Nice Video! I literally did the same with a 100 MHz Overdrive, the 83 MHz Pentium Overdrive and the 200 MHz w MMX Pentium Overdrive. Love those CPUs…but now have Socket 5 Interposer that allows me to run AMD K6-2 with 400MHz on a former Pentium 90. So cool what was possible back then….
My first computer had a DX2/66, thinking about it makes me nostalgic. I remember reading about the "overdrive" in a magazine and dreaming about upgrading to it.
I had an AMD "586" Dx4 133 that still went into a 486 socket, a rather rare chip in the uk but it was very quick with the right board compared to a normal 486 dx4 100, :) wish I still had it.
While I used 486 and Pentium as a kid I wasn’t old enough to build my own PC until the P4 days so these old systems look so strange. A motherboard from 2002 is very similar to 2022 but 1992 they look very different. Also how is it finding drivers for such old hardware? Or maybe it isn’t as necessary as for early 2000s stuff?
Very true. The older boards like this one are based on the AT standard (baby AT formfactor specifically). Later on the ATX standard was adopted, which is still what is used today (although there have been revisions). I'm not sure when ATX came out exactly, but I want to say around 1996. It was pretty mainstream once the Pentium II came out. The retro PC community has done a great job preserving some of the old software required to run these old components. There hasn't been much I haven't been able to find so far, thankfully! :)
@@vswitchzero That is good that people have saved the software. I’ve had issues with some drivers from the early 2000s. Usually windows 98 drivers for the motherboard sound chip. Some brands like MSI and gigabyte tend to have the drivers and the board still on the website but it is more difficult with Biostar and some others. I mostly stick to windows 9x. While I did use some DOS and Windows 3.1 when I was around 8 I don’t remember as much about those as the Windows 9x era. Most older games seem to work well opening the DOS file inside Windows 98 anyway.
The original PC had two external connectors on the motherboard. Keyboard and Cassette. Everything else was provided by expansion cards. The later XT and AT dropped the Cassette port leaving only the keyboard port on the motherboard. For many years most vendors of generic clone motherboard and cases used a form factor called "baby AT" based on the form factor used by the IBM XT-286. This certainly wasn't the only form factor out there but it was the most common and long-lived. Gradually motherboards started adding more on-board functionality but the form-factor had no provision for more external connectors. So extra functionality needing external connectors had to be accommodated with flyleads to either mounting positions on the case or brackets fitted in unused expansion slots. In 1995 intel developed the ATX standard and it became the de-factor standard form factor with the introduction of the Pentium II around 1997. The ATX form factor made a couple of radical changes. The main power connector was changed and Hard on/off was replaced with soft on/off. The dedicated position for a 5 pin keyboard connector was replaced by a flexible space for an IO plate. Intel introduced another new standard "BTX" in the pentium 4 era, but it didn't really catch on and the market continued with varients of ATX. Power and cooling have been beefed up over the years and larger and smaller variants have been created for different markets, but the basic ATX form factor has remained much the same from the late 1990s to today.
My family got a new 486 DX2 66 computer in 1995, less than a year later I convinced my father that we needed a Pentium computer for my school work (I wanted to play Quake). I showed him this processor and he bought it without hesitation, the POD 83 was about 5000 SEK and to exchange the almost new computer would cost atleast 10000 SEK. I was happy and he was content 😁
"less than a year later I convinced my father that we needed a Pentium computer for my school work (I wanted to play Quake)" That is awesome as hell. I LOVE reading stuff like this. I remember suffering and watching a friend play Quake in late '96, at the time we had two 486sx25 desktops with 8megs of RAM that were barely able to play DOOM2. In January 1997 our father brought one of our 486 desktops to the local computer shop and they upgraded it to a Pentium 133 with 16megs of RAM. We were blown away with the jump in performance going from a 486sx25 to a Pentium 133 and we could finally play Quake and experience those amazing gibs with the blood trails. A few months later we discovered Quake Deathmatch and my brother somehow got a dialup program in DOS to work and HOLY CHIRST was the Quake Deathmatch fun as hell. We constantly had the phone line tied up for HOURS everyday for over a year on that Pentium 133.
I was just a little too young for 486 stuff in the day, but I do find the era to be really interesting. Definitely looking forward to a AMD/Cyrix comparison!
Yes, those were interesting times. I am old enough to have gone through not only that time, but in the times before that, as my family bought Coleco & Atari (2600/VCS) consoles in the late 1970's & then a few years later I got into the Commodore 64. I still have all my Commodore stuff (hardware, software, papers), as well as Intel 8088's, 286/386/486's & Pentiums. And sometimes I wish I could have been born slightly a little earlier so that I could have also discovered 1970's computer stuff, such as mini-computers, mainframes & homebrew kits (Altair, KIM, Heathkits, etc). Today we take for granted the power & speed of modern computers, but none of that could have happened without the previous iterations, which also includes the invention of the silicon transistor by Bell Labs, not to mention the invention of the concept of zero in ancient India, which would help start the concept of digital/binary logic long before it was a concept itself.
I had a Sega Megadrive, after giving my CPC 464 to a friend who had nothing, and played the hell out of Mercs, Sonic, Road Rash etc. Was very impressed for the entire two years I had the console. Then a friend of mine invited me over to see his "PC". He had a state of the art 486 DX2-80 with 8MB RAM. And he immediately loaded Alone In The Dark, and my jaw hit the floor. The fact I was controlling this 3D, realistic character and shooting purple monsters with a shotgun, it was unreal. After seeing that, he showed me Doom - and that was it. That did it. I mean it was brand new, and I'd never thought this was possible in games. So I took my entire £1400 post office account savings and bought a DX-33 system and my friend gave me copies of Doom, The Legacy, Alone In The Dark, Dune 2 etc. It was amazing, how fast things moved back then. And the potential was limitless. Never see those times again, from Doom and Alone in the Dark in 1993, to Quake and TombRaider and Carmageddon in 1996, to 3Dfx powered Screamer Rally and Dungeon Keeper 2 in 1999.
This chip would have released when I was 5. I didn't end up using a computer til I was 6 (my dad's Amiga 1000). Even the first PC I built when I was 11 had a K5 socket 100MHz Pentium (all built from Goodwill scraps), and it would later sport a 133MHz Pentium w/MMX, so yeah I still missed out on the 486 days as well.
@@Vile-Flesh Ya know, that friend of mine had connections with a manager of an Escom shop in my town. The manager was stealing PC's from the shop out the back and passing them to my friend to fence, inventing paperwork to cover it up, and I was one of the victims cos I bought one. That's how my friend had so many brand new computers and games. The manager got sacked but was never arrested as far as I know. But I remember walking past that Escom shop one day, and in the window there were 3 computers all running the Doom demo, the £899 computer, £1299 computer, £1699 computer etc. That was probably the best ever move by any manager to sell PC's in 1993/4. There was always a crowd of people outside, and there was a 486 PC inside where you could walk up and play Doom! By then I already had my PC (which was, lets face it, probably stolen) but I still used to hang out in that shop, learning things about PC's. One of the guys in there taught me about conventional memory and all that stuff. It was the first shop in my town that focused on selling PC's for entertainment, rather than to offices for business. Just a few years later there would be Electronics Boutique, Tomorrows World, GameTech etc. But those Escom managers made an early killing (some of them more than others).
