LGR 486 Update! Installing L2 Cache
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ต.ค. 2024
- Got 256KB in cache chips to install alongside the 486 DX2-66! Installing them in the Woodgrain 486 DOS PC to see what they can do.
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Adding more cache has diminishing returns, so I don't think adding 512K would make it significantly faster than 256K. But I could definitely tell a difference between no L2 cache and the 256K you added. I was thinking Duke3D performed better than that on a 486/66. I have a 486/75 laptop and it runs Duke3D perfectly without even reducing the screen size. Admittedly, the best 3D game I could ever get to play on 486/33 mhz machines was Heretic.
Indeed, from what I'm reading 512K wouldn't be a massive difference. I may try messing with the clock multiplier though!
Isn't he running an AMD DX2/66? I guess that's why it's slow... ;)
Well, for the clock multiplier, I'm guessing that 100 MHz is your only options as say 75MHz, whiel giving your more MHz, doesn't it also lower your bus speed from 33MHz to 25MHz? I remember reading about this with early Pentiums.
The 8-Bit Guy He is running a AMD 486 NV8T revision which is write through cache. It would be better for him to use a SV8B which supports write back L1 cache. That should increase performance. I agree this system feels like a slow DX2 66.
I must say that highest framerate I get from bumping FSB to 50MHz (Dx4 in 2x50Mhz mode) DRAM was a tricky part, but performance was much better.. Duke nukem was playable in 640x480 mode. Maybe it is important, video card was VESA Local Bus (some trident) and 50Mhz clock was probably helping with frame buffer speed. Small note regardin Heratic and Doom - some performance gain can be observed when switching DosExtender from Dos4GW to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PMODE and more memory was available to games...
For those wanting the math, that L2 cache made the computer score better by about 25%, which is not too shabby, especially seeing the price of it.
I have a 386DX 25 and adding 64K of cache (not L1, but cache at all) made it at least 50% faster in every benchmark I tried. You could feel the difference, even while booting.
LGR. You have to add wood grain around your keyboard, monitor, and speakers. That's a must
LOL
+AtTheGates also woodgrain penis as well
He should surgically implant woodgrain into his skin.
Handful of leaves and dirt tossed here and there. spray some deer/T-Rex pee for ambiance.
Wooden keyboard.
Yay, L2-Cache! This fine 486 sure did deserve it!
edit: Given that you can disable the L2 cache in the BIOS (without that jumper configuration horror, oh my) you may be able to, e.g., do Doom "timedemo demo1" (I guess duke3d also has timedemo functionality?) benchmarks with and without L2 cache to quantify the speed gain if you desire to do so.
Great video, always a pleasure to watch!
edit2: Another thing that influences 486 performance: The original 486 L1 cache design is a write-through cache, which means that any writes need to be synced with memory (or L2) immediately. Intel later (with the DX4) changed this to a write-back cache, where L1 cache lines need only be written to memory (or L2) when they need to make place in the L1 cache for other contents, greatly reducing write accesses to memory.
Your 486 is a "66NV8T", which means it's a 66 MHz piece, with reverse-engineered (non-Intel) microcode, 8 KB of L1 cache, write-through (the "T") caching policy - this should perform exactly like an Intel DX2. Later AMD released the "Enhanced Am486", which has write-back cache and performs better than the classic flavors if the BIOS enables write-back L1 cache (or if there's a jumper setting for it). If you happen to have other AMD 486 chips lying around: If the model code ends with a "B" (e.g., "66SV8B", like commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AAMD_Am486.jpg) this is a newer version. The 100 MHz Am486 you considered in your original build is such a newer version (and, of course, will also run nicely at 66 MHz if you so desire).
(I don't think Intel released a DX2 with write-back cache)
I never get tired of watching your videos man, your way of talking, your knowledge and all that stuff... Keep doing what you do.
Thank you!
I LOVE YOU
Looks like mine and other's recommendation still was enough to warrant for a new video. ;-) However, I must point out that the machine is still not very optimized. Maybe you should set the cache speed to max. Also, 512K is not going to happen unless you find 4x 1024K cache chips. And eve then, there will be no upgrade to the speed, since you only increase the cacheable area. (from 32MB to 64MB) The more drastic improvements will be a Write-Back Enabled DX2 CPU. It does not enable this caching method out of spite, only a handful 486 actually support that. The other thing would be a PCI or VLB card that is fast enough like a Matrox PCI or a Mach32 VLB card. :)
Knowledge!
Here in my garage, just bought a new 486 here. It’s fun to try out here in the Goodwill hills. But you know what I like more than materialistic things? Performance. In fact, I’m a lot more proud of these seven new L2 Cache's that I had to get installed to upgrade two thousand new 486's that I bought.
4 x 128K cache chips?
But are you saying that if he had installed just one chip for 32KB L2 cache, it would only cover 4MB of address space?
The difference between 28 and 32 pin SRAM sockets is the maximum memory per chip supported. The 32 pin sockets have extra address lines to support 64Kx8 SRAMs, while the 28 pin sockets only support 32Kx8.
Technically that board could handle 384k of cache with 4 x 64Kx8 and 4 x 32Kx8 chips, but I doubt it could address all of it due to the TAG RAM being too small.
The 32 pin sockets are probably to give the user the option to use four 64Kx8 chips or eight 32Kx8 for 256K of cache; Or two 64Kx8 or four 32Kx8 chips for 128K of cache.
The package was sent from Chernivtsi, Ukraine. Greetings from Chernivtsi! There are your subscribers too in Chernivtsi! At least me.
