In this video we're going to take another look at our barn find PC, and see how it stacks up against another DX4 100 machine that does have real L2 cache. Enjoy
its good to see you understand that their is far more to a computers performance than just an fps benchmark. far to many modern channels don't understand that loading times, updates, multitasking, ect all matter. I've seen some newer games load twice as fast with more cores and yet all the big youtubers show is oh look the fps is the same, so therefore exact same cpu perf waste of sand blah blah blah.
Many motherboards from that time had those fake chips. They were often even not aligned and incorrectly soldered... not that it mattered. You could insert a real l2 cache256kb module in the long brown connector close to the CPU, in games it truly mattered (easily 30% more FPS on a Pentium 133 or 486DX2-66)
I did this experiment with my Macintosh Performa 5400. It has a slot for optional L2 cache, so I ran some benchmarks before and after installing 256k of cache. It made a big difference!
On my 486 PC back in the day, one of the biggest performance upgrades I made to it was adding 128 KB of L2. It's especially important for the clock multiplied chips. I still wish I had been able to keep that machine.
Remember playing doom on Compaq ProLinea 386/25 and having to make the screen tiny to be able to play it, Duke(dnrate) and decent(frametime) have built in framerate you can do timerefresh quake also, thanks for the video look forward to the next one.
Every time I see Duke3d running on a 486, it surprises me how slow it is. I just do not recall my 486 system back in the day having a hard time with it. Had a Cyrix DX2-80MHz, so 40MHz bus, with basic VLB video (think it was a low end Cirrus Logic..I was ~12 when I bought the parts) & generic VLB IDE/Multi I/O card (I believe the motherboard was a PCChips M912 w/ real cache). I can't help but think I must be remembering the game from after I had upgraded to an 83MHz Pentium Overdrive (which I got for $1 at a yard sale...most memorable and impactful upgrade of my life). I have all the parts to re-create that system (both with the 80MHz 486 and the OD), so hopefully some day soon, I can find out first hand.
Were you playing it in 320x240 though? I had a Pentium 60 and remember Duke and Quake running pretty well...but could not dream of SVGA until 3dfx came on the scene. I recall Duke going immediately to single digit frame rates the moment I put it in SVGA
@@HoistusMaximus Yes, it was most certainly 320x240. I've seen several videos of the game on Socket 3 and it's always unplayable. I can't imagine they would've all been trying SVGA modes, but maybe they were and I just didn't notice...
@@mikem9536 Yeah, sadly after the 486 (which was licensed, so all brands performed about the same), hardly anything could keep up with Intel until the original AMD FX. The AMD K6-2 was my next CPU and while not able to keep up with Intel, it was plenty fast to run everything at 640x480, which was fine, since I wouldn't own a monitor capable of higher resolutions until years later. Cheers.
Adding 256kb of cache to my Globablyst 510 (w/ 486 DX4 100)made a difference of about 20-25% We just had to reverse engineer the proprietary module first (thread on Vogons about that, if interested) 😅
I have an ECS UM486V AIO Rev 2.0 which I upgraded with a Kingston Turbochip 133 back in the 90s. Sadly, this 5V only board inexplicably disables the L2 with the upgrade. It's still much faster than the original SX-33, but I often wondered if a DX2-66 with L2 would have been faster.
@@RetroSpector78I heard that someone reverse engineered them, but I mean, I have a 256kb module so I'm probably good to go, it's a 486 class system anyway, I feel like as much as the cache is doing things, having PCI for Disk I/O and video does a lot more.
@@RetroSpector78Have you read the thread on Vogons, “Let’s make new M919 cache sticks”? It has quite a following and they have made a coast up to 1024 kb. I think details are uploaded on GitHub but one of the guys was selling on surplus bare boards to interested people. I bought one of these PC Chips m/b’s with the fake cache back in the day along with the 256kb coast module. I was always on the lookout for the “future available” 512kb pipeline burst modules that is mentioned in the manual, but this was never made. I still have this motherboard board running with a 5x86 AMD 133Mhz cpu and it’s still as good as the day I bought it. It was a great buy inspite of the fake cache.