Great video! I remember installing the DX2 66 Overdrive into my SX33 back in the day and how big an improvement it was. I would have passed out from this kind of performance back then. 😂
@@vswitchzero well, I started wirh a AMI NEAT AT 386SX 40 MHz AFAIR, MFM 40 MB & Hercules clone with 14" paperwhite. I had to upgrase with a cyrix ? copro (I still have), a speedstar 24, and an EIZO 9080i. Yes, it was my first PC I bought to work with STRAKON CAD as a studend withe the money I worked for DiCAD. These days back I had been entiteled as "the CAD Pope" and "the one who walkes above water". 😁 An Intel Overdrive would had made me to the Lord of CAD himself for sure. 🫣
I remember having a 12 MHz 286 machine and was visiting someone who had a brand new 486DX-33 and it zipped and unzipped files in a flash where my 286 would take minutes.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 yes. Actually the PC era started with i386 protected mode. My first "Computer" was an Olivetti M10, our uncle ("the FACIT Man") acquired. M10 is still with me. Very helpful for my study. But the software I had to develop was already on a 486, where my study time was enlongued, because I already jobbed for DiCAD and later for Cvil Engineering Companies.
Excellent video , as always but can you add a Voodoo 1 to this system and show us how Quake runs? In 1997 i had an AMD K5 120MHz with a Voodoo 1 and Quake was great.
Thanks very much! It is possible to try with a 40MHz bus speed for a 100MHz total clock. From what I've seen online, these chips don't overclock well at all. Not so much because of the core, but the power regulator on the chip can't provide enough current for it to work reliably at that clock speed. There are some mods that can be done to it to squeeze a bit more out of it, but I'll probably just leave it as-is :)
I remember these when they were new. As I recall they were semi-vaporware. Hard to find and extremely expensive. Some people even suggested that the only reason Intel even bothered to make them in such limited numbers was to avoid a lawsuit over the "Overdrive Ready" sockets they'd been flogging for a couple of years. The cost of one was about the same as buying a new socket 3 motherboard and a Cyrix 5x86 combined. The early 90's 486 motherboards that could have used the speed boost didn't support the chip physically with their older socket, while the later machines that DID have an overdrive socket could also accept the much cheaper AMD and Cyrix 5x86 chips which were either close enough in the case of the AMD chip or arguably better, in the case of the Cyrix chip. The ones I have, I found in upgraded proprietary OEM machines (IBM, Compaq, Dell) that had been in either Government or Corporate service before being scrapped. I've never found one in a standard beige box PC.
Very interesting historical perspective, thanks for sharing! I wondered the same about the overdrive sockets. They were around for quite some time before a chip existed that could actually use them.
@@evergreengamer5767 Citation please. There's no evidence that I've ever seen that Intel used damaged/defective silicon for these. As for the rest of your comment, have you ever heard of the Latin phrase "non sequitur"?
There was even more rare and strange Pentium Overdrive - for the replacement of original Pentium 60 and 66, doubling its' clock. That CPU also had built-in voltage regulator (Socket 4 motherboards had no voltage options, as 486 mb did) and it had full-fledged 3.3 v "new Pentium" core clocked at 120 or 133 MHz.
This video is a great breakdown of the performance of the PODP83. Sadly though, all the trade magazines at the time suggested to avoid buying this as it was deemed overpriced compared to the DX4 or Am5x86-133. I don't think FPU performance was a major selling point at the time, and the general suggestion was that if you needed faster FPU, just get an actual Pentium system that isn't held back by an "outdated" 32bit bus. That being said, I wanted one of these so bad back in the day but my Socket 2 486 didn't have the extra row of pins necessary to support the PODP. It probably wouldn't have helped me much though as I was restricted to using ISA bus graphics.
Thanks very much, Charlie! That's interesting. I wasn't very aware of the POD back in the day. We wound up getting a Pentium 100 system in late 1995 and kept the DX2/66 system we had before. I was always hogging the PC, so my parents were happy to take over the 486 and let me use the Pentium :) It's too bad they didn't make this chip work in a standard PGA-168 socket. I've never seen it, but I've heard people have done modifications to make it work. I'm not sure how essential the extra pins for power delivery really are. But I suppose for those earlier 486 systems, the DX4 overdrive or one of the 5V capable "turbo chip" alternatives were still great choices. Going from an SX or DX to a DX4 was a massive upgrade, that's for sure.
I ended up leapfrogging over the Pentium CPUs when I finally upgraded my 486 and went directly to a Pentium II 300 with AGP. But it's ok though. I have my PODP83 in my collection now, and comparing it to my Cx5x86 100 and AMD DX4 100, Intel DX4 100, and AMD 5x86 133 is quite interesting to say the least. All fun CPUs to have!
True, i was coming from a dx4 100 which i at times replaced with a dx40 (some games just ran to fast otherwise). And when the pentium hit it was just to expensive and not really needed. The overdrive cpu looked nice but a big part of the pentium was the new PCI bus and just couldn't ever perform that great without. Heck i got a cyrix 5x86 133 with PCI bus board for a fraction of the price of a pentium. Sure the fpu performance wasn't good but I didn't really care that much. Kept that system going till they released the pentium ii.
You can often soften the heat conductive glue with ca-glue remover/debonder. Simple CA-glue is a good heat-conductive glue btw. You can heat the heatsink with a blowtorch a bit to loosen the CA-glue afterwards if needed.
25:00 most of the effect does *not* come from the FPU performance itself, but from the architecture difference between 486 and pentium. How pentium worked, was that FPU was able to process its data in parallel with the rest of the CPU. It was almost like you had 2 cores on a CPU. And in quake they made heavy use of this "dual-core behavior". 486 couldn't process integer and floating point calculations in parallel and most of the performance is lost on that part.
I'd love to see a reference on this! As far as I knew, the 486 was available with an on-die FPU, but the FPU remained a distinct coprocessor until MMX and SSE started coupling it closer to the CPU. FWAIT was used to synchronize with the FPU, and you could absolutely do other work on the CPU before that. The Pentium had some FPU operations run in fewer cycles (including the infamously buggy FDIV), but its main improvement was in instructions per cycle on the integer side, which they termed a superscalar pipeline.
It's a combination of multiple factors. Mainly the superscalar integer pipeline, pipelined FPU, FDIV overlap, and FXCH parallelism. The original software renderer was hand-optimized by Abrash with these specific architectural details in mind. Check out Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book if you want to learn how exactly it all fits together on a per-instruction level.
All you had to do was soak it in alcohol it will come right off i would let it sit for at least a day Just put it in a container with a lid And knowing that i would use epoxy i would never trust tape after many heating and cooling expansion
Ahhh the pentium days...I had a 100 OC to 120 or 133. Later I managed to overclock the 75 MHz version to 150, and it ran quake 3 with 40 fps with a voodoo 2 card.
Acording to Wikipedia the Intel Pentium Overdrive CPU for 486 Systems was Introduced February 3, 1995. While the Pentium Processor (P5) was introduced 22. March 1993. Seems weird to not buy P5 in 1993 and instead buy a lower performance Pentium Overdrive CPU in 1995 🤔
Since late 2009 we finally escaped the pc upgrade every 2-3 years issue. Amd hd 5000 series introduced dx11 which is used 13 years later and those 12/13 year old cards can still boot new games. I did say boot not play well.
well I got a 486 back then & I knew about the pentiums but what I ended up doing was building my next machine, it was a 233 mmx in 97.. that's because I went from using my 486 at home to working at a computer store and after that 233 mmx I built machine after machine & I remember when the 1.33 ghz t-bird came out from AMD & I built a system on that.. of course I had a super socket 7 system, actually multiple, as well as slot A, and flip chip system, along with a dual slot 1 and dual socket 370.. ah I just kept having fun with it for years & even now I'm behind the latest hardware & it's just a matter of what you want to spend your money on and how many systems you have & over the years you begin to know what's going to fulfill your demands & don't really spend more unless you have to.. course monitors too now are crazy.. great video here I like stuff that brings back memories ... haha just remembered buying that 4.2GB bigfoot & thinking I'd have enough space lol oh man after that I built a raid array out of some fujitsu drives
I know very well how it sound but this is true. I was there. I saw it; A friend back in the days had a 486 with MMX. You could see the MMX logo with some writings at bios post kind of like a old video card post logo. I asked wtf was that, I want that on my pc and he said it was an ordeal and that worked ok but not as good as a real mmx cpu because it was software mmx.. Some stuff have been erased from history and only memories remain.