ㄴㅇㄴ
You monster, how could you pry those cache modules from each other! Couldn't you see that they were in love?
Damn! You just shook the dust out of my old nerd brain. I used to build these things years ago. Went to many a computer show (Geek flea market) and bought parts! Never bought a ready made box. It was more fun building it out yourself. A co-worker and I years back when the Atari 130xe, etc. were popular were working night ak/a Graveyard shift. Being Resident Programmer Analysts could get pretty boring on the night shift. We were there in case a job on the mainframe coughed up some bits which thankfully was rare. A bored RPA was a dangerous thing soo... We hardware hacked two Atari 130xe's and kicked them up to 320k! A monster in those days. They got a kick out of us with ripping open the machines and swapping out chips plus making wire jumps on the board to be able to address the extra ram in bank switching. Ahh.. those were the days.
Do you still have the Atari 130XEs? If so, check out some of the current upgrades. 1MB and more, 65816 CPUs, RGB output, Dual POKEY "stereo" audio, SD Cart Adapters, WiFi Modems, you name it!
main memory speed 11.6 MB/S its crazy to see how far things have come
we used to live in caves and didnt know what fire was. ya weve come far
Oh and you know that because you were threre?
I suspect that early humans would probably know about fire, seeing as fires have occurred naturally on Earth for almost 500 million years. it is not really that sure how long humans have employed fire intentionally, but at least a few hundred thousand years and possibly as early as two million years ago. However, it is only in the last few hundred years that we have really come to understand the chemistry behind it.
As for living in caves, well, it is hard to say, while obviously many of our finds of early humans do come from caves, that might be just because of the caves offering protection for the remains rather than indicating this was the normal habitations of people at the time.
my god, i was only suggesting that the average hard drive is now 10x faster than the RAM in this machine
+james hallas Comparing to 6 gbp/s SSD drives probably a little bit more.
Shove a 100MHz DX-4 in there Clint! Com'on, you know you wana!! (:
As someone who had a DX2-66 growing up, I would be interested to see just how much more performant that processor might be. What do you say, Clint?
+John Bradley I've used both. With a DX4 @ 100MHz, Duke 3D is incredibly smooth (at standard resolution OFC). That's without boarders and high graphics mode too.
I've talked about and showed a DX4-100 before! It's quite fast.
th-cam.com/video/Qt-0lqkJUKE/w-d-xo.html
+Lazy Game Reviews True that. Just thought that the speed advantage would be a nice thing to have considering the compatibility for DOSing should be much the same as a 66 DX2. Love these hardware vids none-the-less, Especially anything 386/486 related! A 386 (or before era) build would be pretty sweet someday though. (hint? =P)
Excellent. I need to dig deeper into your back catalog, apparently.
Now all of your Excel 4.0 spreadsheets will be super fast! :)
It puts the lotion on the woodgrain
or it gets the slows again
+Sudos IT GOES WITH THE GRAIN OR IT GETS THE SANDER AGAIN...
oh that made me laugh, funny late night laugh
PUT THE FUCKING CACHE IN THE WOODGRAIN!!!!
Adam Smith Best comment ever written 🤔
I never played Duke Nukem 3D until I owned a P133 I got for my 18th birthday, so it's always been smooth as silk for me :)
Watching these 486 videos brings back so much nostalgia. My first PC was a 486/66 from 1995 and I remember loving it when I was a teenager.
I love all these videos you're making with the 486! I enjoy building PCs and it's so refreshing to see something so unfamiliar to me, but yet unquestionably in the same vein.
Thanks, I'm glad you're enjoying!
I swear these 486 videos are the new thing I go and rewatch when I'm having a bad day. The old goto was your video on the all-in-one compaq 486. Apparently the cure for my depression is watching Clint muck around with 486s.
Gave as much boost as your Pentium overdrive did! pretty amazing. Love this Series Client, I have a a couple 486 Compaqs (including a CDS 524 all in one) but I'm making the jump to custom build a 486. Still collecting parts. Your videos really help. Thanks!
Darn! I can remember doing that, back in the day. I also remember installing math co-processors on motherboards as well as getting RAM in long, plastic tubes and pushing them into the motherboard at a shop I worked at.
This has been a great little series. I'm putting together a 3DFX K6-2 machine soon. You rocked putting this thing together and making it all work. Really enjoy your channel.
You need a AMD DX4-120, that has 40 MHz FSB and VLB frequency. A good combination would be a Tseng ET4000-w32 VLB with 2 MB VRAM
Thanks for this series of videos. Takes me back to my old days. I still have all my systems from 386dx33 with co processors, and my dx2-66 also with cache. I believe I still even have my old Cyrix frying pan 586dx166mhz all retired in complete running state. Would be interesting to power them up and see if they boot one day.
Having this video randomly pop up in my recommended 2 years after I watched it, I'm reminded that my 486 was basicly outdated 2-3 years after I bought it. You can keep a 486 for nostalgic reasons for far longer than you'd keep it as your main computer back in the early 90s :p
5:57 - I remember doing this upgrade in 1993-1994 as an inexperienced teenager on my "Packard Bell" 486 DX/2-66 and not being aware of orientation (dot to notch), I installed every SRAM chip backward! Lots of magic heat/smoke. Thankfully, it only fried the SRAM chips and not the entire motherboard. The store I mail ordered them from was gracious enough to educate me and replace them free of charge, considering they were a significant chunk of change at the time!
WOW! What a nice store :-) ..pretty sure you won't be that lucky nowadays...
