I remember going from 486DX 66 to my first Pentium, for the last few months before my upgrade I was tweaking every little bit of performance I could out of that old machine, this video brings me back :)

I too remember L2 cache not having a huge impact on performance. However, disabling L1 cache feels like turning it into a slow 80386 - useful when you run old programs without timing routines that would run too fast, otherwise.

Ah yes, back to the roots, Playing with the old dos / 486 stuff again :) that makes my day.. great video phil..

@Steve25g

5 жыл бұрын

ahr...i did run a 8088/8086 and 80286 too.. running lotus :D Did run winnt 3.5 on a maxed out 486, to later start changing to win2000 on a K6-II, still have that super 7..

Man!!! You never fail in making me happy

Superb as always

Love that you started to overclock!

I liked everything about the video but the best part is how you make almost no references to the age of the hardware, whereas most other people doing this wouldn't be able to shut up about the age of the hardware. You go through the process as if you're just overclocking your current daily computer and I love it.

@trashtronics1700

3 жыл бұрын

Most people talk about that because it matters hardware degradation is a thing it could be better at over clocking and better and tighter timing if these where brand new just saying

Wow, this takes me back.

loved the video. thanks a lot!

Love those insane clock speed gains from the old days! :D More then 2X the clock speed, that's not something we see these days anymore. Last time I had a huge uplift in performance was a i7 920 2.66GHz CPU clocked at 4.3GHz (+62%)...

@SeltsamerAttraktor

6 жыл бұрын

The Pentium III era was also quite extreme, when you think about it. stretching from 450 to 1400Mhz.

@GraveUypo

4 жыл бұрын

@@SeltsamerAttraktor he meant overclock. a pentium 3 450 would at best overclock to ~650mhz, which is nothing to scoff at, but not quite doubling the clock speed.

@LionWithTheLamb

3 жыл бұрын

@@SeltsamerAttraktorI know of at least two that had 400 Mhz Pentium III Slot 1 processors.

@kennethsrensen7706

2 жыл бұрын

Yeah true , I was used to run a core2 quad 8300 stock it say 2,5 Ghz and I run it for around 10 years at 3,8 GHz , with standard cooler . ( temperature at max load was never going past 57 degree Celcius ) Never had any troubles at all , I have later changed to a 9500 stock 2,88 GHz and it can easy run 4,6 GHz with a big good air cooler but due to the very very hot climate where I live now , I just keep it at max 3,8 GHz so I can still keep temperature below 60 degree celcius , otherwise it really easy climb up at wrong side of 80 degree . When temperatures here easy reach end of 30 ties up to 40 plus in summer ambient then its much harder to keep the processor nice cool .

goddamnit i knew dx4s were good overclockers. i wish i was knew about this back then. would have made my life so much better. just clocking my dx4 100mhz to 133 would have been a huge help already.

Great! I used one of these as a scientific work station back in the 90's. Gave me lots of years of service. AMD 5x86 133, 256 MB RAM, and 2 3 gig drives with CDR! What fun.

I picked up a peacock Computer recently. Came with a Cyrix dx 66 mhz processor. Then looking through a pile of broken laptops I found a system with a desktop 486 dx4 75 MHz cpu in it. I simply set the peacock bus speed to 33MHz along with the usual adjustments and works at 100mhz flawlessly ! About 65 on 3d bench

I tried overclocking my 486 back in the day. I saw the jumper diagram for the processor speeds engraved on the motherboard and thought It'd be cool to make it go faster. After a while, the PSU connector in the motherboard melted. I managed to saved the whole thing, but that ended my teenager OC adventures.

@Mr_Meowingtons

4 жыл бұрын

ROFL sounds like you had other problems.. never melted any power connector OC my 486 or early Pentium good old days when i had a Pentium 150Mhz running at 233Mhz...

Wow, my day just got better. Keep up the great work. *also what’s your outro music?* thanks

The only information we were getting back then was coming from magazines. Darn. I never had a 80486. I went to Pentium directly from 80286. It wasn't easy to upgrade. The PCs were so expensive.

@cheater00

3 жыл бұрын

Kinda like now?

@ikannunaplays

3 жыл бұрын

I had a 66mhz had to oc it to get to the 90mhz range just to play mp3's without stuttering, lol. Oh the days. 160 mhz or even close was unthinkable

@TheVanillatech

2 жыл бұрын

@@cheater00 Nah much more expensive than now. It was Dell and Gates that made prices come down. Back in the 386/486 days, a top end model capable of playing the best games would be £1300 MINIMUM, going up to £2500 and more.

@cheater00

2 жыл бұрын

@@TheVanillatech Kinda like now?

@TheVanillatech

2 жыл бұрын

@@cheater00 No. Not like now. You can get a gaming laptop "now" for under $1000 that plays every brand new game out there and monsters 5-6 year old games with 150fps or more. You can get a $1000 desktop that performs even better. For $3000 dollars today, the PC you can build rips through 10 different tasks without slowing down with it's 64 cores, and plays games at over 500fps. So no. Not like now. Not like now at all. XD If you wasn't there, it might be hard to understand. But there are tens of thousands of PC magazines scanned and freely available to read from bygone eras. That might be a good place to start.