I bought a Pentium Overdrive 63mhz chip back in the day to upgrade my 486 DX2 running at 50mhz. To tell you the truth I didn't see much of a difference although I convinced myself otherwise back then to justify not wasting my money. I sold the system soon after and bought a proper Pentium.
u should immediately replace all of those ceramic caps , ceramic caps when damaged can go short circuit and explode like tantalums which will really damage the soldering area and also short the voltage regulator to ground and as the supply to cpu is unregulated the psu will continue pumping current into shorted voltage regulator and so that ic will explode as well.
With the 83 mhz overdrive chip. You could run most games well in 96, by 97 it was still pretty much obsolete tho lol. Still extended the life of your 486 for a year or so.
something died inside me when I saw you soldered to the gold pins. I thought you wete going to leave the kapton tape with a piece of wire, just for perfectionist sake. but in any case, really cool video and project!
Thanks very much! Haha yeah, to be honest it felt wrong soldering the gold pads. The tape and wire mod was too flaky though, unfortunately. I had the multiplier change a couple of times during testing.
Kinda wanna get one now simply because I know what to do if it's messed up. Nice work! Great to have this documented so succinctly. Seems like ages ago you were talking about this on Twitter, so I'm glad you got the video out. And that tutorial from Intel is absolute gold. Impressed by the performance in Quake - definitely acceptable performance.
Thanks very much! .. Haha yeah, I love that intel demo - the VGA artwork is awesome. Yeah, you're right! it was many months ago that I got that chip. My backlog is definitely getting too large now :) I'll hopefully be doing some more mods on it and some overclocking in the future.
Awesome seeing this. I was one of those guys that purchased one of these. It was to squeeze out more performance. Definitely not worth it though. A few months after I purchased this cpu.. I learned out to build my own PC from scratch and put together a shuttle socket 7 system with an AMD k5. That whole build, including the case cost less than the Pentium Overdrive, lol.
Thanks very much for your comment, that's interesting! From what I'm hearing, these chips were very overpriced and hard to obtain back then (selling above the $300 USD MSRP). Do you remember roughly how much you paid for it back then?
@@vswitchzero I paid $500, give or take $50. I had to order it from a local PC shop. It took at least a couple weeks for it come in after placing the order. A couple of other things I remember from that cpu.. I put it in a packard bell with a 486sx @50mhz. The sound events in windows 3.1 were "accelerated". Was interesting but I rarely used win 3.1 so I ignored that, lol. My time with it was short lived.. around the time I ordered the Pentium overdrive I started reading one of those PC hardware Bible type books.. and I also discovered "Toms Hardware" online. It was only months later that I picked up that shuttle board.. the k5pr75 (for $32!), a trident video card, 8 or 16 megs of ram (think it was 2 8meg sticks) and a sound blaster. That build blew away the Pentium overdrive Packard Bell in performance. That said.. I do regret selling that system to this day because it was cool. :)
23:30 The PCI S3 Virge is certainly not the bottleneck. If you put it on a fast socket 7 system, 3DBench 1.0C will easily reach 150+ FPS. The main bottleneck is most likely the slow bus speed and subpar memory performance of the 486 platform. Anyway, awesome video, keep it up! 😀
Thanks very much for your comment and for pointing that out! That definitely makes more sense. The more I see the Pentium, the more I realize just how bus limited the 486 platform was. I hope to start exploring some faster socket 7 based systems in the future and to look more into the Virge DX and Virge VX as well. Thanks again :)
Indeed. Those S3 cards are among my fastest in DOS. But 33 vs. 40 MHz bus makes a huge difference in memory bandwidth (120 vs. 100MB/s in Speedsys from my experience).
Thanks! That's interesting, I've heard a similar story about the OEM fan from others too. If it's anything like the retail box pentium coolers, they are pretty loud and don't age particularly well :)
Thanks for your comment! I'll be doing another video soon that'll compare the P83 overdrive to the AMD Am5x86 and the Cyrix 5x86 chips. I will definitely include some 160MHz results for the Am5x86 as well :)
@@vswitchzero if your components can handle it, I've observed 3x50MHz to be faster than 4x40MHz setup. But not all vlb graphics can handle 50MHz bus and pci bus might be thrown out of whack as well causing problems.
@@GigAHerZ64 I had some success running my AM5x86 at 3x50 on another PCI board I have in the past. I’ll have to give it a try on this shuttle HOT-433 as well 👍
I love when RUclips recommendation section hits a home run. All your content has been fantastic! Subscribed I had a 486sx2 at the time iirc. I do remember starring through the glass cabinet at the Pentium OD at CompUSA. The main incompatibility was the cost for my 14 yo self.
What I do with heatsinks like that, for example on my voodoo 1 and 2 cards, I use normal thermal paste, something like Arctic mx-4 or whatever in the center. And then add two SMALL drops of gel superglue on diagonal corners of the heatsink. Then I use some carpenters spring clamps to hold it on with some pressure until the glue sets. It works perfectly, holds really well, and cools perfectly. But all it takes is a bit of acetone to dissolve the superglue and you can remove it without a trace.
That was a great video! Now my itch to build a Pentium Overdrive system has returned… but oh Lord the prices… socket 3 PCI boards got expensive; not to mention the processor itself. Gotta keep trying the recycle center I guess. Keep up the good work!
I was looking for two years on a good deal and catched a Compaq branded LPX form factor UM8881/8886 board with 5x86 installed for ~25€. No other bids even though it was placed correctly. Seems people don't like those LPX form factor boards.
That Noctua 40x20mm fan has a 5V version. Don't know if the CPU package could provide enough power, but it would be pretty cool to have it soldered on and self-contained like that. I also have what looks to be the same thermal tape. I got it to attach small heat sinks to some servos, and was surprised how well the stuff holds.
Thanks for your comment! I actually have the 40x10mm 5V version from Noctua. I think the OEM fan is actually quite a bit heftier and probably uses more power so I assume it would be okay to be powered from the gold pads.
My first computer was a 233mmx, so, a little ahead of these overdrives. I only wiched intel still produced overdive cpu's, the new alder lake e-cores would be such an upgrade for so many old plataforms.
it's basically the same as i did with my am4 recently. landed a 5800x3D on the system i originally bought for a r7 2700 (non-x), and the improvement over that is vast. in games, it might be 3 times as fast.
Back in the day I had a 486DX4 100Mhz with 16MB of ram. I remember when Winamp came out it cried that it needed MMX instructions, so I spent the money to upgrade to the Pentium 60mhz.. even though it was "40mhz slower", it included those MMX instructions that allowed me to run Winamp.. man I wish I kept both of those boards.
I remember reviews at the time which usually weren't favorable, mostly because of views that the 486 platform was in it's endgame so it would not buy much time for many people. It was a spectator sport for me because I got a P54c 90MHz system (with the FDIV bug) in mid-94 as my graduation present, though I remember it having a few issues, particularly with the Reveal sound card that Insights included.
Thanks for your comment! The FDIV bug was very interesting. My first Pentium was from 1995 (a P54c 100MHz model NEC system) but I'm pretty sure they had the FDIV situation sorted by that point.
I would have killed for any kind of Pentium in 1994. We suffered with a 486sx25 from '92 all the way to January 1997 when we got the Pentium 133. That 133 opened sooooo many doors for us and it was so FAST.