I thought this was going to be a boring episode but somehow it was quite enjoyable. Having flashback from 98/99 when my brother bought his/our first PC and he assembled it part by part.
By the way, I still have that same computer, the motherboard was changed in a week but it's basically the same, the CPU, the sound card and the 3GB Quantom Fireball HDD is the same. I don't seem to have the original mouse and keyboard we used it with. And the graphics card was upgraded during it's active use time and had to change the memory modules (upgrade and replacement of faulty ones). It feels nice to think back but I'm not keen on going back to my early PC gaming days. Don't get me wrong, I still love Shadow Warrior, Blood, Duke3D, Shogo and all those old games it's just... Time has moved on. Saying this after I spent a week restoring/cleaning an old Amiga 500...
I have to say your my favorite you tuber. You look into the obscure and the geeky. You love your fans and are always positive. Every every you release brings a smile to my face and I have to say, thank you very much.
I am genuinely happy to hear it :)
As a viewer from Poland I'm quite happy that the envelope with cache chips had some information in polish on them! "Tutaj otwierać" (open here) and "Papier z odpowiedzialnych źródeł" (paper from responsible sources) made my day ^^ Greetings!
Ah, nostalgia! My third computer was a 486 DX2 50 MHz intel with VESA bus. If memory serves, it had the very same video card that you use in your build. Turbo button would switch the display between 25 and 50 MHz. :) Finding a good VESA upgrade video card was an expensive endeavor at the time. Ended up upgrading the entire system to an AMD 5x86 at 133 MHz with PCI bus and 2MB cache. Still AT form-factor though. Been building my own computers since. Glad to see these things are still out there, alive and kicking bits around. I'd love to build up a 486. My "legacy" PII/PIII gaming rig is geared more towards Win95 era games, but I do throw the occasional DOS game at it once in a while. I still have some original boxed games from that era. Thanks for sharing!
Hey Clint! A little trick I use is clear hot glue in mounting holes. If you do it right it won't really be visible but will hold the board away from the case pretty well, and it comes off really easily so no worries about damage :)
Good idea!
I still have my pair of Compaq 486 PC's that I grew up with. Both have been upgraded with the AMD 5x86-133 CPU's and 64MB RAM. No trouble with Duke 3D that I can remember!
Seeing the VLB video card brings back memories though. Although they did make 486 boards with PCI, by then the Pentium was taking hold. I've nearly lost track of al the systems I've gone though over the years, but my best memories were probably with the AMD stuff. The 5x86-133 ran great at 160Mhz in certain boards too LOL.
Memories! (See what I did there)
Out. NOW.
Leave.
GET OFF THE STAGE!
Ferry Ansony
I thought that was the joke
Hahaha. Fantastic!
OMG! in the background as you brought us into the project, Jazz Jackrabbit came up and man that took me back to a very younger part of my childhood. I remember being in awe the fact snow kinda collected on the ground in that game, I thought that was cool :D
Seeing the thumbnail chip I was half expecting you where going to have to solder them on, at least it wasn't that hardcore.
Dude - Watching you struggle with jumpers was my highlight of the day. Far out...the amount of times I've been there, friend hahah
Still having a 486 dx2 80 laying around somewhere with 16mb memory with a pci slot on it and awe 32 soundcard.. was my 1st PC back in the day after i messed around with an MSX2 NMS8255 for years, realy makes me want to rebuild it again.
Hell i may even have my old Diamond multimedia videocard somewhere
It just dawned on me, this is your vagabond falcon. I feel this is going to be a great journey...
I played Duke Nukem 3D on my 66Mhz DX66 which is a lower model with high detail, at fullscreen with cache on an ISA 1MB video card and it played fine. Don't remember what resolution it was tho. You might have turbo off which lowers it in half.
When I was young, we didn't have the $$$ to get toys like this. Coleco handheld football was top notch lol. The very 1st computer I ever played around on was a Radio Shack TRS80 w/cassette reader. It is amazing how far technology has blossomed since then. I was 10 when the Commodore 64 was released in '82, and I knew 1 person who had one. Those things retailed around $600 back then (almost $1500 today). Now that I am older, I can afford these things, and from seeing the Packard Bell I owned (1st computer I bought) to the rig I own now is quite a difference. TY for the video. Subbed.
Ah, memories of overclocking a "Fugutech" 486 board (PC Chips clone), running the motherboard at 60MHz with an undocumented jumper, setting my Cyrix Cx5x86 chip at 2X for a 120MHz clock, and sourcing some 10ns cache chips and the fastest RAM I could find for it. I had to use some ridiculous waits on the RAM and could only use one VLB slot (not just one at a time, only one slot of the three was reliable at that speed), but that thing just flew for a 486 based platform.
*starts ebaying for Fugutech motherboards*
60mhz FSB for a 486? _I must try this_
I wonder if you used a water cooling system and an Evergreen or Kingston overdrive chip you could hit 180 or even 240mhz... :-o
Or, hell, just overclock a DX50 to 60mhz and see what its performance is like. (Or attempt running a DX2-50 or 66 at 1x multiplier somehow?)
Those jumper installations give you an idea of what it's like working on a modern car. Everything is crammed in so tight with no space to work. It can take a couple hours to get a bolt lined up or taken out because you can't see it and have to reach around in a awkward position just to touch it. Yes you crank position sensor on the 1.8t VW/Audi. Yes also you timing belt tensioner. Yes it takes a lot of patients good job though.
i'm pretty sure there's a fetish for placing chips
Then is Louis Rossmann the high end 8mm snuff style?