I had an Am586 133 overclocked to 160 MHz, I even could squeeze more performance with the ramfrsh utility.

Great to see you going back to the 486, as I'm currently putting together two of those systems. My current understanding is that the cache only really helps if you have the RAM's waitstate set to anything higher than 0, since the CPU only has to wait if there is an actual waitstate set, otherwise cache and RAM run at the same clock with the same waitstates. So maybe, it might be an idea to revisit the effects the cache has at anything but 0 waitstate.

@philscomputerlab

6 жыл бұрын

It can also depend on the chipset. I think this is is well tuned. So every system likely shows slightly different results.

One DOS benchmark I used to rely on heavily is System Speed Test (I think v4.78 was the last one). It can do all kinds of nifty tests, including CPU speed, cache and memory bandwidth, video bandwidth and harddrive performance, and will save a screenshot and/or log file. For memory latency tests there's also "Cachemem", and there's even "STREAM for DOS", a version of the popular STREAM memory benchmark. In the olden days, the difference in memory performance between various chipset could be huge. I used to have a VLB board with an older/lower-end OPTi 495SX chipset (Shuttle HOT-409), and upgrading from that to an 895 (I think), I saw memory read/write/move throughput go from 9/25/8 MB/s to 31/42/14 MB/s with the same DX/2-66. You definitely noticed that, too! One odd quirk I once came across was that a 5x86-133 didn't like the power supply (!) in the tower I was using (a late-'80s beast once housing a 386) and left its L1 cache in write-through mode rather than switching to write-back. Booo. And that wasn't a standard "modern" AT power supply, but rather something bigger and older, I don't remember what that formfactor was called, so no easy replacement. Bummer.

Great video Phil. I had a hunch the DX4-120 would be faster than the 133MHz and I waited 20 years for the confirmation :))

@philscomputerlab

6 жыл бұрын

There you go :D

@LionWithTheLamb

3 жыл бұрын

The AM486 DX4-120 was a seriously fast 486.

That's an excellent in depth comparison Phil! It always strikes me how well organized you are. Kudos! I'm currently overclocking a late 486 (1996) board that I got for only a few bucks (sold as broken but I necromanced it ;-) ) I always buy my hardware broken so I don't have to take out a second mortgage on my house for this "harmless hobby derailed" and it's really fun to repair cheap garbage ;-) Also got the famous ADZ version of the AMD 5x86 for cheap at a local seller. Your other video already helped me out a lot with my K6-2 build. This one does as well. I'm going with the 160Mhz option. This thing is goind to rip! ..for a 486 ;-) I'm still waiting for my 15ns L2 cache to arrive from Ukraine but I'm quite curious as well how much of a performance boost it will give me with this UMC chipset and my 60ns EDO ram... Funny how de ADW parts state "heatsink and fan req'd" while the ADZ doesn't have this etched into the ceramic. I know the ADZ has the higher temperature rating but I wouldn't dare running this without any sort of cooling, especially not overclocked to 160MHz ;-)

Excelent Video.

Thanks phil :) brings back memory's of tweaking dad's dx4-100 to try and get quake playable :D When you're pushing the bus and memory that far, system performance might be increased even further if you manage to shadow that Tseng's memory.. try playing around with the extra shadow/cache options, also curious if the "System BIOS Cacheable" and "Video BIOS Cacheable" options have any performance impact :)

What there was a 486 over 100MHz !! Learn something new everyday. Nice

@fungo6631

Жыл бұрын

Ofc there was. It just wasn't called a 486.

❤️❤️❤️ my first machine 486 ,, very tanks ❤️

well, last OC miracle ive seen was my 1.6GHz P4 with Northwood core. That little beast was running on 3.2GHz without any problem, with better cooler and motherboard and memories 3.6GHz was possible with that piece.

@MF175mp

3 жыл бұрын

The early i5 and i7 overclock really well and reliably. i5 2500K @5.1GHz in use for almost 10 years and counting and no problems. Could be stable with much higher clocks if the voltage would be raised.

it was possible to overclock 133MHz one with ADZ code to 200MHz.

Austin: "Why does (some not exactly cutting-edge piece of tech) exist in 2017??" You: "One good optimization for your almost 30 year old computer is to run your memory timings low. Here are some benches showing why." And this is why I love your videos more than other tech youtubers' consumerist, throw-away-your-supposedly-useless-year-old-tech-and-buy-the-newest-shiny tech videos.

@philscomputerlab

6 жыл бұрын

Nice :D

@tduforever5542

6 жыл бұрын

Exactly.

@nomoredamnnamestouse

5 жыл бұрын

To me its not about new vs old, but rather I despise all the endless clickbait garbage without any worthwhile content on YT that are made just for the sake of maximizing view counts.

dang about 25yrs to late.