Update: keep finding these on ebay for 100> bucks 63 mhz was 70 bucks. Maybe in canada the prices for these listing are high but in the US they're pretty reasonably priced
Very interesting! Those prices are much more reasonable than what I’ve been seeing lately. It’s true that Canadians always seem to pay more for this kind of stuff. Especially considering the exchange rate, import tax etc.
I had amd 386 DX 40 Mhz cpu in a mobo which was upgradeable to 486 :D Also you could massively overclock the 386 DX 40 Mhz to 80 Mhz. To achieve 50 MHz was realive easy. Anything over 50 Mhz was not as easy as now days.
Love the content. For a crazy idea i'd like to see the Pentium Overdrive paired with a Voodoo 2 Accelerator, see if it helps Quake to run better?? Just curious
Way back in the days my 1st computer was a Gateway 2000 4DX2-66 It was so slow. Even with the Evergreen Pentium Overdrive CPU Upgrade the system had bottlenecks. It wouldn't even play mp3s.
I bought Tandy 3100 and 3200 back in the day. 486/33s with 4MB, no sound or CD. Still have them fully loaded. The 3100 had only the "new" zif socket and could take up to a DX4/100 or the Gainberry 586/133 which is what is in the 3100 now. The 3200 has the Pentium OD socket. The Gainberry smokes that Pentium and the DX4 is right there with it.
i was hoping evergreen and modding would become like a competitive aspect the hobbyist brought into market... repairable modular enhanced hardware that was community driven and standardized for support. eliminate the tit for tat profiteering and monoplies... with home grown components that push the big chips beyond their original designs without stealing designs or exploiting royalties... instead allowed to market tgeir designs and give directly to those engineers instead of a company. in a royalties style distribution for all involved. not a corporation
I was supposed to get a second hand 486dx4 100 system for my first pc, but when my dad went to pick it up, (an hours drive away BTW) the bloke had sold it to someone else, so my dad was absolutely raging... Dad was so pissed he just stopped off at a computer shop on the way back and that's how I ended up getting a Pentium 75 instead of the 486 lol I over clocked it too, I was very chuffed!
1- heatsink is overkill. The black one would have been sufficient, if used in a clean (non smoker) environment. 2- The fan is overkill. You could have easily used a 12V fan, using the 5V pins. It would have given you enough airflow. 3- the cooling efficient of the tape you use on the cpu, is about the same as standard dual sided, plastic scotch tape.
My first PC, bought from Electronic Avenue at Montgomery Wards, was a Packard Bell desktop. I think it was around late 1994. Windows for Workgroups 3.11, I eventually upgraded to Windows 95. Originally 486DX-2 66Mhz, I had the Pentium Overdrive @83Mhz that was bought at one of the many electronics businesses in Silicon Valley that eventually went out of business. It worked well for what it did. Learned a lot with that thing.
@vswitchzero did you try orange Goo Gone on the top of that chip? I find it's useful sometimes when isopropyl doesn't remove thermal paste. It does need about a minute to activate.
Good tip, thanks! I forgot about "Goo Gone". I remember using that stuff to remove sticker residue many years ago and it was quite good at it. I did try IPA on it but it seemed to have no effect at all. Hopefully I won't have to do this again :D
Those intel overdrives were the only chips were getting. Had a 486dx33 and tried an offbrand "overdrive" chip but it was trash. Returned it and got an intel brand overdrive dx4 and it was night and day better.
Every single one of these that I ever had had a heat sink and fan permanently mounted to the chip.. this is the first time I've ever seen one with it removed and not absolutely destroyed!
My first build PC is a Pentium MMX 233MHz with motherboard Asus Off-board,it's a Itautec from Brazil,it's a great PC,running windows 2000,good times! The overdrive is a huge improvement.
i would have used normal pencil to short the sense pad of the fan. It worked to unlock the L1 bridges of thunderbird, should work for pentium as well :D
Haha yeah I forgot about pencil mods! I’m sure it would have worked. I remember using pencil across two solder points on a 9800 Pro for a volt mod back in the day.
I had a 486DX 4 100 with 256MB and 8meg gfx card for get the card do think is was sort of matrix. Also 32bit sound blaster it did play quake and doom very well. Also used on ham radio for decoding morse and sending telex. Then moved to a P2 the P4 never did own a P3 until years later. Had external liquid cooling. Do miss the old stuff worked so well.
the pentium 60 was my first, i later upgraded to a 166. was a beast, it had 24mb ram and an ati mach64 2mb gfx. could just play need for speed without lagging too much
On my raspberry I always use some Standart superglue for heatsinks. Did peal them off from time to time. A screwdriver + a little push and they come off. But I never used it for CPU's . There I always did it how it should be done.
Awesome video. One thing I'd like to see is an AMD 5x86-133 running at 150 and/or 160mhz on the same board to compare performance. I ran mine at 150mhz back in the day after benchmarking and seeing the mhz bus more than made up for the 10mhz frequently loss. I guess I just got lucky that my Diamond Stealth 32 VLB video card had zero issues with it. I did always wonder back then though if I had an overdrive chip how it would perform in integer performance. Even Quake ran around what a p55-90 would output though, so I wonder how that would compare too.
I commented before the end of the video and saw that 160mhz was tested. Was 150 mhz tested though? The extra bus clock really helped, and I have no idea how my i/o card and crap 30 pin simms handled it.
Thanks for your comment. I'll be doing another video comparing the AM5x86, Cyrix 5x86 and the POD. I will be including overclocking results in that one.
I remember working at Computer City. We had a Pentium Overdrive in a small display mold for displaying it. I later asked if I could have the CPU displayed (we now had slot type Pentium II, so AMD and Cyrix CPUs could no longer fit) and got the broke the mold and took out the processor, being careful of the pins... It worked!!!
I was working as tech support for windows 95 when these were new, they were a pain when trying to install windows. I don't recall what was the root cause, but every system that had one of these installed, setup would error out very early in the process. I told the end user to put in the original chip for the install, then put in the overdrive. :P
I have a couple of 486 CPUs (one of which is AMD 5x). I've had such a rough time finding a good board for the AMD. I found one that supports it but I can NOT get the mouse to work on it at all. What board(s) do you recommend in terms of price to supporting features/compatibility? I prefer PCI for some specific silliness I have planned rather than an ISA/VLB-only board.
It's getting harder and harder to find good 486 boards these days, unfortunately. The prices also vary wildly on eBay. I personally like the 486 boards based on the UMC 8881/8886 PCI chipset, like the Shuttle HOT-433 I used in this video but there are other good ones out there too. The Lucky Star ls486e is a popular one based on the SiS 85C496/497 chipset. The ls486e is known for being a potent overclocker, and because of this the price can be high. There are others that can be found more cheaply based on the same PCI chipset that may be a good choice. Sticking with the latest 486 PCI chipsets will help to ensure you'll have working L1 write-back cache capability too. Many earlier boards have broken WB implementations. Best of luck in your search and let me know what you find!
Absolutely insane to think that 4 years after this they'd go from 133mhz to 1ghz, man what a time for computing.
Indeed the golden age for hardware enthusiasts.
The more insane part, it didn't really feel that long ago.
yeah, it's amazing how far they could go so quickly just by cranking the power into the CPU🤣🤣
@@raven4k998 well, I'd say the shrinking process is far more impressive.
Oh yeah, the 3 upgrades a year period. It was fun, but it raped your wallet!
Nice Video! I literally did the same with a 100 MHz Overdrive, the 83 MHz Pentium Overdrive and the 200 MHz w MMX Pentium Overdrive. Love those CPUs…but now have Socket 5 Interposer that allows me to run AMD K6-2 with 400MHz on a former Pentium 90. So cool what was possible back then….