Remember the original celerons? While the pentium 2 had 512k cache chips in the cpu board, the original celerons had no cache chips which was supposed to be a more cost effective alternative but had worse performance than the equivalent pentium 2, that was quickly superceded by a celeron with 128k cache.
I was surprised to see 62.5 fps on 3d bench without the L2 cache using the PCChips motherboard. That was pretty good. 4fps faster than the other ChainTech motherboard. Gonna try and source a coast module.
As a kid in the 1990s I had......empty cache sockets.....and no idea what that means. I wish I could go back and by myself some kilobytes for my 486DX4.
I have a Pentium 75 socket 7 and I fit 256k l2 cache. Speedsys see's the cache ok, so does all the other tools on Dosbench except cachchk? Very odd. I can clearly see the measure differences with it on or off but cachchk always says only L1. The cmos doesn't have any settings however for write back or write though, only on or off.
I remember Clint (LGR) realized his pc had the fake L2 chips. The circuits didn’t lead to anywhere. I would have been pissed off years ago if I bought the PC brand new and find out L2 cache was fake.
@@RetroSpector78 Thanks for the answer :) I have one to this day. My model is 7GlrA. I bought it in February 2000 along with cool components from which I assembled my dream computer at that time. Only my AOC 7GLrA has a slightly different look and a different stand. Also with speakers, but different shape.
they are getting hard to find. keep looking and you’ll find one. i got mine from a facebook marketplace computer lot. turned a profit on the modern stuff and got some neat retro stuff.
Why would you produce a motherboard with fake cache soldered on? Why not just... sell a board that doesn't have the L2 cache? You're obviously selling to a market that doesn't know or care. It seems like fraud for the sake of fraud.
The human race is a strange one to fathom. The same question could be asked, "Why put a giant exhaust on a car with a small engine?". The harder you try to make life make sense, the more you'll tangle yourself up in unfathomable decisions.
Cause marketing can say this board is better because it has L2 cache when other boards of a similar price don’t have L2 cache, of course it was a lie and it doesn’t actually exist on the board itself, hence the COAST slot.
Yes, that's correct -- it was fraud. The bootup message literally told you it had enabled cache that doesn't exist. Why bother? Probably because somebody might have read in a PC magazine that you should always make sure your new computer has cache. As you see here, it makes a big difference, so that's good and relevant advice. But SRAM was expensive, so higher performance boards cost more. If you were on a budget, you would have to decide what components to spend more money on to meet your performance goals. It makes no sense to buy a faster CPU with no cache compared to a slower CPU with cache, since the faster CPU would be hamstrung. Ergo, PC Chips could meet the low-price demands of budget-conscious buyers who didn't know about cache, and _simultaneously_ meet the demands of buys who know enough to demand cache by having the competitive edge of "having cache" without having had to encumber BOM cost on actual SRAM. This makes the board very "price competitive" to competing products. Even if you knew what cache was and that you wanted it, you've been suckered into thinking you have it, and chances are, you wouldn't actually know any better, and would just assume that's how (not) fast it was _supposed_ to be. I still think it's as asinine as it was fraudulent, as your reputation will be in tatters as soon as the tech press catches on, but I guess they were betting on it flying under their (the press's) radar. They were mostly tethered to OEM vendors and business customers anyway.
