funny, not only they didn't bother to use a heat spreader, but they also glued the fan directly on the chip, so it blows only at the edges, but the die in the middle is where no air is coming to :D I'm impressed to see this CPU, since it is very rare, but I'm a little bit confused by the engineering job Kingston did on that :D
You are welcome! For me I can say your channel is the best retro channel out there!
And I was also very surprised about the cooling engineering on the Kingston. 😅
Imagine having that 16MHz 486 back then, and spending hundreds of pounds on cache and RAM... and seeing no improvement. I was impressed by the number of tweaks on this motherboard, though. It would be amazing with VLB included. Thanks for the video!
My 1st PC had the same CPU, only it was 25Mhz. Eventually, I upgraded to the 83Mhz pentium overdrive CPU, though I think I had to run it at 63Mhz bc that was the highest speed the board supported. It was a Packard Bell PC. It was cool because I remember using the built-in tutorials to learn DOS commands and how to copy disks,files, and stuff.
locked 2.5x multiplier on the Pentium OverDrive. A 33MHz (66Mhz?) crystal oscillator transplant would have gotten you to 83.
I loved the subtle background music that you faded in with Norton Sysinfo. It really built up some tension. But then it prematurely ended ;-) No 160MHz today? 40MHz FSB really make all the difference in the world for L2 and mem throughput. And 10x the speed CPU upgrade would also be pretty unique ;-)
Impressive setup. In the old days I owned a 486SX-25 I could easily OC to 40 MHz. I also upgraded ram from 4MB to 8MB. The graphic card was a Cirrus Logic 5428 VLB. It performed so well so I played through Blizzard Diablo.
I still play Diablo on my system, though it's an AMD-DX4 100Mhz. I unfortunately "popped" my 486-25 trying to overclock (was still learning). lol
Glad you're back! Unsubscribed just maybe 3-4 weeks ago when I finally assumed that Channel was done :( So happy to see you again, keep up the good work :)
btw; your 486SX/16 was most likely SO heavily CPU-limited that no amount of tuning won't help. Tuned a lot of early PC's since 1987 and seen a lot of quirks in 1990's and some chipsets behaved very strangely. 11MHz AT-bus _should_ help a lot but with 486SX/16... apparently not.
Is there any software to tune that 5x86 Kingston you tested?
You can only go so far with AT-bus overclocking until MB goes unstable. Sadly Overdrive-Pentiums were pricey even then. I later had Cyrix CPU's quite a while and those had a lot of tuning-sw available.
Thank you for this excellent video. Couldn't help but laugh out loud when you said you're going to scare the shit out of that motherboard 😆
😇
If someone made a change like that in 1996 I imagine it would be shocking how diffrent that computer would feel.
Seriously… It made it 4-5x faster in a few minutes. No wonder Overdrive/Turbochip upgrades sold like hotcakes. You’d save at least $1000, which is about $2000 today!
If they're using this in 1996 I'd feel bad for them. Pentium II was out by 97.
I remember pentium 2 being just stupidly expensive when released. It was much cheaper by 1998. Same with pentium; the P60 and P66 was very expensive and almost nobody had one.
I upgraded my first PC from a 486 SX 25, to a DX 33, to a DX2 66 to a DX4 100. Yes it made stuff faster but it's a law of diminishing returns because the rest of the system like the bus, memory, storage etc becomes the bottle neck. I still got 4 or so years out of it, upgrading bits and pieces until I did a reset for my move to Pentium.
@@drxym For games I'm not sure anything above the DX 33 helped if you had some horrid trident ISA graphics thing. If you have a really fast ISA card I think you'd still see gains from the DX-2/66 and above that you'd really want a VLB or PCI card (some very late 486 motherboards actually had this). You'd still get a higher score in FPU intensive stuff, but you can't really play those games comfortably anyway on a 486 (e.g. Quake).
You'd also want L2 when you're getting up there in speeds, which many cheaper 486s didn't come with.
I was lucky enough to own one of the Turbochips back in the day - I installed it for a friend who was still running a 486SX/33 in 2005 and didn't want to throw it away as it worked for their needs - the performance increase was amazing - gave it a new lease of life!