My first computer had a DX2/66, thinking about it makes me nostalgic. I remember reading about the "overdrive" in a magazine and dreaming about upgrading to it.
I had an AMD "586" Dx4 133 that still went into a 486 socket, a rather rare chip in the uk but it was very quick with the right board compared to a normal 486 dx4 100, :) wish I still had it.
While I used 486 and Pentium as a kid I wasn’t old enough to build my own PC until the P4 days so these old systems look so strange. A motherboard from 2002 is very similar to 2022 but 1992 they look very different. Also how is it finding drivers for such old hardware? Or maybe it isn’t as necessary as for early 2000s stuff?
Very true. The older boards like this one are based on the AT standard (baby AT formfactor specifically). Later on the ATX standard was adopted, which is still what is used today (although there have been revisions). I'm not sure when ATX came out exactly, but I want to say around 1996. It was pretty mainstream once the Pentium II came out. The retro PC community has done a great job preserving some of the old software required to run these old components. There hasn't been much I haven't been able to find so far, thankfully! :)
@@vswitchzero That is good that people have saved the software. I’ve had issues with some drivers from the early 2000s. Usually windows 98 drivers for the motherboard sound chip. Some brands like MSI and gigabyte tend to have the drivers and the board still on the website but it is more difficult with Biostar and some others. I mostly stick to windows 9x. While I did use some DOS and Windows 3.1 when I was around 8 I don’t remember as much about those as the Windows 9x era. Most older games seem to work well opening the DOS file inside Windows 98 anyway.
The original PC had two external connectors on the motherboard. Keyboard and Cassette. Everything else was provided by expansion cards. The later XT and AT dropped the Cassette port leaving only the keyboard port on the motherboard.
For many years most vendors of generic clone motherboard and cases used a form factor called "baby AT" based on the form factor used by the IBM XT-286. This certainly wasn't the only form factor out there but it was the most common and long-lived. Gradually motherboards started adding more on-board functionality but the form-factor had no provision for more external connectors. So extra functionality needing external connectors had to be accommodated with flyleads to either mounting positions on the case or brackets fitted in unused expansion slots.
In 1995 intel developed the ATX standard and it became the de-factor standard form factor with the introduction of the Pentium II around 1997. The ATX form factor made a couple of radical changes. The main power connector was changed and Hard on/off was replaced with soft on/off. The dedicated position for a 5 pin keyboard connector was replaced by a flexible space for an IO plate.
Intel introduced another new standard "BTX" in the pentium 4 era, but it didn't really catch on and the market continued with varients of ATX.
Power and cooling have been beefed up over the years and larger and smaller variants have been created for different markets, but the basic ATX form factor has remained much the same from the late 1990s to today.
Thanks.
My family got a new 486 DX2 66 computer in 1995, less than a year later I convinced my father that we needed a Pentium computer for my school work (I wanted to play Quake). I showed him this processor and he bought it without hesitation, the POD 83 was about 5000 SEK and to exchange the almost new computer would cost atleast 10000 SEK. I was happy and he was content 😁
now days you can build your own amazing computer yourself if you want to not just upgrade the cpu but everything you like to your hearts content😊
"less than a year later I convinced my father that we needed a Pentium computer for my school work (I wanted to play Quake)"
That is awesome as hell. I LOVE reading stuff like this. I remember suffering and watching a friend play Quake in late '96, at the time we had two 486sx25 desktops with 8megs of RAM that were barely able to play DOOM2. In January 1997 our father brought one of our 486 desktops to the local computer shop and they upgraded it to a Pentium 133 with 16megs of RAM. We were blown away with the jump in performance going from a 486sx25 to a Pentium 133 and we could finally play Quake and experience those amazing gibs with the blood trails. A few months later we discovered Quake Deathmatch and my brother somehow got a dialup program in DOS to work and HOLY CHIRST was the Quake Deathmatch fun as hell. We constantly had the phone line tied up for HOURS everyday for over a year on that Pentium 133.
@@Vile-Flesh i know those feels
@@Vile-Flesh QuakeWorld is still very much alive.
I was just a little too young for 486 stuff in the day, but I do find the era to be really interesting. Definitely looking forward to a AMD/Cyrix comparison!
Yes, those were interesting times. I am old enough to have gone through not only that time, but in the times before that, as my family bought Coleco & Atari (2600/VCS) consoles in the late 1970's & then a few years later I got into the Commodore 64. I still have all my Commodore stuff (hardware, software, papers), as well as Intel 8088's, 286/386/486's & Pentiums. And sometimes I wish I could have been born slightly a little earlier so that I could have also discovered 1970's computer stuff, such as mini-computers, mainframes & homebrew kits (Altair, KIM, Heathkits, etc). Today we take for granted the power & speed of modern computers, but none of that could have happened without the previous iterations, which also includes the invention of the silicon transistor by Bell Labs, not to mention the invention of the concept of zero in ancient India, which would help start the concept of digital/binary logic long before it was a concept itself.
I had a Sega Megadrive, after giving my CPC 464 to a friend who had nothing, and played the hell out of Mercs, Sonic, Road Rash etc. Was very impressed for the entire two years I had the console. Then a friend of mine invited me over to see his "PC". He had a state of the art 486 DX2-80 with 8MB RAM. And he immediately loaded Alone In The Dark, and my jaw hit the floor. The fact I was controlling this 3D, realistic character and shooting purple monsters with a shotgun, it was unreal. After seeing that, he showed me Doom - and that was it. That did it. I mean it was brand new, and I'd never thought this was possible in games. So I took my entire £1400 post office account savings and bought a DX-33 system and my friend gave me copies of Doom, The Legacy, Alone In The Dark, Dune 2 etc. It was amazing, how fast things moved back then. And the potential was limitless. Never see those times again, from Doom and Alone in the Dark in 1993, to Quake and TombRaider and Carmageddon in 1996, to 3Dfx powered Screamer Rally and Dungeon Keeper 2 in 1999.
This chip would have released when I was 5. I didn't end up using a computer til I was 6 (my dad's Amiga 1000).
Even the first PC I built when I was 11 had a K5 socket 100MHz Pentium (all built from Goodwill scraps), and it would later sport a 133MHz Pentium w/MMX, so yeah I still missed out on the 486 days as well.
@@TheVanillatech "he showed me Doom - and that was it" God damned right, I know that feeling all too well. Those were the best times ever.
@@Vile-Flesh Ya know, that friend of mine had connections with a manager of an Escom shop in my town. The manager was stealing PC's from the shop out the back and passing them to my friend to fence, inventing paperwork to cover it up, and I was one of the victims cos I bought one. That's how my friend had so many brand new computers and games. The manager got sacked but was never arrested as far as I know. But I remember walking past that Escom shop one day, and in the window there were 3 computers all running the Doom demo, the £899 computer, £1299 computer, £1699 computer etc. That was probably the best ever move by any manager to sell PC's in 1993/4. There was always a crowd of people outside, and there was a 486 PC inside where you could walk up and play Doom!
By then I already had my PC (which was, lets face it, probably stolen) but I still used to hang out in that shop, learning things about PC's. One of the guys in there taught me about conventional memory and all that stuff. It was the first shop in my town that focused on selling PC's for entertainment, rather than to offices for business. Just a few years later there would be Electronics Boutique, Tomorrows World, GameTech etc. But those Escom managers made an early killing (some of them more than others).
Great video! I remember installing the DX2 66 Overdrive into my SX33 back in the day and how big an improvement it was. I would have passed out from this kind of performance back then. 😂
Thanks very much! Yeah I can imagine! Going from an SX/33 to a DX2/66 would have been a tremendous upgrade back then, that's for sure.