I still have my pair of Compaq 486 PC's that I grew up with. Both have been upgraded with the AMD 5x86-133 CPU's and 64MB RAM. Yes trouble with Duke 3D that I can remember!
The thing that still blows my mind about this era of PCs was the pace at which the tech evolved. Got my first PC in December 1994, an AMD 486 DX40 with 4Mb of RAM and a 170 Mb HD from the now defunct Escom. Within six months I'd dropped a DX2 80 in there and about 8 months later I was up to a DX4 100. That's three processors and 2 motherboards in just over a year. That HD soldiered on into the Win95 and Pentium era too before it got to the point that it couldn't hold any more than 2 games at once.
And here I am typing this on my FX8350 I've had since 2013 and 3 year old GTX970.
Did you ever hear about fake (it was really a fraud) cache on 486 motherboards??. I have two of those chips, really fake, made of plastic and soldered in the motherboard doing absolutely nothing. They come in pcchips motherboards if i remeber well. If you want i can send you a picture. They are pretty messed up because there were hard to desoldering from the motherboard
I haven't heard about that one but I do remember in 1996, 1997, IBM PCs like the Aptiva had no L2 cache at all. They came with a Pentium 166 MHz or 200 MHz and no L2 cache at all! I decided to choose my own parts and selected a mobo with 512 KB L2 cache, which was the maximum in 1997.
To desoldier chips, the professionals add that cream thing to prevent oxidation, blow hot air, pull off the chip.
I think you can use break fluid if you don't have that cream. It can handle 200 °C.
The PC chips motherboards, I have one and am tempted to put actual cache chips in when the system eventually gets built.
@@morantaylor This mother has this two chips a mention earlier, together. And the tracks for the first chip ends in the second one and nothing else is connected to the mother. This two chips can be opened!! because they are so fake! and inside all "chip legs" are soldered together. Later, came a newer version of this motherboard with a newer version of fake chip. These were made of plastic too, but inside there was a resistor, generating heat to simulate that it was a real working chip
@@cornalito I am aware of this and was planning on replacing the fake chips with actual cache chips. I have had this board for 25 years.
Isn't that just the chip socket? Or was it just a chip shape?
That's a great improvement! Certainly way more playable now. Back in the day, this would be totally acceptable, so in a way, you successfully accomplished what you set out to do - make a period correct 486DX2-66.
I'm looking forward to more videos of this machine!
Maybe you should build an overkill 486 instead
Perhaps someday, but as explained in the original video, that is not the goal of this one.
Lazy Game Reviews True that, and, like you mentioned, that performance might be lower than you remember thanks to nostalgia. But, well, it is still a really nice project.
But yeah. Gotta go overkill some day :P
I've got plenty of overkill machines, like this one :)
th-cam.com/video/Qt-0lqkJUKE/w-d-xo.html
Lazy Game Reviews Hehehe, Yep, that pretty much is it!
Your woodgrain DX2 is just plain awesome. DX2 + VLB = 486 era at its finest :)
Funny fact, I've used the SRAM chips used for 486 cache, as replacement RAM for the Sega Genesis. As long as it's the 32KB chips and the right pin count, they almost always work, because they are faster than what the Genesis will need anyway, and are basically, the same. Genesis uses PSRAM (fake SRAM, really DRAM internally, but with SRAM pinouts), and cache uses real SRAM. So if anything, it's an upgrade (with no gain though).
Addind faster ram without changing the clock speed of the data bus is generaly useless.
Nekkz Right, which I said it had no gain. But, the chips are usable for repair, since they are more easy to obtain than PSRAM.
That is cool indeed. A nice hack.
IT NEEDS MORE WOODGRAIN everybody knows wood grain increases performance the the grainer the better
I remember my 486DX/2-66 was faster than your "Woodgrain" with Duke 3D on high detail even and fullscreen one tick down. Quite like Doom 1. Seems to be more than the Cache problem?
Meet Clint, Operation world champion since 1987...
Ha!
The biggest performance gain you'd get in Duke3D is with a good VESA-Compliant video card. A TSENG et4000 or better. The CPU and cache are more than good enough to run that game full speed.
How much cache did you say it cost you?
+AtTheGates it was a joke
They give ya cache, which is just as good as money.
kostandrea XD
Oh it's got caché baby! It`s got caché up the ying yang!
he oughta do a collab with LTT. RGB woodgrain
You need a caddy load CD-ROM for it, to make it really 1990s. I'd love to do this myself, for me my first x86 computer experience was around 1993/1994, i remember in 1st grade them putting the IBM eduquest boxes in, and by 4th grade i remember writing a seaquest DSV fanfic in Late 1997 in class, before i got my own x86. I just need to find the right Eduquest, something with a 486, and pop in a decent soundblaster, a CD-ROM, run windows 3.11 and DOS 6.x. Keep up the good work man, love this 486 quest.
Another setting to check is wait states. I remember upgrading from a 486DX2/66 to a DX4/100 in 1995 and not noticing much difference. Then someone told me to check wait state settings and it made a huge performance difference(20-30% in some cases) in demos and games. I don't remember what settings the Amiwin bios had on them with wait states though, as I remember I always went with Award because of some missing features on the Ami one, but I can't remember which ones anymore.