@andrive

4 жыл бұрын

Damn about 27 yrs too late

@chippyconqueror

3 жыл бұрын

damn about 28 yrs too late

@jari2018

3 жыл бұрын

not to late - just do it buy and try doom ,duke nukeem 3d ,descent 1+2 hexen ,herectic ,blood ,shadow warrior ,nam ( this dos based game might need a pentium ) nam was developed by a addon(mod) that converted the game(duke nukeem) to vietnam battlefield

@clavius5734

2 жыл бұрын

Dang about 29yrs too late

I remember overclocking my P75 before oc'ing was a thing without success. When I switched the cpu out to my brothers P90 i could go all the way up to 150Mhz before running into bus issues. And my P75 was running happy as a P100 in my brothers system. Your mileage could vary a lot, back in those days...

@TheVanillatech

2 жыл бұрын

Yes I often wondered about OC'ing Pentiums long after I'd moved on to Athlons etc. A Duron 750 from Time Computers let me push it to 1Ghz with an Asus cooler I won at a LAN. That got me thinking, so I tested a lot of retro rigs with Pentiums and was surprised how easy it is to get extra Mhz with just a few jumper changes. Free FPS. Wish I'd have known about it back in the mid 90's.

good to know about wait states, ill def try this on my pentium and 486 boards. Also that video card, i want it lol

Great work Phil. I noticed that 120 is faster than 133, however 160 is faster than 150. Due to the 2/3 pci divider. Which shows how important PCI clock is. It would be interesting to test out some ram intensive cpu benchmarks that are not graphics based to further isolate ram. However the only thing that matters is 0-0 ws timings considering the ram can do it no matter what. (my 486 system is the same way) And it would be kind of interesting to pick an arbitrary clock, and see how much impact L2 has with different timings. and the L2 latency timings as well.... But that can be time consuming. And L2 had a greater gain on the lower end cpu's with 8k L1 over 16k l1. At least that is what I found.

@GraveUypo

6 жыл бұрын

oh yeah bus speed was a HUGE bottleneck back then, even into the pentium 3 era. you'd want to push it as far as you could without getting instability. i remember my athlon 700mhz could go up to 119 fsb and the increase in performance was MORE than just 19%. it was more like 25%. same for the pentium 2 which i'm tired of mentioning already. 133mhz fsb made it like 50% faster. 150mhz fsb made it feel twice as fast as stock. never benchmarked anything though so these are just impressions.

nice video my very first computer was a 486/33 :P i have a 6600k now@4.65. its silly easy to overclock now

the 486 computers are still my favorite computers. even though the first PC I ever used was a 286, the 486 with windows 3.1 is what I knew as a child all the way up until 1999 when we got a Pentium 3. I enjoy learning more about what this old hardware was capable of. The settings aren't as apparent as they are now in modern PC's. Also just because these settings worked on that brand of CPU, a Cyrix, or IBM or AMD 486 with similar specs may not perform the same due to differences in the construction of the CPU's micro architecture.

Hi, just thought of something. Would it be viable or make sense otherwise to add POV-Ray into your existing benchmark suite when benchmarking CPU's? I remember fiddling with it back in my DOS days, it had a good selection of example scenes ranging from simple to rather complex. Just thought I'd throw the idea in the air and see what you think, it might've given some interesting results between the stock / various overclocks, not sure how the RAM wait states and cache would've affected the results.

10/10 video

This was so cool to watch! Never thought you could OC a x486. Does motherboard matter?! Any specific chipset?

Hi Phil, Did you make that 20pin ATX to AT cable yourself? What is the difference between the P8 and P9 connectors on AT PSUs?

My first computer i had to myself was a 486 in 1999, my brother built it out of old parts from his highschool. He apparently did this too. It was awesome for a free computer

@Heliocentric

3 жыл бұрын

My "little" brother killed my first computer, a commodore 64, by pouring glue all over the keyboard. He thought my fingers would get stuck like a cartoon. What a goofball.

@ 12:53 all the results chart, Notice how the 40MHz bus slopes are similar. Both are steeper than the other bus speeds!

My recollection was that BIOS default equated to "safe defaults" and SETUP default equated to "optimized defaults" - which may apply some better options. Also, a few passes of memtest at 50MHz 0ws would be reassuring - generally, the reason for applying any wait states is that things fall apart without them, or at least for safety margin at higher speeds - if it can tolerate 0ws on 70nS SIMMs at 50MHz, you wonder how bad the RAM would have to be to need wait states?

What were the equivalent benchmark scores from auto configuration? Does the board automatically decide on 3-3?

Interesting. My rig was actually AMD 486Dx4 WT 100, but I was able to run it in 2x50MHz mode (with VLB card) with quite good results. No PCI clocks multipliers etc... but maybe I was just lucky. It was some trident card.

13:46 that boost will vary for sure depending on the application, for Doom once the instructions and some data is cached in the 16Kb L1, no need to go to L2 and it relies on ram memory.