@@vswitchzero well, I started wirh a AMI NEAT AT 386SX 40 MHz AFAIR, MFM 40 MB & Hercules clone with 14" paperwhite. I had to upgrase with a cyrix ? copro (I still have), a speedstar 24, and an EIZO 9080i. Yes, it was my first PC I bought to work with STRAKON CAD as a studend withe the money I worked for DiCAD. These days back I had been entiteled as "the CAD Pope" and "the one who walkes above water". 😁 An Intel Overdrive would had made me to the Lord of CAD himself for sure. 🫣
I remember having a 12 MHz 286 machine and was visiting someone who had a brand new 486DX-33 and it zipped and unzipped files in a flash where my 286 would take minutes.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 yes. Actually the PC era started with i386 protected mode. My first "Computer" was an Olivetti M10, our uncle ("the FACIT Man") acquired. M10 is still with me. Very helpful for my study. But the software I had to develop was already on a 486, where my study time was enlongued, because I already jobbed for DiCAD and later for Cvil Engineering Companies.
Did the board have Cache? Did the same back then without and it made it worse hehe.
Excellent video , as always but can you add a Voodoo 1 to this system and show us how Quake runs? In 1997 i had an AMD K5 120MHz with a Voodoo 1 and Quake was great.
Awesome. That's a great idea. I'll have to give that a try :)
Quake is the only benchmark that matters.
I have always found these Overdrive CPUs very fascinating, thanks for this great video!
Is there any chance for overclocking?
Thanks very much! It is possible to try with a 40MHz bus speed for a 100MHz total clock. From what I've seen online, these chips don't overclock well at all. Not so much because of the core, but the power regulator on the chip can't provide enough current for it to work reliably at that clock speed. There are some mods that can be done to it to squeeze a bit more out of it, but I'll probably just leave it as-is :)
I remember these when they were new. As I recall they were semi-vaporware. Hard to find and extremely expensive. Some people even suggested that the only reason Intel even bothered to make them in such limited numbers was to avoid a lawsuit over the "Overdrive Ready" sockets they'd been flogging for a couple of years.
The cost of one was about the same as buying a new socket 3 motherboard and a Cyrix 5x86 combined. The early 90's 486 motherboards that could have used the speed boost didn't support the chip physically with their older socket, while the later machines that DID have an overdrive socket could also accept the much cheaper AMD and Cyrix 5x86 chips which were either close enough in the case of the AMD chip or arguably better, in the case of the Cyrix chip.
The ones I have, I found in upgraded proprietary OEM machines (IBM, Compaq, Dell) that had been in either Government or Corporate service before being scrapped. I've never found one in a standard beige box PC.
Very interesting historical perspective, thanks for sharing! I wondered the same about the overdrive sockets. They were around for quite some time before a chip existed that could actually use them.
@@evergreengamer5767 Citation please. There's no evidence that I've ever seen that Intel used damaged/defective silicon for these. As for the rest of your comment, have you ever heard of the Latin phrase "non sequitur"?
The Cyrix fell flat in gaming with the release of Quake being a unpleasant experience.
@@eleventy-seven You're thinking of the 6x86.
There was even more rare and strange Pentium Overdrive - for the replacement of original Pentium 60 and 66, doubling its' clock. That CPU also had built-in voltage regulator (Socket 4 motherboards had no voltage options, as 486 mb did) and it had full-fledged 3.3 v "new Pentium" core clocked at 120 or 133 MHz.
Great detail, thanks for sharing. resistor hack was amazing to fix the clock speed
Thanks very much! :)
This video is a great breakdown of the performance of the PODP83. Sadly though, all the trade magazines at the time suggested to avoid buying this as it was deemed overpriced compared to the DX4 or Am5x86-133. I don't think FPU performance was a major selling point at the time, and the general suggestion was that if you needed faster FPU, just get an actual Pentium system that isn't held back by an "outdated" 32bit bus.
That being said, I wanted one of these so bad back in the day but my Socket 2 486 didn't have the extra row of pins necessary to support the PODP. It probably wouldn't have helped me much though as I was restricted to using ISA bus graphics.
Thanks very much, Charlie! That's interesting. I wasn't very aware of the POD back in the day. We wound up getting a Pentium 100 system in late 1995 and kept the DX2/66 system we had before. I was always hogging the PC, so my parents were happy to take over the 486 and let me use the Pentium :)
It's too bad they didn't make this chip work in a standard PGA-168 socket. I've never seen it, but I've heard people have done modifications to make it work. I'm not sure how essential the extra pins for power delivery really are. But I suppose for those earlier 486 systems, the DX4 overdrive or one of the 5V capable "turbo chip" alternatives were still great choices. Going from an SX or DX to a DX4 was a massive upgrade, that's for sure.
I ended up leapfrogging over the Pentium CPUs when I finally upgraded my 486 and went directly to a Pentium II 300 with AGP.
But it's ok though. I have my PODP83 in my collection now, and comparing it to my Cx5x86 100 and AMD DX4 100, Intel DX4 100, and AMD 5x86 133 is quite interesting to say the least. All fun CPUs to have!
True, i was coming from a dx4 100 which i at times replaced with a dx40 (some games just ran to fast otherwise). And when the pentium hit it was just to expensive and not really needed. The overdrive cpu looked nice but a big part of the pentium was the new PCI bus and just couldn't ever perform that great without.
Heck i got a cyrix 5x86 133 with PCI bus board for a fraction of the price of a pentium. Sure the fpu performance wasn't good but I didn't really care that much.
Kept that system going till they released the pentium ii.
Owned a 486 DX2 and parents "upgraded" me to a Cyrix 233..... Oh man, garbage to garbage haha
You can often soften the heat conductive glue with ca-glue remover/debonder. Simple CA-glue is a good heat-conductive glue btw. You can heat the heatsink with a blowtorch a bit to loosen the CA-glue afterwards if needed.
25:00 most of the effect does *not* come from the FPU performance itself, but from the architecture difference between 486 and pentium. How pentium worked, was that FPU was able to process its data in parallel with the rest of the CPU. It was almost like you had 2 cores on a CPU. And in quake they made heavy use of this "dual-core behavior". 486 couldn't process integer and floating point calculations in parallel and most of the performance is lost on that part.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing! I still have a lot to learn about the Pentium architecture :)
I'd love to see a reference on this! As far as I knew, the 486 was available with an on-die FPU, but the FPU remained a distinct coprocessor until MMX and SSE started coupling it closer to the CPU. FWAIT was used to synchronize with the FPU, and you could absolutely do other work on the CPU before that.
The Pentium had some FPU operations run in fewer cycles (including the infamously buggy FDIV), but its main improvement was in instructions per cycle on the integer side, which they termed a superscalar pipeline.
It's a combination of multiple factors. Mainly the superscalar integer pipeline, pipelined FPU, FDIV overlap, and FXCH parallelism. The original software renderer was hand-optimized by Abrash with these specific architectural details in mind. Check out Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book if you want to learn how exactly it all fits together on a per-instruction level.
@@GeckonCZ Thanks, I think I may. :)
All you had to do was soak it in alcohol it will come right off i would let it sit for at least a day
Just put it in a container with a lid
And knowing that i would use epoxy i would never trust tape after many heating and cooling expansion
Ahhh the pentium days...I had a 100 OC to 120 or 133. Later I managed to overclock the 75 MHz version to 150, and it ran quake 3 with 40 fps with a voodoo 2 card.