Another thing that would help is a faster bus speed. In the late 486 era, I had an AMD 5x86/133(which was really a 486 running on a 33Mhz bus with a 4x multiplier) running at 150Mhz(3 x 50MHz) and tried it at 160Mhz(4 x 33Mhz) and it was far faster at the 150Mhz speed. With that cpu, quake ran about the same as it did on a Pentium 90, and Duke 3D ran smooth at 320x200.
The weird thing is, I get almost twice the memory speed on a 25mhz-bus system with the most conservative memory timings the BIOS (from the same manufacturer) allows you to set. At the faster timings, it's 2.5x the speed. Unless it's got the turbo switch accidentally turned off (which CacheChk should have detected and showed a lower MHz figure for... hmm, should have tried that myself, totally forgot), or the BIOS allows and defaults to _extremely_ conservative memory timing, there's something deeper and weirder going on.
I love how my Atari Falcon with its 66Mhz Motorola 060 processor runs Duke3D at a silky 30fps+ and also Quake 1 reasonably well, compared to the PC counterpart. All with it's included stock video controller and sound chip. Maybe you should check that machine out one day Clint!
Separate L2 Cache and math Co-processors. Now that stuff is built right into the CPU.
It has to be. The higher operating frequency means that the very electrical impulses they use to operate _wouldn't have time_ to travel that distance across the motherboard from CPU to MMU to cache chips and back without causing considerable lag.
The 486DX had an integrated FPU already though, you might be thinking of the 386...?
I owned a lot of retro computers (still have lots of parts - nostalgia). A lot of motherboard had numbers of L2 slots. I came 2001 to one shop: hey, have you some old L2 cache? I buy it. The guy brought me the whole basket of it!!! No cash. That crap is yours now. I installed dozens of it in my 486 computers. Fantastic boost to load sofisticated games of middle 90'. Not the game but the loading of various menu screens was pretty quicker! I remember the legendary "installing afternoon" one cold day in early spring 2001.
Aren't AMD 486 are known to run duke worse than its intel counterparts ?
AMD 486 chips will perform exactly the same as Intel chips - they share the same microarchitecture. *However,* there are 486 chips with 8 KB or 16 KB of L1 cache, some of those with "write-through" cache (all writes to L1 need to be synced to memory immediately) or "write-back" cache (contents from the L1 cache will only be written to memory if the cache is full). So chips with a 16 KB write-back cache will be faster than those with a 8 KB write-through cache (such as Clint's current 486 CPU).
AMD offered 486 CPUs with
- 8 KB write-through cache (original cache configuration). Those will perform just like Intel 486 DX and DX2 chips.
- 8 KB write-back cache ("Enhanced Am486")
- 16 KB write-back cache (later models of "Enhanced Am486" and "AMD DX5" or "AMD 5x86"). Those will perform just like Intel DX4 chips.
edit: Some words on Cyrix 486 CPUs: Unlike AMD's chips, those have an in-house designed architecture. Earlier versions were a bit slower, later versions basically closed the gap (some instructions were faster, others were slower). Still solidly 486 class chips.
I had an AMD 486 dx/2 66 w/16mb of ram on it (72-pin). VLB trident 512kb video, sound blaster 16.
It ran Doom worse than an Intel processor, but not by too much. It would run low detail about the same speed as the Intel did on high-detail. It would lag out Duke3d if you let the demo run, it would eventually crash out when he was under water or in an ice-area in the demo as the buffer overflowed as it got more and more behind it'd crash to dos. This was 22 years ago I do not remember what chip it was originally but it was a 486 dx/2 66 by AMD.
Not same arch; starting with the AMD AM386, they were not Intel designs.
Both the Am386 and Am486 were reverse-engineered by AMD from Intel chips as Intel would not hand over the original engineering documentation and fabrication templates (Intel felt that their agreement with AMD would only cover chips up to the 286). The Am386 even includes a 1985 Intel copyright marking on-chip (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am386#/media/File:Amd_386_processor.jpg) and could only be released after a lengthy court battle.
Am486 DX/DX2 (re-)implements the same architecture as the respective Intel DX/DX2 chips and behave and perform identically (for benchmarks see, e.g., www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=28470 and compare "Intel DX2 66" with "AMD DX2 66"). Again, things went to court, and AMD had to come up with their own microcode to escape Intel copyrights (they managed to remain compatible, without performance loss). The Intel DX4 included some tweaks (mostly bigger and "more clever" cache) that AMD did not immediately adopt, which is why the Intel DX4 pulls away.
So yes, AMD put significant effort in-house to develop their 386 and 486 implementations (and managed to produce higher-clocked and cooler-running variants), but they did not deviate from the architectural features set by Intel. The first 100% in-house design from AMD was the K5, derived from the 29K-line of AMD RISC chips.
Oh, maybe was wrong about the Am286. But by arch in the Am486, do you mean supporting the same instruction set, or actually being the same chip inside? I don't have my Upgrading and Repairing PCs readily accessible. Also, I've heard 29K is part of the K5, mostly the FPU, but is there any hard data on this?
Nice!. My AMD 486 DX4 100 had 256kb, but it came in a single slot. I remember playing Duke Nukem 3D at max (though as you said, maybe I was playing it at 15fps and I though it was very playable xD), with a 1MB VESA card.
You could try some overclock. I tried 33x4 (133MHz), 40x3 (120MHz) and 50x2 (100MHz), and the last one was the better, since it seems reduce the latency with the cache and RAM (or overclock them too). I could even play MP3 without stuttering at 44KHz after that, which was not possible at stock settings (except lowering to 11/22KHz, which sounded horrible).
I could even play Quake 2 after overclocking!