@HandFromCoffin

4 жыл бұрын

Yep, doom is known for not being impacted much by L2 cache. Look at Celeron 266/300 with no L2 cache for more info.

i like the discount code... electromyne is faster and cheaper than eBay in Germany :D

Just a note- you should also test Intel DX4- 100 and DX2-66 , famous processors for comparsion. Or, Amd DX2-66 too. It would be very interesting to see, if 25x3 = 75 is actually slower or faster than DX2-66

Phil, do you have any motherboards with COAST cache expansion? I came across a few recently, but haven't got around to playing with them. COAST - cache on a stick. The socket for it looks like an AGP port, but accepts CPU assist modules.

@philscomputerlab

6 жыл бұрын

No I don't have any such system.

@nitrax8629

6 жыл бұрын

I currently use such a board fitted with 256KB through a COAST slot. There are a few types of cache modules available for the slot - the one to use depends on the motherboard. Generally, Pentium (MMX) boards use the faster Pipeline burst cache, whilst 486 boards often use asynchronous cache. Some boards may have different requirements though.

@enilenis

6 жыл бұрын

I have 1 pentium motherboard on hand with COAST slot and 3 modules that I discovered in my RAM bin. I thought they were laptop memory at first, but then noticed the labels. Will probably get to test mine out closer to Christmas. Still waiting on some power supply cables for the old AT standard. My sticks are 512K, I believe. Very curious to see how much of a performance difference that type of cache makes.

Why no IBM cpus? Blue Lightning? Some were soldered on infamous motherboards. I had one with.486BL33/100 (386sx pinout) with VESA VLB slots (32 bit).

What changes in performance with the slower PCI and ISA dividers on the other clock speeds. Especially on the 40 MHz FSB setting.

The non-linear performance spread is to be expected since the CPU clock steps aren't uniform and the bus clock driving the rest of the system is another variable. 75/25 to 100/33 makes a big difference because both have been increased 33%, whereas the step from 120/40 to 150/33 is only a 25% gain on the CPU and an actual loss of 17.5% on the bus.

When you disable the external cache, memory performance is going to be more critical. The cache is there to hide some of the latency of RAM. If you would keep the cache enabled, you would gain more performance from the high clock speed.

Do you have a video of FPS vs different cache sizes for 386, or 486? ie. 64k vs 128k vs 256k? Thanks.

+PhilsComputerLab Did you have to change the voltage at all? And how hot did it get?

@philscomputerlab

6 жыл бұрын

TheCaptain Voltage was all stock.

I never found a 486 of any type actually make a lot of use of the L2 cache. There is a slight benchmarkable difference, but not as much as one would think. The 72 Pin memory you are using will be rated for 66Mhz, FPM or EDO, and in all of these tests, the memory is being underclocked so you will not see a difference between 60 and 70ns because both types can handle the WS at the underclocked speed. One thing you might take a look at, is look at your jumper settings for your FSB on that motherboard and see if there are any combinations that are not listed. Some of these late era boards have the ability to run at 60 or 66Mhz clock speed, and is usually undocumented. I have had some success running these chips at 180Mhz @60 bus, and if you want to see a AMD 5x86 chip at max performance, that is how you get it and will likely be equal or faster than it would be at 200 because of the 60mhz bus speed.

@philscomputerlab

6 жыл бұрын

Yea the board can go even higher, 60 and 66 are supported. I admit, I thought L2 cache had a higher impact, so I'm glad I checked it out, learnt something. And with prices on some L2 chips, you can need up to 9 of them, you can also save some money.

@jochenblacha7241

6 жыл бұрын

Well, if you wanna talk "High-End 486 Era Motherboard" (i.e. the Elitegroup EISA/VLB 486 board from the early 1990's - the model of the board escapes me though I'm sure WaybackTECH may know it) you could even go up to 10 Cache chips ... 8 Cache SDRAMs (either 256KB or 512KB), 1 Tag SDRAM and 1 Parity SDRAM. While the memory speeds were incredibly important (and they are still of importance nowadays) the cache and selection of components were also somewhat critical to overall system performance. Also, you may want to mess with some of the other Chipset Features setup bells and whistles... I think you should enable the "Burst Copy-Back" option (with the L2 cache enabled) in an attempt to improve L2-->L1 data transfer speeds in case the CPU can fetch data back from the L2 cache... try IBC #DEVSEL Decoding set to "Fast" and see if you can get I/O Recovery Time down to 0 BCLKs (this basically defines how many bus clock cycles the system should wait before attempting an new read/write from/to the memory ... 0 BCLK would mean no wait between I/O transfers given your RAMs and Caches are fast enough. Lastly, enable the System and Video BIOS shadow - much faster when the OS (MS-DOS / Windows 9x/Me) has to resort to either the BIOS or VBIOS and it can access a shadow copy in the RAM instead of ye goode ol' snailspeed ROM ... and enable the PCI Posted Memory Write (should speed up PCI Bus-Master DMA transfers) and Preempt PCI Master option (may be a hit-or-miss depending on the OS and workload). You got some great benchmark results but there's quite some wiggle-room to really boost that thing into "Supersonic" speeds. ;) And as a very final tip: Try to get a copy of QEMM386 and forget about EMM386.SYS ... QEMM386 was the magical ingredient to really make EMS memory access fly.