Acording to Wikipedia the Intel Pentium Overdrive CPU for 486 Systems was Introduced February 3, 1995. While the Pentium Processor (P5) was introduced 22. March 1993. Seems weird to not buy P5 in 1993 and instead buy a lower performance Pentium Overdrive CPU in 1995 🤔
Since late 2009 we finally escaped the pc upgrade every 2-3 years issue. Amd hd 5000 series introduced dx11 which is used 13 years later and those 12/13 year old cards can still boot new games. I did say boot not play well.
well I got a 486 back then & I knew about the pentiums but what I ended up doing was building my next machine, it was a 233 mmx in 97.. that's because I went from using my 486 at home to working at a computer store and after that 233 mmx I built machine after machine & I remember when the 1.33 ghz t-bird came out from AMD & I built a system on that.. of course I had a super socket 7 system, actually multiple, as well as slot A, and flip chip system, along with a dual slot 1 and dual socket 370.. ah I just kept having fun with it for years & even now I'm behind the latest hardware & it's just a matter of what you want to spend your money on and how many systems you have & over the years you begin to know what's going to fulfill your demands & don't really spend more unless you have to.. course monitors too now are crazy.. great video here I like stuff that brings back memories ... haha just remembered buying that 4.2GB bigfoot & thinking I'd have enough space lol oh man after that I built a raid array out of some fujitsu drives
I know very well how it sound but this is true. I was there. I saw it; A friend back in the days had a 486 with MMX. You could see the MMX logo with some writings at bios post kind of like a old video card post logo. I asked wtf was that, I want that on my pc and he said it was an ordeal and that worked ok but not as good as a real mmx cpu because it was software mmx.. Some stuff have been erased from history and only memories remain.
I was born in 2007, the week after Intel finally discontinued the 486. They may be older than me, but I love and collect these computers :)
I bought a Pentium Overdrive 63mhz chip back in the day to upgrade my 486 DX2 running at 50mhz. To tell you the truth I didn't see much of a difference although I convinced myself otherwise back then to justify not wasting my money. I sold the system soon after and bought a proper Pentium.
Thanks for your comment! It's really great to hear some first-hand experience with these chips from back in the day.
u should immediately replace all of those ceramic caps , ceramic caps when damaged can go short circuit and explode like tantalums which will really damage the soldering area and also short the voltage regulator to ground and as the supply to cpu is unregulated the psu will continue pumping current into shorted voltage regulator and so that ic will explode as well.
Thanks for your comment and for the tips. I may do some further modification to the chip and will look into replacing the chipped caps.
I wonder if it would work in what came with a Cyrix 486DX2 66MHz. I'll never find out though.
With the 83 mhz overdrive chip. You could run most games well in 96, by 97 it was still pretty much obsolete tho lol. Still extended the life of your 486 for a year or so.
something died inside me when I saw you soldered to the gold pins. I thought you wete going to leave the kapton tape with a piece of wire, just for perfectionist sake. but in any case, really cool video and project!
Thanks very much! Haha yeah, to be honest it felt wrong soldering the gold pads. The tape and wire mod was too flaky though, unfortunately. I had the multiplier change a couple of times during testing.
Kinda wanna get one now simply because I know what to do if it's messed up. Nice work! Great to have this documented so succinctly. Seems like ages ago you were talking about this on Twitter, so I'm glad you got the video out. And that tutorial from Intel is absolute gold. Impressed by the performance in Quake - definitely acceptable performance.
Thanks very much! .. Haha yeah, I love that intel demo - the VGA artwork is awesome. Yeah, you're right! it was many months ago that I got that chip. My backlog is definitely getting too large now :) I'll hopefully be doing some more mods on it and some overclocking in the future.
Now I need that processor…
Awesome seeing this. I was one of those guys that purchased one of these. It was to squeeze out more performance. Definitely not worth it though. A few months after I purchased this cpu.. I learned out to build my own PC from scratch and put together a shuttle socket 7 system with an AMD k5. That whole build, including the case cost less than the Pentium Overdrive, lol.
Thanks very much for your comment, that's interesting! From what I'm hearing, these chips were very overpriced and hard to obtain back then (selling above the $300 USD MSRP). Do you remember roughly how much you paid for it back then?
@@vswitchzero I paid $500, give or take $50. I had to order it from a local PC shop. It took at least a couple weeks for it come in after placing the order. A couple of other things I remember from that cpu.. I put it in a packard bell with a 486sx @50mhz. The sound events in windows 3.1 were "accelerated". Was interesting but I rarely used win 3.1 so I ignored that, lol.
My time with it was short lived.. around the time I ordered the Pentium overdrive I started reading one of those PC hardware Bible type books.. and I also discovered "Toms Hardware" online. It was only months later that I picked up that shuttle board.. the k5pr75 (for $32!), a trident video card, 8 or 16 megs of ram (think it was 2 8meg sticks) and a sound blaster. That build blew away the Pentium overdrive Packard Bell in performance. That said.. I do regret selling that system to this day because it was cool. :)
you could push this thing to be within 10% of an actual pentium 100mhz. it's a best of a cpu for the platform
23:30 The PCI S3 Virge is certainly not the bottleneck. If you put it on a fast socket 7 system, 3DBench 1.0C will easily reach 150+ FPS.
The main bottleneck is most likely the slow bus speed and subpar memory performance of the 486 platform.
Anyway, awesome video, keep it up! 😀
Thanks very much for your comment and for pointing that out! That definitely makes more sense. The more I see the Pentium, the more I realize just how bus limited the 486 platform was. I hope to start exploring some faster socket 7 based systems in the future and to look more into the Virge DX and Virge VX as well. Thanks again :)
Indeed. Those S3 cards are among my fastest in DOS. But 33 vs. 40 MHz bus makes a huge difference in memory bandwidth (120 vs. 100MB/s in Speedsys from my experience).
Great stuff! Love the heatsink mod. (The original fan is really annoying)
Thanks! That's interesting, I've heard a similar story about the OEM fan from others too. If it's anything like the retail box pentium coolers, they are pretty loud and don't age particularly well :)
Why didn't you try AMD 5x86-P75 (Am486DX5-133)? Oc'd @160 maybe.
Nice vid! Thanks!
Fpu still sucks
Pretty sure he says he will in a future video
Thanks for your comment! I'll be doing another video soon that'll compare the P83 overdrive to the AMD Am5x86 and the Cyrix 5x86 chips. I will definitely include some 160MHz results for the Am5x86 as well :)
@@vswitchzero if your components can handle it, I've observed 3x50MHz to be faster than 4x40MHz setup. But not all vlb graphics can handle 50MHz bus and pci bus might be thrown out of whack as well causing problems.
@@GigAHerZ64 I had some success running my AM5x86 at 3x50 on another PCI board I have in the past. I’ll have to give it a try on this shuttle HOT-433 as well 👍
I love when RUclips recommendation section hits a home run. All your content has been fantastic! Subscribed
I had a 486sx2 at the time iirc. I do remember starring through the glass cabinet at the Pentium OD at CompUSA. The main incompatibility was the cost for my 14 yo self.
Thanks so much for the kind words, it means a lot! :)
What I do with heatsinks like that, for example on my voodoo 1 and 2 cards, I use normal thermal paste, something like Arctic mx-4 or whatever in the center. And then add two SMALL drops of gel superglue on diagonal corners of the heatsink. Then I use some carpenters spring clamps to hold it on with some pressure until the glue sets. It works perfectly, holds really well, and cools perfectly. But all it takes is a bit of acetone to dissolve the superglue and you can remove it without a trace.
Great tip, thanks!
I seen that method a long time ago on either ANANDTECH or TOMSHARDWARE for chipset / video adapter heatsinks.
That was a great video! Now my itch to build a Pentium Overdrive system has returned… but oh Lord the prices… socket 3 PCI boards got expensive; not to mention the processor itself. Gotta keep trying the recycle center I guess. Keep up the good work!