I wonder what Clint thinks about Vaporwave
As do I.
He has a Blank Banshee song in his favorites list.
I think a lot of the meme culture around vaporwave is really absurd, but some of the music (and yes, the aesthetic) definitely appeals to me with its reliance on cheesy muzak, '90s tech, and just overall strangeness. Like it's from a nostalgic time we never actually experienced, except perhaps in a parallel reality.
I always remember those empty sockets as a kid and always wondered what went in there. Totally forgot about those until i saw this video! Great video, Learned something very new in this video!
Woodgrain is finally evolving...
CPU YES!!!
Really makes me appreciate modern case design. Case I currently have, you can open it on both sides and the motherboard is actually attached to the right panel so when you open it the entire thing swings right down, taking part of the back of the case with it.
This 486 has as much L2 cache as a Skylake core haha. You really should go a DX4 100MHz, cmon. Don't mess around.
Good point. PD 83MHz. And then install Windows XP haha.
Nah. 133mhz AMD 5x86 is what it's all about. Overclocked to 160mhz by running the bus at 40mhz.
You take me back to the times I was live swapping bios chips on a SiS 630 mb.
(BAD PUN ALERT) Like a lot of people I know, myself included, who can't use a little more cache in their pockets?
Thatwas an acceptable pun tbh
*sockets
sketchesofpayne (raises glass) Touche.
Issi chips controlled by a Sis bridge makes a Sis-Issi cache!
Regarding the missing motherboard standoff under the "floating" corner of the motherboard... You can take one of the plastic standoffs and use a razor knife to cut off the "knob" part that normally goes through the slot in the motherboard tray. Then just plug it into one of the holes in the floating corner of the motherboard so it supports that corner. You can use this trick for any motherboard mounting hole which doesn't have a corresponding hole in the motherboard tray.
If it's one of the slide-in/slot type it would need to be glued in place, since there would be no attachment to the motherboard keeping it from sliding out.
Ah, the good old days...
As a kid in the 90s I tried to push my DX2-50 from 128 to 256K. Without the web, a manual or the slightest idea of what the fu** I'm doing. Do I have to add, that I failed miserably?
At least I made some good memories. ;)
Duke3D ran like shit, but we didn't care, it was the Duke.
Lol, I tried to overclock it without internet nor the manual after looking at those pins and table printed in the motherboard, by trail and error and I was successful! I put first my DX4 100 at 133MHz, but then I discovered it was fast at 120Mhz with 40MHz bus and 100MHz with 50MHz bus. Then it died from electro-migration after overheating a few times (the fan died). But that was already in 2002/3.
DX2-50....I suffered with the same CPU..."sandclock studies" and it never came close to the mysterious superpower of the new PENTIUM processor.
every so often i comeback to this video and i just love the jumper part, your suffering is so genuine an palpable,
You should have gotten the intel board. SiS were rubish, slowing down the system.
Which Intel board in particular? Both companies made a lot of different 486 models.
And, well, the 1992 SIS motherboard in my SX25 still runs its memory at 26mb/s (essentially the same speed as the CPU's internal cache, so it can't really go any faster) vs Clint's 11mb/s, and can't even be *forced* to go slower than 19mb/s, so it doesn't seem to be a matter of choice of motherboard manufacturer.
Possibly he's got two mismatched SIMMs meaning the controller is running in slow-but-compatible 16-bit mode, ie addressing each of them separately (a neat trick certain 486 motherboards could pull with 72-pin modules) instead of in tandem?
Other chipsets could be slow, too. System Speed Test gave me read/write/move speeds of 9/25/8 MB/s on an OPTi 495SX based board. With an OPTi 895 job this went to 31/42/14 MB/s using the same DX/2-66. You definitely noticed in memory-intensive applications like web browsers. Differences like these make the hotly-debated ones between Intel and VIA chipsets in Pentium III days look almost negligible.
Was that using the same memory, and the same BIOS settings though? I mean that's sort of in line for what I'd expect with a jump from 25 to 33mhz operating speed for the read, and far more so for the write (and a little slow for move...) vs my own machine, which I guess is about middling on that evidence. So long as you had 60ns SIMMs of course (vs the ones I'm using that are probably 70ns, but could probably be 80ns without it making any difference to how hard a 25mhz 486 can push them).
I have a suspicion that the chips used on later SIMMs could actually run quite a bit faster than the 60ns they were universally rated for (as when SDRAM came in it was basically the equivalent of memory running at _least_ twice as fast if not far more so, and that sort of thing just doesn't happen overnight), it's just that lay users had gotten used to looking and asking for that speed grade so anyone actually openly selling 50ns or faster might end up losing sales as no-one actually thought to buy their products... so a 33mhz board with tight timings (minimal wait states at each stage of the memory access process... or maybe that just quietly ran the memory system at a higher frequency to everything else) could well see a speed bump from using SIMMs that were actually 50 or 40ns on the inside, so long as the user bothered to tune the timings to make best use of them, or the board was able to detect and do that automatically...
If it was the same CPU, same memory, same nominal settings, then that's a truly chronic speed difference. Given how memory-bound all but the least data intensive / most heavily looped software is, having RAM running twice to three times faster in one machine vs another can make a _massive_ difference to how fast it runs, enough to potentially make the CPU speed somewhat moot, if you e.g. have a slower CPU that can run absolutely flat out in the faster board, and a faster CPU that's continually stuck waiting for memory access on the slower board.