@SeltsamerAttraktor

6 жыл бұрын

Can the 486 actually tolerate that? Did you do a video about that?

@CompatibilityMadness

6 жыл бұрын

I would assume external cache would make the biggest difference when CPU is starved of data. So, in your case that would be lowest bus setting with highest CPU frequency (25MHz, x4) and with 3|3 wait states. It's always best to do worst and best case scenario with this sort of things.

@cbsboyer

6 жыл бұрын

I had an old Fugutech (PC Chips clone) 486 board that ran up to 60MHz with undocumented settings (it did really nice things with my Cyrix Cx5x86 chip). Where the L2 cache really makes a difference is with Windows programs, or programs that run under DPMI that use lots of memory. If you could find fast SRAM chips (I used 15ns because that's what I could find, but faster was available), you could run the FSB pretty fast and still use low L2 cache wait states.

I have a test I'd love you to be able to do, basically the same you are doing here but with a VLB board AND VLB IDE and VGA cards, note that you will have to most likely adapt heatsinks on those VLB cards as they will run at the same FSB as the CPU, this in fact was one of the main drivers to implement PCI as a standard due to when the 486DX@50Mhz came out a LOT of add on cards (mostly VGA cards) were dying due to not being good enough to run at a 50Mhz clock rate. That said, the ones that did work should run faster than the SAME model on top of PCI bus as the PCI bus has more stuff between the card and CPU therefore adding wait states (to keep it simple). So, I'd love you to find a VLB and equivalent PCI VGA card then run them against each other on a benchmark, same thing goes for the IDE controllers but for IDE controller YOU MUST HAVE THE DOS DRIVERS INSTALLED. Aside IDE controllers that have their own bios (and even those benefit form the driver) none of them will have any decent performance compared to a normal ISA card, the DRIVER is CRUCIAL for these babies to run full tilt, and the performance difference if HUGE when the driver is installed and running.

awesome stuff. but i sometimes run MS-DOS 6.22 on a 500MHz P2 based celeron.

I was wondering if you'd like to do a similar benchmark but for cache? No cache, different amounts of chips, different chip speeds, etc

I remember I was the first one of all my friends/school etc who had a pc with EDO ram. So, I took the name EDO on both the NET and on my MC27

@armorgeddon

6 жыл бұрын

LOL awesome!

@humphrex

4 жыл бұрын

cool story edo, but i was living in DDR

dont forget if u are buying DRAM that u dont go by the manu sticker but the actual dram chips just look up the datasheet on the part number printed on tthem that will tell u exactly what they can or cannot do like eg 2k refresh or 4krefresh timings etc etc

Going from no cache to 128K L2 cache was more of a bump in performance for me than going from 33MHz to 40MHz bus (I only have a DX2/66) It wasn't the most dramatic but it did certainly increase performance, even in Windows 95 boot times. Sadly can't run both since it's not stable, but as the cooling setup is less than optimal I run 33 FSB and drop from 3.45V to 3.3V. The cache makes up for the drop in clock speed.

Hey Phil maybe not related to this video directly but do you have good source of SIMM 30pin ? I am looking for the 16MB if possible some 72 -> 30 pin converter for the SB64 bank...

@philscomputerlab

6 жыл бұрын

I don't sorry, you just got to browse on eBay I'm afraid.

Not going to lie... I preferred computers back in the 386/486 era. Even the bios today is a hot mess of crap.

damn good

I realized you are actually changing 2 variables every time, the bus speed and the processor speed. It would have been wise to test the bus speed exclusively by doing 4x25, 3x33, 2x50 to see the effect of the bus scaling first, apply that ratio to the numbers when scaling up the processor clock to see which is more important, raw clock speed or bus speed. I feel like the bus speed is making a bigger hop than just the processor speed is.

The L2 cache, probably makes a bigger difference with slower Wait States. I expect with Wait State 3-3, enabling L2 cache would bring way more than just 3 fps increase. But it is likely the Doom is more CPU bound than memory bound (as you would really expect if you think about it), this is why slopes of these curves are not that steep.

can you over clock keyboard? and what happens when you over clock keyboard controller?

Low end hardware makes me happier. I moved up from a Core2Quad 2.5GHz to a Ryzen 1200 with 2933mhz memory and and Sata 3 SSD. I don't understand why people would pay more than double the money i spent for faster quad core chips. Both of the machines I'm using are roughly $500 machines and the difference a decade makes is crazy. Best improvements are at the low end. I'd like to see how AM1 chips compare to Athlon 64 dual cores if you ever were to make a old goodies vs modern low end video just to show how far modern low end architectures have come

@GraveUypo

4 жыл бұрын

because dual 2c4t chips are awful and even 4c8t chips are on their way out. my laptop and my office computer are both 2c4t and they struggle with a lot of stuff. your ryzen is slower than an 8 year old core i5, so it's not really "the difference 10 years make" and more that there have been a huge jump right after that core2quad. most of that jump was concentrated on the first 2 years and we've kinda plateaued since then.