Upgrading my 486 DX2 66mhz to a AMD 5x86 133 running at 120mhz (due to a strange board issue that would only apply a 3x multiplier instead of 4x) was a good upgrade for my 1st PC. I also use a 5volt to 3.3 volt socket adapter in my setup and bought all the parts individually before Kingston started selling the Turbochip upgrades in the US. I still miss that 486 machine. I used it for a little over 5 years in all!
You could have gotten 150 MHz out of it easily, if your board supported a 50 MHz bus. I’ve heard that was common.
@@5roundsrapid263 40mhz was the max bus speed on that board. It was a strange gimped PC but I made the most I could out of it.
@@Choralone422 You definitely did!
Very interesting. I totally share what you said concerning the benchs results that are strictly identical after the BIOS optimization, I've faced the exact same effects on several systems, and jut can't explain why. The 486SX-16 became a piece of collection, pretty hard to find on eBay (at a reasonnable price of course). And so does the Turbochip !
Love seeing epic performance boosts! In those days I was running a 12 MHz 286, and would have given anything for that kind of machine. Also, FYI, "quadrupled" (kwah-DREW-pulled) means "multiplied by four." In the context of CPU clocks, I understand this is usually clocked by a PLL (phase-locked loop) oscillator. Makes sense, given you're going from ~33 MHz to ~133 MHz. 👍
Had a "super 286" running @ 16mhz ... fondly remember that machine , playing Falcon 1.0. Then I got a cheap 386SX which was still a better machine.
In advanced tab on BIOS setup, what the option "80486 DX2 CPU (50MHz)" does? It force the FSB to 50MHz? And if so, you can get the CPU to run at 150 MHz?
What POST card do you use? I never seen one so tiny.
You can populate Banks 2 and 3 (72 pin) RAM to increase the max amount of memory (4/16 M 32 pin RAM sticks are hard to find) and make a nice Win 95 machine...
It's interesting that a 486 @17Mhz was roughly equivalent to my 386DX40. Great video again, good of you to give a shoutout to Necroware, gave them a sub.
Chaintech boards are quite nice, they remind me of similar features present on DFI mainboards. Great video!
I built a couple 386 and 486 machines using parts salvaged from the computer/storage room at my dad's office back in the late 90s, but at home I learned programming and computers in general on already an old but still fun Apple IIGS and Mac IIci, both loaded with the best upgrades you could get because they were gifted from my uncle that saved them from the design and printing place he managed the computers for. I missed out a lot on DOS and Win 3.1/95 and when we did build a computer for be at home I went straight to a Pentium and 98SE.
That said, I still use the IIGS and IIci for fun programming but haven't really gone back to older PC stuff (love videos on it though). I never played a ton of games, I just read books on Assembly and C, the two options I had the tools for on both, so I don't have the same nostalgia a lot of people do. I focused more on writing graphics/music programs, my own games, and IIGS demos.
That mainboard is a great find. The earliest iteration of 486DX board, not much different than a late 386DX. And a very respectable brand, too.
5:53 Such memories... I had this bios in my first pc in 1993 (386 dx 40mhz).
It is funny feeling, when you're messing with settings there, which I still remember.
Your voice is great. Great videos. Thank you.
Love having you back in 2023!
Very Nice Content .... ty for detail the Cache and RAM Options. I like
The way you said quadrupled actually makes more sense than the actual way its said. Very nice video like watching these retro tech (well retro to me) videos keep it up.
An interesting comparison would be 286-16 vs 386-16 vs 486-16.
It would also be interesting to see the weitek 4167 up against the 5x86-133 - especially the weitek benchmark programs.
olden golden memories - the weitek... 5x86... Weitek equipped boards had a thing with the Xcom IIRC. I dont know, not I can imagine why. They loaded the above 640K memory loaded correctly but then froze when the XCOM started. Same with Xcom 2.
The 486-16 is more or less on par with the 386-DX40
I had 486dx2 66. Was a fun time as it was my first pc in 90s. Always need repair here and there. I didnt mind because it made me who I am now. As an IT Tech. Have done all from desktop support to server level.
Спасибо! Как всегда оригинальный и качественный контент!!!
Great video thank you
Those 486 overdrive chips were very useful and kept users from “needing” a pentium for a while… or until quake of course :-)
I Recently got given two 486 cpus by a friend of mine along with a bunch of other cool tech (including an old 5:4 monitor that actually ended up replacing my newer 16:9 one due to just how good the image quality is) that he "had no use for anymore" I was thinking about selling them but after discovering this channel I'm now convinced to get them running someday, thanks for the inspiration!