Back then we had this phone book size book called pc shopper among others that sold pc parts all with pics description etc etc then on top of that their was always a computer expo in major cities selling used new off brand etc.etc how i built my 1st pc from scratch
0:50 Yes & yes'ish TULIP AMD DX2/66 MHz with a bit more RAM: Wing Commander III AND IV😲, Under A Killing Moon & The Pandora Directive 😀 ^all with NO DARN! TULIP-proprietary Cache on a stick.....(sigh) ...SELF-builder since ;-)
I never shutdown my PC, sometimes 4 months without a reset... I consider unacceptable that sometimes it takes up to 8 seconds or more for the Start Menu to appear on screen after I pressed the windows key... I am okay with Disk Paging under extreme situations (like some dumbass that lets his PC running for 4 months straight...) My problem is when essential parts of the system also get Paged for example Sound subsystem and UI elements... How the F did things reach this level 😂😂😂😂😂
And don't even come with the Linux preachy BS... Utter crap... I've experienced the exact same on Linux, even worse I would say... Windows as broken as it is at least has the Elegance of clearing unused portions of didk swap, unlike linux 😂😂😂😂😂
Наука
I worked with computers, as a tech, for 25 years. I never saw a demo of real world differences with cache. Two thumbs up!
Glad you enjoyed it !
its good to see you understand that their is far more to a computers performance than just an fps benchmark. far to many modern channels don't understand that loading times, updates, multitasking, ect all matter. I've seen some newer games load twice as fast with more cores and yet all the big youtubers show is oh look the fps is the same, so therefore exact same cpu perf waste of sand blah blah blah.
The fps is the same as long as you don't multitask, those youtubers always run systems with very few background tasks running.
Many motherboards from that time had those fake chips. They were often even not aligned and incorrectly soldered... not that it mattered.
You could insert a real l2 cache256kb module in the long brown connector close to the CPU, in games it truly mattered (easily 30% more FPS on a Pentium 133 or 486DX2-66)
Yeah just need to find a PCChips m919 coast module as this is a proprietary slot.
I did this experiment with my Macintosh Performa 5400. It has a slot for optional L2 cache, so I ran some benchmarks before and after installing 256k of cache. It made a big difference!
Nice computer systems. Greetings from Steven from the Netherlands
Very cool to see .. what was going through my mind was at the end of the video you were going to show a hack to get working L2 cache on the barn box..
I was expecting the barn find PC to be slower but also surprised that it was faster
On my 486 PC back in the day, one of the biggest performance upgrades I made to it was adding 128 KB of L2. It's especially important for the clock multiplied chips.
I still wish I had been able to keep that machine.
Remember playing doom on Compaq ProLinea 386/25 and having to make the screen tiny to be able to play it, Duke(dnrate) and decent(frametime) have built in framerate you can do timerefresh quake also, thanks for the video look forward to the next one.
Great info...nice to see the comparison between both pc's 🙂
Every time I see Duke3d running on a 486, it surprises me how slow it is. I just do not recall my 486 system back in the day having a hard time with it. Had a Cyrix DX2-80MHz, so 40MHz bus, with basic VLB video (think it was a low end Cirrus Logic..I was ~12 when I bought the parts) & generic VLB IDE/Multi I/O card (I believe the motherboard was a PCChips M912 w/ real cache). I can't help but think I must be remembering the game from after I had upgraded to an 83MHz Pentium Overdrive (which I got for $1 at a yard sale...most memorable and impactful upgrade of my life).
I have all the parts to re-create that system (both with the 80MHz 486 and the OD), so hopefully some day soon, I can find out first hand.
Were you playing it in 320x240 though? I had a Pentium 60 and remember Duke and Quake running pretty well...but could not dream of SVGA until 3dfx came on the scene. I recall Duke going immediately to single digit frame rates the moment I put it in SVGA
@@HoistusMaximus Yes, it was most certainly 320x240. I've seen several videos of the game on Socket 3 and it's always unplayable. I can't imagine they would've all been trying SVGA modes, but maybe they were and I just didn't notice...
Duke3D ran on my Cryix 6x86 alot better than Quake.
@@mikem9536 Yeah, sadly after the 486 (which was licensed, so all brands performed about the same), hardly anything could keep up with Intel until the original AMD FX. The AMD K6-2 was my next CPU and while not able to keep up with Intel, it was plenty fast to run everything at 640x480, which was fine, since I wouldn't own a monitor capable of higher resolutions until years later. Cheers.
good video. nice split screen demo. thanks.