I love 486 ! Fantastic video ! THX !!! PS. Tell me, is it EISA slot (brown slot) or something else ? www.amoretro.de/2012/01/abit-pb4-rev-1-3-ab-pb4-ali-486-motherboard.html

@classicmacintosh

6 жыл бұрын

From the link: mysteriösem PISA-Slot (braun), der als PCI/ISA Riser-Slot konzipiert ist. Which I think translates roughly to 'mysterious PISA slot which is for a PCI/ISA riser card' - my German is not very good!

@SeltsamerAttraktor

6 жыл бұрын

Just because it's brown and looks like EISA doesn't mean it's EISA. Good way to tell, if the BIOS has EISA capabilities or not. Because EISA isn't as simple as just putting cards in. Think MCA. I for example have a 386/486 dual board with something that looks like an EISA slot, but it's actually an early local bus for the 486. The BIOS has no trace of any EISA settings.

@GGigabiteM

6 жыл бұрын

>I think it was a riser slot for adding a cards for a special type of chassis. No, it's most definitely an EISA slot, I've seen enough of them over the years. The slot in the picture has six keys in it, with one of them being the hard ISA key and the remaining five being deeper in the slot for the second row of deeper pins. You can see the marks for the remaining five keys on the edges of the top of the slot where there are fewer contact holes present. You can match all six keys up to this EISA card: philipstorr.id.au/pcbook/images/eisa1.jpg >Because EISA isn't as simple as just putting cards in. EISA slots only require complicated setup if an EISA card is used. You can use regular ISA cards in an EISA slot and they'll work as normal. The last time I ever did anything with EISA was on an old Dell dual PII Xeon server probably about 10 years ago now. We found out that the last Microsoft OS to support EISA slots was Windows 2000 Server, as XP and 2k3 wouldn't detect the cards at all.

How many 486 motherboards have mounts for a CPU heatsink/fan? I don't remember any that I ever had having them because they were never required and I didn't OC in those days.

@philscomputerlab

6 жыл бұрын

The cooler mounts to the CPU, not motherboard or socket. You're thinking way too modern :D

@HappyBeezerStudios

6 жыл бұрын

And in case you can always plug the fan into the PSU. 12v, 9.6v 7v, 5v, 3.3v are all avaiable. Some voltage wil get the right mix of cooling performance and noise level.

@anthonykearney608

6 жыл бұрын

Alot of 486 chips had a heatsink cemented to them

Hi Phil, I am having a really weird issue with the dosbench batch file. When I run it it just spews out "bad command or filename" over and over again. I have looked at the bat file in the editor and it doesnt seem to be doing anything that would cause such errors, so i'm quite stumped as to why it would do that.. Have you ever heard of that happening with the dosbench bat file?

@philscomputerlab

4 жыл бұрын

Do I haven't had that issue. Be sure you copy all the sub-directories as well!

my 486dx had a turbo buton on the case, when i pressed goes from 66 to 100mhz

"Does it run Crysis?" "Chris's? Of course!"

I had a K-6 II 400mhz I kept him at 616mhz for a few years without problems 112mhz x 5.5 vcore 2.5 and still running at a friend's house.

@5roundsrapid263

4 жыл бұрын

Wow. I had a K6-2 350, and the fastest it would go was 400. I put in a Voodoo3 and overclocked it, too. The fastest PII was 450, and I was getting similar framerates for about half the price.

Can you set the jumpers for the CPU to run at 66MHz FSB and clock 2.5 to 166MHz?

@fungo6631

Жыл бұрын

You could just get a different clock crystal.

I wish i knew how to improve performance back then :O

Try enabling Slow refresh in same menu... Should give you substantial boost.

Would be interesting to see how this cpu with these clocks compares against the intel 486DX2/DX4 or Pentium

I have 183mhz celeron in my 1998 laptop.

Hi Phil, try system with 5x86 4*40=160 with Voodoo 1 in DOS Glide games

If you can use EDO, do it because it does some faster transactions than FPM.

The most interesting point is the one with cache enabled. I expected a much bigger difference too. It seems that memory timings have much greater effect than that 256kB cache. What kind of difference a bigger cache could make, I wonder... Also memory timings seem to have a huge impact. Perhaps WS0 memory is not much slower than cache anymore...? Strange to see, especially that you used 70ns memory (WS0 at 50MHz, it must be a very nice overclocker) and typical late 486 cache SRAMs are rated to 15ns. (On 50ns EDO - I have a quadruplet of 8MB/50ns in an Acorp 5TX29 that can take 83MHz FSB with fastest timings. But not every stick of the same model could complete a memory test at these settings.)

@soylentgreenb

4 жыл бұрын

L2 is task specific. Doom’s inner loops fit in 16k L1. Textures and everythimg else don’t make good use of L2. In other tasks this may not be true.

WOW!!! I remember running a intel 486DX4 100MHz to 60MHzx2=120MHz on a VEGA board (!!!). And an AMD DX4 100MHz to 40MHzx3=120MHz.