Awesome work! What great times back then in the 386 days. One needed intelligence to be able to get games running, and what pieces of art those games were! I se you included Raptor, also amazing memories!
I had a Kingston 133 in my Packard Bell when I was a kid. It made later DOS games run so much better. Great video! I subscribed!
Wow, I had a 486DX/33 in 1993, but this is in a whole other league!
Welcome back! I am so happy to see your excellent videos back on my feed.
From 386 level performance to Pentium level! Amazing upgrade.
It was. AMD actually marketed the chip as "PR75," meaning in integer operations at least, it could match a 75 MHz Pentium. The Cyrix 5x86 could interface with a 486 socket and was faster, but had major compatibility issues. The AMD part was just a really fast 486 and could be made to work in any 486 socket. If you had an old board that couldn't support 3.45v operation, this TurboChip had the onboard regulator, and used the excess to power the fan.
Really interesting upgrade, but yeah the ISA bus is definitely causing the CPU some bottlenecks! I would have loved an upgrade like this in the early 1990s when I had a 486-33. By 1996 I was using an AMD 5x86-133 (OC to 160Mhz) in a motherboard with a proper PCI bus and it performed extremely well.
The ultimate powerpoint machine. We used to say sx was garbage but by then we'd get dx4-100 for free from people moving on to Pentium 133-166. I hate myself so much I didn't keep any of these and not even my 3dfx.
Hah, you'd love my retro corner - V30 to P233 MMX :D (I'm missing a 286 but I don't really care about those)
When I think of all the old gear I had that I had held on to for so long but inevitably got rid of I kick myself. The foolishness of youth I suppose... My old Creative MPEG2 accelerator would be so interesting to play with again 😔
2:32 Home sick from work today with a migraine and I still laughed out loud at "And to scare the shit it of this mainboard" love your content keep it up.
Two videos in a week or so? You are spoiling us! Thank you :)
Loved the video. I would of loved to have one of the Kingston or PNY upgrades(have both now) when I still had my Tandy 3200 Machine. I wonder what performance gain it would have got. I also Ordered a Weitek 2265-060-GCD ALU to add to my collection. Got to say Thank You Peter for this channel and your channel has really pushed my love of vintage computers and components and I have been collecting more and more vintage parts and especially old CPUs. Thanks again and have a good one.
Thank you for the XT-IDE video links!
Lovely video, congrats.
However I think the slow graphics performance on the original CPU was partly due to the clock divider was set to run the ISA bus at a 1/3 of the system memory clock, and once the system got switched to 33MHz, the ISA bus got a very needed boost as well.
Good that you are back! Thanks for this interesting video!
Thanks for the good memories… I miss those days
Interesting board! Just glad that you're back!
I bought one of those Kingston upgrades in the late 1990s to upgrade a Dell tower with an SX-33. It was like night and day, even compared to an SX twice as fast as yours. I ran that machine into the early 2000s before the motherboard failed.
Really interesting to watch! I'm currently getting an Apricot FT//e machine back up and running, and it has the same Turbochip. I'll be using Phil's DOS benchmark (like you) to see how well mine does!
ufff... what for a fast upgrade. insane! i need to build a time machine.. back to the 90's
Thanks for comming back with another great video!!!
This was back in the fun days of CPU's
I upgraded my 486DX-33 back in the days with one of these CPUs. Big improvement indeed ;)
13:10 as teenager in 1993, and then also later I didn't know what is difference between Cache write back (w/back) and w/trough. I know only two first settings on the top - and rest of it below - It was always the mystery for me - what it is doing...- In 1996 I had access to internet in school for the first time, but I never checked it, and forget it later.
but now, when you set up those settings with commentary (it looks like you know what you are doing) - it is such a nice feeling, to finally understand it better.
The TurboChip actually IS based on a low powered laptop chip, as you mentioned. It has a small spreader on top of the chip. It's a small piece of metal that's embedded in the top, and it's flush with the rest of the chip. It runs slightly warm. (not hot) You technically probably don't even need a fan - even under load. In my experience, it runs slightly slower than a full 5x86 133, but it's still very fast for a 486 class chip. I think those boards were for 286 users, that still considered high end 386 computers expensive, but wanted to start with a 486. I think they were pretty inexpensive. You also got the prospect of future upgradeability. I am currently using one in a computer that was designed around a DX 33, so the Kingston dropped in & ran just fine. There were some Cyrix options, but they occasionally ran into timing problems.