Performance vids are always great! Thanks for the in depth comparisons, I really enjoyed it!
Very informative and interesting, as always. 😊
Adding 256kb of cache to my Globablyst 510 (w/ 486 DX4 100)made a difference of about 20-25% We just had to reverse engineer the proprietary module first (thread on Vogons about that, if interested) 😅
Thanks for this nice detailed video!
To Retrospector78 or not to Retrospector78?
To Retrospector78!
Thanks for the BIOS tips!
I have an ECS UM486V AIO Rev 2.0 which I upgraded with a Kingston Turbochip 133 back in the 90s. Sadly, this 5V only board inexplicably disables the L2 with the upgrade. It's still much faster than the original SX-33, but I often wondered if a DX2-66 with L2 would have been faster.
2:11 You forgot to enable IDE HDD block mode and IDE 32bit transfer mode. Increases disk performance.
Great video❤
I have this exact motherboard! I also happen to have the cache module for it, it actually runs quite well with the cache installed.
Yeah also on the lookout for one. They are reverse engineered so might be possible to create a pcb and solder on some cache chips.
@@RetroSpector78I heard that someone reverse engineered them, but I mean, I have a 256kb module so I'm probably good to go, it's a 486 class system anyway, I feel like as much as the cache is doing things, having PCI for Disk I/O and video does a lot more.
@@RetroSpector78I have some extra PCBs for the 1MB cache module if interested.
@@RetroSpector78Have you read the thread on Vogons, “Let’s make new M919 cache sticks”? It has quite a following and they have made a coast up to 1024 kb. I think details are uploaded on GitHub but one of the guys was selling on surplus bare boards to interested people.
I bought one of these PC Chips m/b’s with the fake cache back in the day along with the 256kb coast module. I was always on the lookout for the “future available” 512kb pipeline burst modules that is mentioned in the manual, but this was never made. I still have this motherboard board running with a 5x86 AMD 133Mhz cpu and it’s still as good as the day I bought it. It was a great buy inspite of the fake cache.
Remember the original celerons?
While the pentium 2 had 512k cache chips in the cpu board, the original celerons had no cache chips which was supposed to be a more cost effective alternative but had worse performance than the equivalent pentium 2, that was quickly superceded by a celeron with 128k cache.
My 486 DX4 at 133 with 512 kb / VLB CirrusLogic gets around 70 fps on 3d bench. Memory timing for me did help.
I was surprised to see 62.5 fps on 3d bench without the L2 cache using the PCChips motherboard. That was pretty good. 4fps faster than the other ChainTech motherboard. Gonna try and source a coast module.
@@RetroSpector78 yeah really curious now what difference that makes.
As a kid in the 1990s I had......empty cache sockets.....and no idea what that means. I wish I could go back and by myself some kilobytes for my 486DX4.
Would be great barn find 486 have at least empty L2 banks. Nice pc to upgrade
I noticed L2 cache for every cpu advertisement, since mid 90s. And wondering what is that all about.
Just like the jungle, the difference is massive.
I have a Pentium 75 socket 7 and I fit 256k l2 cache. Speedsys see's the cache ok, so does all the other tools on Dosbench except cachchk? Very odd. I can clearly see the measure differences with it on or off but cachchk always says only L1.
The cmos doesn't have any settings however for write back or write though, only on or off.
I remember Clint (LGR) realized his pc had the fake L2 chips. The circuits didn’t lead to anywhere. I would have been pissed off years ago if I bought the PC brand new and find out L2 cache was fake.
isn't that exactly why the L2 cache exsists for to speed things up
Isn't the brown socket on the board with the fake cache chips for a stick of cache RAM?
I might be wrong, but isnt that brown slot for a cache module on the pc chips Motherboard?
Are your sure the traces from the surface mount chips go nowhere? Is it possible they go to the cache slot on inner PCB layers?
15:41 What is the model of the AOC monitor ? Is it a 7GLr ?