I find the L2 cache gives my machine much more of a performance boost with higher wait states. I see a jump between 0 and 1WS so I am wondering if certain things (that would normally make use of it) bypass the cache when WS is set to 0?

@philscomputerlab

6 жыл бұрын

Is this on the 486? For the RAM, just set it to the fastest timings. You shouldn't have any issues.

@AshleyJColeman

6 жыл бұрын

PhilsComputerLab yes it is. And that is what I thought. But going from 1ws to 0ws I get results consistently about 3% lower. Not much I know, I just don't understand why.

EDO SIMM is superior. Does that motherboard support it?

I've not really seen any noticeable difference with L2 cache enabled vs. disabled myself. I was thinking of upgrading the cache on the board, but looks like it will be a futile exercise.

@philscomputerlab

6 жыл бұрын

This might be a good video topic, checking out the impact of various cache sizes and if it's worth it. Some chips can cost quite a bit these days.

If you could do that nowadays I'd be running at a blistering 10.5GHz, wow, they're not made like they used to be, also please do a vid with an old high core count Xeon (attempt #2)

So the fsb was one of the biggest bottle necks on old machines. I remember my causing had an 133mhz mmx which he downclocked to 100mhz just so he could raise the fsb and memory speed or something like that. In his words it was faster. (never actually touched the machine in depth, i was like 8 at that time)

@N0zer0

6 жыл бұрын

I can confirm this too. Back in the day I did benchmarking like this on a 5x86 with 60ns EDO RAM modules and the machine got faster at 3×50 MHz than at 4×40 because of higher FSB especially in Windows. Doom may be an exception favoring higher CPU clock speed. I didn't have these options in BIOS, had to use jumper settings.

@cybercat1531

5 жыл бұрын

Even on Core 2 Conroe/Merom/Penryn etc FSB is a major limiter.

The best of Amd's 5x86 were meant to run at 160mhz but there's a rumor saying 5x86 at 160mhz could get into k5 territory. So Amd decided to sell all of 5x86's capable of more than 140/150/160Mhz as 133mhz . You can tell the real rating from the code on the cpu : ADW rated at 133+ ; ADY rated at 140-150mhz & ADZ 160+; I have in my collection all 3 of those. ADZ in general can reach 180mhz stable with a very good motherboard and ram (60mhzx3). At 180mhz amd 5x86 is faster even than a Cyrix 5x86-120GP with full features enabled. Also Cyrix are also rated to run stable at 50mhz fsb and sometimes 2x50 is better than 3x40 .(depends on ram used),pity cyrix 5x85 are not great overclokers!

@alvaroacwellan9051

6 жыл бұрын

I couldn't find a direct connection between AD* rating and overclocking potential. I've seen ADWs that could beat certain ADZs. Officially the third character means max temperature though, and higher heat tolerance can indeed mean better overclockability. But it's just a marking and I suspect cheap mass produced 5x86s weren't strictly binned so there may be a huge "ADZ content" among the chips marked ADW.

I think we all really want to know how it Compares overclocked with those settings against the Pentium

in the 90´, I OC my Intel 486DX2 80MHz to 100MHz, and lowered memory timings too, can´t remember the numbers :-)

Do amd5x86 133 vs cyrix 5x86 gp120 :d

What is song on the end?

My brother had am5x86-p75 133Mhz overclocked to 160Mhz with jumpers =) , 8Mb simm ram , 1mb videocard Cirrus logic.. 8x Mitsumi CD-Rom. 850Mb Hdd Seagate... SB AWE64 .. Oh my God ... All mp3s files played without lag till 160 kbps , but if you move a mouse it was a lags.. =)

I had the Old ET 6000. That thing ran 2D stuff like a pimp on meth. I remember my 2D games going actually faster than they should because of that thing.

@rawlynn2112

4 жыл бұрын

You tell me, I still have an old ISA ET4000 card and that thing is a rocket under DOS games using VGA 320x240 ... better performer than supposedly faster and later VLB cards, go figure.

@fungo6631

Жыл бұрын

@@rawlynn2112 Well, it certainly wasn't better in Doom and Duke3D, that's for sure.

how old can you go with overclocking considering intel x86 with consumer grade motherboards? can you overclock a 286 for instance? is it possible?

@AshleyJColeman

6 жыл бұрын

That was a very different time back then, motherboards were designed to work with x86 and a number of vendors made processors to the x86 standard. Instead of now motherboard makers design their board to work with intel, or amd. But yes 286 overclocking was possible.

@soylentgreenb

6 жыл бұрын

AMD begun manufacturing x86 chips as a second source for intel chips. Some server operators required that there must be a second vendor who can give them x86 chips if intel goes belly up. Their chips were identical until Intel changed their relationship and cut AMD off from detailed design data. That was 386 era I believe, but the first generation was 386 was reverse engineered intel 386 and almost identical. Up to socket 7 AMD maintained pin-compatiility so that you could plop a K6 into the same motherboard that would take a pentium.

@PileOfEmptyTapes

6 жыл бұрын

Overclocking a machine from this era would probably involve getting the soldering iron out to swap the clock crystal.