Funny thing, while Duke doesn't care about FPU performance, if you don't have an FPU you're not going to have a good time in some very specific spots of some of the maps.
That's because slope rendering code does an integer FPU load and then store back as a float to then do some further integer magic on that, looks like approximate 1/z calculation, and it does this once per pixel. That's the only FPU instruction used and it's basically non-arithmetic. This function that does this is also called to generate random numbers or something like that but not enough to matter for performance.
There's also no alternative implementation for any of this, so if you don't have an FPU, you get it emulated by the Watcom runtime, handling the NM exception, which is predictably slow.
I remember upgrading from my original dx2-66 to the AMD K5 and being blown away. It was like having a new PC for around £70.
Thank you very much for this interesting Retro video, I enjoy those very much.
About your question on intel and the 486/487SX series, I always imagined intel used this as an opportunity to sell a CPU which failed the quality test in production. The 486SX failed on numeric coprocessor function at least, and the 487SX simply failed the speed tests. The chips were packaged different (pinout) to sell them with different mainboards. But I personally at least once saw an 487SX on an adapter board to place it in a regular socket for 486DX.
The same reasoning was with the special DRAM module. A partially defective DRAM chip was bonded directly to the PCB, so it could be used with lower capacity still.
I'm English an quadrupled still trips me up occasionally - you did a good effort.
Great video. Blast from the past :)
I was expecting it to run even faster after the installation of the Kingston Turbochip. I run it on a microchannel IBM PS2 77s with an onboard S3 of 1MB and Doom runs extremely smooth. 3D Bench reports a score of 76 frames per second.
Great video, Peter! Very insteresting hardware. That Kingston Turbochip must be somewhat rare. I never heard about it before.
Спасибо что показываете нам такие штуки. Для кого-то ностальгия по прошлым временам, а кто-то и вообще таких в живую и не видел даже.
У Вас очень хороший уровень английского языка, без шуток. А мне, как русскому, даже легче воспринимать английский с немецким акцентом. Все четко и понятно.
Very nice, those Turbochips are quite amazing. :)
Were those 16MHz chips some sort of OEM special thing, do we know? I worked at a PC-builder in the early 90s and the cheapest chips we could buy was the SX-25. Never did see a 16 and we bought our parts from a huge distributor so if it was available they would've had it. At the time our entry-level PC used AMD 386DX-40, which I'm still fond of today. It wasn't that much slower than the 486-25 as I recall, and the 486 setup cost a lot more.
Yeah, you'd surely view a 100% ISA board as low-end, but it also has a whopping 8 SIMM slots, something I only saw on more expensive boards, and one of the more configurable examples of AMI BIOS. An industrial application makes the most sense to me, somewhere expansion was important, but clock speed wasn't. At the same time though, this era produced some weird and wonderful things, and it wouldn't shock me to learn it was from a name-brand desktop offering.
Possibly in some applications that required performance a bit better than 386 performance but lower power and some more features. I'm pretty sure that the 486SX-16 consumed less power than a 386DX-40. I could see it being used in laptops. And regarding the price, note that Intel reduced the price of the 486SX once the Cyrix 486SLC was released in 1992. To 119 USD, no less.
Something I just realized with the older motherboards is they don't use serpentine/matched traces. I guess it makes sense with the slow clock speeds, but it is weird seeing motherboards without them. I do remember my 333MHz computer had them, so the cutoff must be somewhere below that.
Great content as always.
unequal trace routing is problimatic with high speed busses, latency timing becomes critical.
@@joefish6091 yeah. I design PCBs, but mostly as a hobby. The only length matching I have ever needed to do was for USB. It is fun watching videos on DDR3/4/5 though and realizing how slow the speed of light is to require length matching.
I really enjoy your videos. Thankyou for making them .
Wow! I would find lot more use for that computer in 16MHz configuration. Older 80’s to 90’s games problems with high speeds would run great with 386/33MHz or comparable - for example adventure games, Wing Commander series, etc. Having already i486dx4 and 5x86P75 leaves a spot at that range underneath. Also my 286 is breaking and a little slow anyways to restore.