Yes it is !
@@RetroSpector78
Thanks for the answer :) I have one to this day. My model is 7GlrA. I bought it in February 2000 along with cool components from which I assembled my dream computer at that time. Only my AOC 7GLrA has a slightly different look and a different stand. Also with speakers, but different shape.
still need a old PC for Windows 95
they are getting hard to find. keep looking and you’ll find one. i got mine from a facebook marketplace computer lot.
turned a profit on the modern stuff and got some neat retro stuff.
i don't know if you mentioned it, but isn't that slot on the fake-cache-board for cache?
Yes, but he said that that slot is not compatible with the normal Coast modules.
@@Flashy7 i see...
Why would you produce a motherboard with fake cache soldered on? Why not just... sell a board that doesn't have the L2 cache? You're obviously selling to a market that doesn't know or care. It seems like fraud for the sake of fraud.
The human race is a strange one to fathom. The same question could be asked, "Why put a giant exhaust on a car with a small engine?". The harder you try to make life make sense, the more you'll tangle yourself up in unfathomable decisions.
Pc chips loved that shit. They do it because it was profitable and didn’t kill their reputation, they lasted well into the 2000s
Cause marketing can say this board is better because it has L2 cache when other boards of a similar price don’t have L2 cache, of course it was a lie and it doesn’t actually exist on the board itself, hence the COAST slot.
Yes, that's correct -- it was fraud. The bootup message literally told you it had enabled cache that doesn't exist.
Why bother? Probably because somebody might have read in a PC magazine that you should always make sure your new computer has cache. As you see here, it makes a big difference, so that's good and relevant advice. But SRAM was expensive, so higher performance boards cost more. If you were on a budget, you would have to decide what components to spend more money on to meet your performance goals. It makes no sense to buy a faster CPU with no cache compared to a slower CPU with cache, since the faster CPU would be hamstrung. Ergo, PC Chips could meet the low-price demands of budget-conscious buyers who didn't know about cache, and _simultaneously_ meet the demands of buys who know enough to demand cache by having the competitive edge of "having cache" without having had to encumber BOM cost on actual SRAM. This makes the board very "price competitive" to competing products. Even if you knew what cache was and that you wanted it, you've been suckered into thinking you have it, and chances are, you wouldn't actually know any better, and would just assume that's how (not) fast it was _supposed_ to be.
I still think it's as asinine as it was fraudulent, as your reputation will be in tatters as soon as the tech press catches on, but I guess they were betting on it flying under their (the press's) radar. They were mostly tethered to OEM vendors and business customers anyway.
Back then we had this phone book size book called pc shopper among others that sold pc parts all with pics description etc etc then on top of that their was always a computer expo in major cities selling used new off brand etc.etc how i built my 1st pc from scratch
2:00 The date says the year is 2094. WTF?
Is that AMD one with 8 or 16K L1 cache?
8kb write through l1
0:50 Yes & yes'ish
TULIP AMD DX2/66 MHz with a bit more RAM: Wing Commander III AND IV😲, Under A Killing Moon & The Pandora Directive 😀
^all with NO DARN! TULIP-proprietary Cache on a stick.....(sigh) ...SELF-builder since ;-)
.
Thx a lot ! Appreciate it !
I never shutdown my PC, sometimes 4 months without a reset... I consider unacceptable that sometimes it takes up to 8 seconds or more for the Start Menu to appear on screen after I pressed the windows key... I am okay with Disk Paging under extreme situations (like some dumbass that lets his PC running for 4 months straight...) My problem is when essential parts of the system also get Paged for example Sound subsystem and UI elements... How the F did things reach this level 😂😂😂😂😂
And don't even come with the Linux preachy BS... Utter crap... I've experienced the exact same on Linux, even worse I would say... Windows as broken as it is at least has the Elegance of clearing unused portions of didk swap, unlike linux 😂😂😂😂😂
Disk swap... Hate typing on phones 😂😂😂😂