Esas memorias me recuerda a las primeras pc que desensamble

I honestly never overclocked any of my machines ever. So, just out of curiosity... can you keep the 486 at 160MHz for productivity without running into longterm issues? This makes me wonder if I could overclock my old MMX200 to 233 or 266MHz as I remember lots of games back then preferred those clock speeds.

@SeltsamerAttraktor

6 жыл бұрын

In my experience the MMX can easily be overclocked. I ran a 166Mhz rated one at 233Mhz for the longest time because it had no 166Mhz written on it only the model number and I accidentally confused it for my 233Mhz one.

@TheVanillatech

6 жыл бұрын

I've always had good results overclocking the later pentiums, even the non-MMX models. Ran a lot of testing a few years ago and my P200 (vanilla) ran fine from 75Mhz up to 250Mhz with a small Pentium 3 cooler, and sat happy with a SS7 cooler just the same. The speed difference isn't huge, all things considered, beyond 200Mhz with the pentiums. Prolonging the life of the CPU in terms of usability didn't really come into it back in the late 90's because the Pentiums simply didn't have enough grunt to run a VooDoo 2 without severely bottlenecking the card. The Pentium 2's were simply so much faster, even the bottom end 233Mhz PII.

@TheDemocrab

6 жыл бұрын

Pretty much. I've got a Pentium MMX 166 that was remarked (Custom sticker) as a 200Mhz chip and runs flawlessly to this day.

@kainhall

6 жыл бұрын

every machine ive had.....that could be....has been OCed i dont go all out..... i like to keep the voltages quite low, and temps below 60c (which with a nh d15, is easy to do lol) my favorite was using PhenomMSR Tweeker to P-state OC.....i ran P4 at like 800mhz and VERY low voltage and p3, p2, and p1 were all stock speeds.....but were all under volted p0 is where i had a 4ghz OC with 1.45 volts on my old phenom 2 6 core.... now ive got a ryzen 8 core at 3.925ghz

@GGigabiteM

6 жыл бұрын

It was a common thing to run Am5x86-133 chips at 160 MHz back in the day. They could run like though throughout the life of the computer without issue so long as you had proper cooling. It was sometimes possible with certain steppings of the Am5x86 to get 200 MHz, but you needed a motherboard which could run at a 50 MHz FSB, which was pretty rare. As shown in this video, bus clocks were often cascaded off of a master clock (usually the FSB) and often didn't have dividers available, so boards that had PCI or VLB could end up running the slots at 50 MHz, which was way out of spec and caused cards to malfunction. Though if you could get such a setup working, it would often perform like a low end Pentium in many applications.

I never knew you could get an AM486 going that fast! Highest I ever got an intel 486DX2 was at 75 from 66 and it didn't like it.

@soylentgreenb

6 жыл бұрын

The AMD 5x86 was a 486 architecture compatible 486 motherboards. I think the fastest variant sold was 160 MHz stock.

@LionWithTheLamb

3 жыл бұрын

It's not a AM486, it's a AM5x86. Technically it's a optimized and clock increased AM486.

Hey Phil have you thought about making a video on the last agp cards made? I managed to pick up a mint Ati 3650 for $10. There is supposed to be a Geforce 6800 also from nvidia side. Would be interesting to see the bottleneck effects on old cpus

@philscomputerlab

6 жыл бұрын

Nah these cards are too expensive :/

@Pholiage

6 жыл бұрын

Boy you werent kidding. Man $Au100 average is pretty much.

@tduforever5542

6 жыл бұрын

@PhilsComputerLab - I can forward some cards to you, the internatinal shipping is cheap here in CZE. After a 10-second search on Bazoš I was able to find a whole used PC with Athlon XP 3200+, 2GBs of DDR2, 80GB HDD and finally an AGP 3650 for $35 AUD, or a lone AGP 3650 for $10 AUD, with shipping I could probably forward it for about $20-30 AUD.

@philscomputerlab

6 жыл бұрын

I had a look, I actually have a 3650. But it's not the fastest card, there are faster ones and they cost even more. I think my best AGP card is a 7800 GS or something like that.

@philscomputerlab

6 жыл бұрын

Though I would just ditch AGP and go with PCIe. You can get 478 and 775 for PCIe as well as AMD 754 and 939.

Phil, personally, I don't think going older and older does you any favors. I enjoyed your videos on using cheap Ali Express motherboards to leverage Intel Xeons for maximum performance vs. modern parts so much more. I mean sure, remembering 486DX and such is cool, but what can we all really DO with all this? Now a cheap intel Xeon is a whole other story. I also loved your videos on older GPUs and how they can sometimes fill in when newer more expensive GPUs are not available.

@fungo6631

Жыл бұрын

Dude, we watch Phil BECAUSE of the older stuff. It's much more simpler but at the same time more complex. And it's more DIY-able. Some guy did actual HARDWARE mods to make the 386 run at 50 MHz.

@lisov4575

Жыл бұрын

@@fungo6631 there's old, and there's OLD.