As for the later boards, I can't say I measured a particularly great difference in memory speed between the various mobos I tried out over the years. At least the ones that all used single speed SDRAM; due to the "synchronous" bit of that acronym, as well as the SPD information, a particular module would generally rate more or less the exact same speed across a range of boards and CPUs, in both MemSpd/CacheChk and other less exacting benchmarks like the one incorporated into Memtest86+ ... so long as you used the same default settings on each board of course. Occasionally a particular board and module combo would end up somehow interpreting e.g. the CAS latency differently and produce a slightly different speed result, and of course you could always override the officially burned-in speed and overclock the modules (which is something you would surely notice yourself deliberately doing), which each individual part reacted to differently and would hold up under differening combinations of CL and MHz, but in the main if left set to default you'd get the same memory performance from the same sticks. The real differences, so long as you bought the fastest SDRAM you could afford in the size you needed, were starting to depend rather more heavily on the CPU, its speed, that of the FSB, and the cache...
Hey man, nice work. I watched the whole build from beginning. The problem with DUke 3D is not your CPU, actually it runs great on 66 Mhz but your problem with frame rate is the video card. ISA or VLB card just don't have the capacity to push out the desired numbers. You should have tried a MB with integrated IDE controller and PCI bus. Then with 1MB PCI VGA card you would see it fly with the same CPU and RAM. How do I know it for sure? I used to own exactly that set up :) and my friend was experiencing exactly the same problem you are facing. He had a free PCI slot though and after buying a PCI video card it was running great. Matter of fact with his ISA 512K card even Doom was having a performance issues. Try just change MB and then compare the benchmark numbers. It would be interesting...
Quake and Duke3d are pentium territory
Quake probably more than Duke3D for various reasons.
Guess it's not worth playing below a Pentium100 and 4M of RAM but hey~ one can always try.
Will it run Crysis?
Oh boy, I used to play Quake back in the day on my 486 DX/2 and 28.8 modem for multiplay. It was pretty terrible, but I managed to finish single player mode.
Note sure about Quake but I played Duke3D, Shadow Warrior, and MechWarrior 2 on an i486dx2 with one of the most basic video cards ever, a ISA-based Trident with 512 (kb) of video RAM. It could be choppy but it was more often than not awesome.
From what I recall, getting above 320x200 in DOS Quake was basically never done. Frame rates were unplayable and before it was doable there was GLQuake for Windows combined with Voodoo accelerators and Quake-specific drivers. Even in 320x200 you could have been getting something like 18-25 FPS with anything less than the best Pentium money could buy.
My first PC was a 386-DX 25Mhz with no cache. A friend of mine had a 386-DX 33Mhz with cache and the difference was HUGE.
4:18 i mean it literally says "15N" on the 15ns one and "20N" on the 20ns one...
Had a 486 running at 100MHz DX2 when I was a teenager back in '96 and could get Duke Nukem 3D to run at 640x480 without any issues (very smooth). I am not sure how much RAM I had when I initially played Duke Nukem 3D but I know before I got rid of the PC (sure regret it today) it had been upgraded to 40MB of RAM (16MB + 16MB + 4MB + 4MB). Probably more RAM than what the PC could every actually use... In any case the graphic card was just an on-board one displaying only 256 colors. Boost/swap your CPU LGR and I am sure you can get Duke Nukem 3D running at a high frame rate. Cool build and really like the wood grain!
wait what. Is this a UEFI on a 486 motherboard?
no
vojtasTS29 early renditions you could say
UEFI wasn't even thought up yet when these were in common use.
i thought that too. But his bios clearly has a graphical interface.
Graphical interface doesn't indicate UEFI
My 486 PC back in the day used an Hsing Tech motherboard, 256K L2 cache, an AMD Am486 DX4-120 with 8KB WT L1 cache, and it ran DooM without issues. Wish I had a 486 PC with the same setup as my original setup, but with AMI BIOS since Award BIOS had the Y2K bug (lawsuit was later filed).
Clint, I have two questions! First is, what would you recommend for putting together a DOS machine for Quake, DN3D, etc? Second is, can I send you some music?
Awesome video man. This takes me way back to my 486 DX4 100Mhz PC. I used to play DOOM 1 & 2 and Duke Nukem 3D on that pc. Those were good times.
For faster loading in general, hit c:\dos\smartdrv.exe C 1024 512. It will basicly 'cache' the C drive with read-cache up to 1MB and write-cache up to 512KB. Basicly your harddrive can work 'ahead' filling the cache while the CPU processes the loading in a game. Also, if you can find it, Diamond Stealth 32 VLB with ET4000/W32p. It's going to boost your games in MS-dos significant. Nice to see someone picking up the 486 old days ^^
my first PC was a 386DX25 w/o cache. A friend had a 386DX33 w/cache. His system was MASSIVELY faster than mine... Not sure whether it was L1 or L2 though - likely L1.
I remember doing this upgrade back when Computer Shopper magazine was how you ordered parts
I remember Duke 3D running quite well on some type of 486 133MHz processor in the family's computer of probably over 20 years ago. I also remember using higher graphics settings.
Nice video. I'm not surprised that there's a ~25% performance increase - the Celeron 300A was almost twice as fast as the previous version (without L2).
512kB would be interesting, but I'm not sure there would be a very noticeable difference. A late/fast 486 system would likely benefit more than this one, depends on if the FSB is the bottleneck or not.
(On (early) Core 2 Duos I remember the difference was ~7% between the 1/2/4MB L2 steps, which were somewhat limited by FSB IIRC.)