In the age of 486 the Weitek FPUs usually weren't faster anymore but they were often required for expensive software because they used incompatible Opcodes. Think of them as dongles which actually do something useful.
Hi good video I wish i grew up in the 80s/90s it was probably awesome to experience these generational improvements. Also for quadrupled you say the u like ooo so its quadroopled
Overclocking a 5x86 to 160Mhz is actually really easy and stable. I have used 5x86@160Mhz a lot and still have one in my basement. So you could also call it a 1000% upgrade.
Thanks for the exploration! It's strange seeing an enthusiast using a motherboard with an intact barrel battery - most retro channels I watch treat it like an emergency to remove those asap before it explodes and gets battery acid everywhere within a five mile radius.
😅
That works a lot better than I thought it would. I wonder how affordable that would have been at the time? I'm not sure of the exact timing but I imagine at that point many would be using early pentiums and the cost of upgrading was plummeting which if I remember made these types of upgrades disproportionately expensive. But, it does work very well.
Qua-Drew-Pulled. And while we’re talking about it, cache is pronounced just like cash. Actually, I prefer your pronunciation. Love!
That beep had me laughing. Great video!
3:38 The second “u” in “Quadruple” is pronounced less like “couple” and more like “strudel”. It is an odd word for a German speaker! Great video. 👍
As a native English speaker we pronounce it Qwod-roo-pel. The Google Translate page says it correctly with the audio 'Listen' function.
i always find it hilarious that i can now download things faster than some of the processors in my old computers could even think. downloading a file at 80MB a second still makes me giggle.
Good times! I had a Cyrix 133 back in the day.
Excellent video Peter, as always 👍👍😀😀😀
I'm really curious how high that 486SX-16 would clock. I'm fairly certain it would do at least 33 MHz, and probably 40-50 MHz. I had an old 486DX-25 that ultimately ended up at 48 MHz, though it wouldn't work at 50 MHz. (In hindsight, it was on a "33 MHz rated board", so it could have been the motherboard not the CPU limiting performance). This was around 1993 or so.. My BBS + gaming + work setup consisted of several 486's...
Большое спасибо за качественный и полезный контент! 👍🏻
Hahahaha - "And to scare the sh&^ out of this motherboard" - laughed for 5 minutes!
I have one of these chips in my collection. I really should build a 486 setup and utilize it.
love the videos hope your all ok over there
I had a friend that had a 486sx20, never ran across a 16mhz chip in the wild though. The 20Mhz chip was terribad, i cant imagine slowing it down by 20% more. I eventually gave him my 5x86 build once i got my Pentium 120 system until he finally upgraded to a Pentium 200 a year later or so.
Another interesting adventure in retro. Did you notice the strange looking "L" in the BIOS info and menus? Why do you think it is?
Far more interesting than your old CPUs are all the hacks of modern times we hadn't in these days, like the CF-IDE or LAN-BOOTROM Hack. Very nice.
That´s a beautiful and true retro DOS PC
The university I was in early 90's had a lot of these 486 SX just the 25Mhz variation, lots os white Gateway PCs. Just 2 or 3 of them had 80487 Math coprocessors.
Love your stuff, keep the great content coming!
So good to see the content again! yay!
i have 386dx 16/25 mhz board and it dont have cache at all but works pretty ok with ram at these bus speed
Could you still add the wy-tec 4167 co-chip as well to setup? Or does the 486/133 include or cover it already? Thanks great video!
Great stuff! you may have a more fun experience with Wolfenstien rather than Doom on a board without VESA or PCI I've never come across a 16mhz '486 but I do remember building machines in the shop with the 25 & 33mhz ones, which both could be run @33 and some boards 40mhZ -, if I remember the UMC chipset boards were fairly quick like the ubiquitous PT-429 series, I remember some of the OPTI chipset boards with AMI's WIN-BIOS werent bad either, - thanks for the memory - those were the days of turbo buttons speed displays and setting by jumpers!
Mid-1992, which seems to be when the board was made, sure makes it rather late for a 16MHz machine. While it won't catch a PCI or VLB system with the Turbo Chip installed, I do often think ISA only boards are more capable than maybe some people give them credit for.