Ha, nice! The first thing I thought when I saw the video was that you're going to get an improvement, but it will be hard to notice in actual games, though easily measurable in benchmarks.
Hehe, yeah I was surprised to get the results I did here! I love experimenting with stuff like this (well, minus jumpers.)
hello phils!
I really miss those days too. I grew up with a 386 and remember getting a new 4865 back in the day. I have a game review request! An old adventure title called "Innocent until caught" That was the game that turned me into a computer nerd. Mainly because I COULDN'T GET IT TO RUN!!! I did eventually, without having to upgrade. I instead learned how to overclock, and I remember spending days messing with the bios settings. I spent way more time trying to get the game to work than I did playing the game, and as I sat there trying to figure out how to get it to run I kept dreaming the game to be much better than it was. And the day I finally got it to work was one of those victory celebrations where I was like "Yeah! Look! It's running! Lo... oh... I'm alone...." :P
From my experience 256KB L2 cache was the difference between running Doom smoothly or not. Your topbench numbers suggest a 25% improvement.
my 1st computer was a p133 with 16mb and i remember he had COAST (cache on a stick) slot that I always wanted to try, I still have the mainboard now hooked up to the wall in my old room at my parents, maybe I will try a rebuild you hooked me up! all the best!
Thanks for this nostalgia trip. Cache changes were pretty much the only thing personally didn't mess around with PC's when kid. Really didn't understand the benefits of it. Though I don't think I could've even get those back in the days.
Did you eventually wrap woodgrain around the monitor too? Looks awesome!
I'm finally trying to put together a 486 and it's a headache, bad CMOS (even with a new battery), bad video card, etc., etc., anyway I'm loving the process. I saw this video before but came back to it to get some info about the cache. I have NEVER seen a 486 BIOS from the 90's with a mouse input like that one!
My first motherboard with Pentium 150 MHz in 1997 had slots for extra cache memory but the cache was very expensive for me then.
In 1999 I bought a Soyo motherboard with super socket 7 socket and 1 MByte cache memory. I used the motherboard with the AMD K6-III 400 MHz with 256 Kbyte cache. I overclocked the motherboard to 450 MHz and with 1280 KByte of total cache the norton utilities benchmark gave me a performance comparable to that of Pentium III.
It was a smart move for people who couldn't afford the expensive Pentium III.
I had great times with my AMD K6-3. Very fast and affordable CPU. I was using it for many many years. My next CPU was with a Celeron at 1.7 MHz in 2003. It was incredible faster than my old AMD K6-III but for its time it was one of the slowest. However it was very cheap and good enough.
When you went to the unboxing portion, your right hand looked like it was trying to grasp a mouse that wasn't there. You've really been using computers for a very long time.
Would the Edge3D make any difference for Duke Nukem?
Huh, depending on the the package needed, you can still purchase cache memory chips from I think it was mouser. There is a company called Pyramid that supposedly still has TAG chips as well, but they never responded to my e-mail questions regarding the items listed on their website. A TAG chip is what I am missing for my cache. I need to find one has to be 15ns. For some reason that's what my motherboard requires. *shrug* Edit - Good job on putting the jumpers in with the tweezers. That's tough.
I recommend giving the front a nice shiny, silver color, and doing the same to the drives. It would give it that look of those old stereos that had that brushed aluminum/polished aluminum front wit the wood grain. It's just a really good look I my opinion and one of the few instances I like wood grain anything as much as black anodized brushed aluminum, or matte black.
Back in the days, I was playing Duke3D 1.3D on a 486 DX4-100 computer , and it was running fine. However, the first thing i noticed when switching to atomic version (using plutonium pack) was how slower it was. Only a friend of mine which had a pentium could run it fine. I think devs have added lot of things to the engine (from 1.3D to 1.4) which impact frame rate regardless the level you are playing.
Probably switched from 486-tuned to Pentium-tuned code. Which will end up running slower on a 486, but faster on a Pentium, vs the original code. It might even be that's the only difference between the two versions, so you'd be better off sticking with the original on an older machine, but upgrading on a newer one. There were a few other games (and programs such as MPEG decoders) around the same time that had switches for 486 vs Pentium mode... don't think I ever saw any notable difference on our 486 when trying the latter, but it didn't crash either, so either it made too small a change to the speed to be discernable, or it was actually just a fake-out and the game checked what processor you had anyway (or used the manual switch if it couldn't auto-detect for some reason) and ran the correct code regardless of your attempt to manually override it. It did make a difference for MP3 playback and the like, though.
Did you change out the video card? The first bench test you did said it was the Cirrus CL-GD5428, but the second test said you were using a stealth64 s3 vision864, which from what I looked up is a different card that the Diamond Speedstar Pro.
If you still want to use a 66Mhz part, Cyrix Cx486 DX2 66 has write back cache, as opposed to many Am486-8T (8B & 16B have WB), also for Intel check "&E" markings, those also are WB and faster.
Good boy, I'm glad I had my dad doing this for me when my 486DX2 was trolling around.
But dang, your build just got more and more awesome and all just because of some little bricks.
seems to be a pretty good upgrade. the benchmark showed the video card as being only 256kb rather than 1mb. this could explain performance issues with duke3d and even simcity2000, I think i saw on the box it requires 512kb for the video card
Fun fact: 12 ns versions of those ram chips were used as tag ram on pentium boards with the hx chipset, required if you bumped the ram over 64 mb. From cache ram to tag ram :)
Remembering modding my ga-586hx with one chip + resistor + edo ram to 128 mb. Served me well into 2006 or so as data server.