Thanks very much! Yeah, the prices for the pentium overdrive chips these days are pretty ridiculous. Best of luck! I hope you find one :)
I was looking for two years on a good deal and catched a Compaq branded LPX form factor UM8881/8886 board with 5x86 installed for ~25€. No other bids even though it was placed correctly. Seems people don't like those LPX form factor boards.
20:44 When it cut to the scene with the sawI thought bewas cutting the cpu for a second lol
I found one on ebay with the heatsink fornonly 100 bucks
That Noctua 40x20mm fan has a 5V version. Don't know if the CPU package could provide enough power, but it would be pretty cool to have it soldered on and self-contained like that.
I also have what looks to be the same thermal tape. I got it to attach small heat sinks to some servos, and was surprised how well the stuff holds.
Thanks for your comment! I actually have the 40x10mm 5V version from Noctua. I think the OEM fan is actually quite a bit heftier and probably uses more power so I assume it would be okay to be powered from the gold pads.
My first computer was a 233mmx, so, a little ahead of these overdrives. I only wiched intel still produced overdive cpu's, the new alder lake e-cores would be such an upgrade for so many old plataforms.
it's basically the same as i did with my am4 recently. landed a 5800x3D on the system i originally bought for a r7 2700 (non-x), and the improvement over that is vast. in games, it might be 3 times as fast.
@@GraveUypo AMD is so much better then Intel on upgrades, the single fact they keep the same socket for several generations is a plus.
Back in the day I had a 486DX4 100Mhz with 16MB of ram. I remember when Winamp came out it cried that it needed MMX instructions, so I spent the money to upgrade to the Pentium 60mhz.. even though it was "40mhz slower", it included those MMX instructions that allowed me to run Winamp.. man I wish I kept both of those boards.
I remember reviews at the time which usually weren't favorable, mostly because of views that the 486 platform was in it's endgame so it would not buy much time for many people. It was a spectator sport for me because I got a P54c 90MHz system (with the FDIV bug) in mid-94 as my graduation present, though I remember it having a few issues, particularly with the Reveal sound card that Insights included.
Thanks for your comment! The FDIV bug was very interesting. My first Pentium was from 1995 (a P54c 100MHz model NEC system) but I'm pretty sure they had the FDIV situation sorted by that point.
I would have killed for any kind of Pentium in 1994. We suffered with a 486sx25 from '92 all the way to January 1997 when we got the Pentium 133. That 133 opened sooooo many doors for us and it was so FAST.
Update: keep finding these on ebay for 100> bucks 63 mhz was 70 bucks. Maybe in canada the prices for these listing are high but in the US they're pretty reasonably priced
Very interesting! Those prices are much more reasonable than what I’ve been seeing lately. It’s true that Canadians always seem to pay more for this kind of stuff. Especially considering the exchange rate, import tax etc.
Nice to see an overclocked Pentium. I just have a 486 DX2. Thank you for vidéo.
I had amd 386 DX 40 Mhz cpu in a mobo which was upgradeable to 486 :D Also you could massively overclock the 386 DX 40 Mhz to 80 Mhz. To achieve 50 MHz was realive easy. Anything over 50 Mhz was not as easy as now days.
Love the content.
For a crazy idea i'd like to see the Pentium Overdrive paired with a Voodoo 2 Accelerator, see if it helps Quake to run better?? Just curious
Way back in the days my 1st computer was a Gateway 2000 4DX2-66 It was so slow. Even with the Evergreen Pentium Overdrive CPU Upgrade the system had bottlenecks. It wouldn't even play mp3s.
I bought Tandy 3100 and 3200 back in the day. 486/33s with 4MB, no sound or CD. Still have them fully loaded. The 3100 had only the "new" zif socket and could take up to a DX4/100 or the Gainberry 586/133 which is what is in the 3100 now. The 3200 has the Pentium OD socket. The Gainberry smokes that Pentium and the DX4 is right there with it.
i was hoping evergreen and modding would become like a competitive aspect the hobbyist brought into market... repairable modular enhanced hardware that was community driven and standardized for support.
eliminate the tit for tat profiteering and monoplies... with home grown components that push the big chips beyond their original designs without stealing designs or exploiting royalties... instead allowed to market tgeir designs and give directly to those engineers instead of a company. in a royalties style distribution for all involved.
not a corporation
I had the 50/66 to 120/133 if I remember correctly it was a long time ago. I sold it on ebay back in the early 2000's
I was supposed to get a second hand 486dx4 100 system for my first pc, but when my dad went to pick it up, (an hours drive away BTW) the bloke had sold it to someone else, so my dad was absolutely raging... Dad was so pissed he just stopped off at a computer shop on the way back and that's how I ended up getting a Pentium 75 instead of the 486 lol
I over clocked it too, I was very chuffed!
Pentium Overdrive 100mhz + UMC motherboard is the killer......i have it with 1MB cache and 192MB EDO!
1- heatsink is overkill. The black one would have been sufficient, if used in a clean (non smoker) environment.
2- The fan is overkill. You could have easily used a 12V fan, using the 5V pins. It would have given you enough airflow.
3- the cooling efficient of the tape you use on the cpu, is about the same as standard dual sided, plastic scotch tape.
DX2-50? I had a 50MHz 486, but it wasn't a DX2, it was just a straight up DX, no clock doubling there, the raw bus speed was 50MHz as well.
My first PC, bought from Electronic Avenue at Montgomery Wards, was a Packard Bell desktop. I think it was around late 1994. Windows for Workgroups 3.11, I eventually upgraded to Windows 95. Originally 486DX-2 66Mhz, I had the Pentium Overdrive @83Mhz that was bought at one of the many electronics businesses in Silicon Valley that eventually went out of business. It worked well for what it did. Learned a lot with that thing.
@vswitchzero did you try orange Goo Gone on the top of that chip? I find it's useful sometimes when isopropyl doesn't remove thermal paste. It does need about a minute to activate.
Good tip, thanks! I forgot about "Goo Gone". I remember using that stuff to remove sticker residue many years ago and it was quite good at it. I did try IPA on it but it seemed to have no effect at all. Hopefully I won't have to do this again :D
Next time try Automotive Lacquer thinner. That will clean off the Thermal Glue off. Its also cleans regular thermal paste quickly.
I overclocked an amd 133mhz 486 to 180mhz and i played quake and other games like blood completely through.
Those intel overdrives were the only chips were getting. Had a 486dx33 and tried an offbrand "overdrive" chip but it was trash. Returned it and got an intel brand overdrive dx4 and it was night and day better.
Every single one of these that I ever had had a heat sink and fan permanently mounted to the chip.. this is the first time I've ever seen one with it removed and not absolutely destroyed!
Acabo de ver un 83 en el sitio de subastas más común de Argentina, 55 dólares, vengan, aprovechen nuestra moneda totalmente devaluada xD
My first build PC is a Pentium MMX 233MHz with motherboard Asus Off-board,it's a Itautec from Brazil,it's a great PC,running windows 2000,good times!
The overdrive is a huge improvement.
I remember wanting a pentium overdrive cpu when i was a kid, pretty sure I had a 486dx at the time.
i would have used normal pencil to short the sense pad of the fan.
It worked to unlock the L1 bridges of thunderbird, should work for pentium as well :D
Haha yeah I forgot about pencil mods! I’m sure it would have worked. I remember using pencil across two solder points on a 9800 Pro for a volt mod back in the day.
Hi. please, don't forget that we had Pentium 60 MHZ and 486 DX-4 120MHZ. Regards from Brazil.
My first upgrade over my 486 was a Pentium Pro, which I still had it, seem rare nowadays
The Pentium Pro was legendary. I remember wanting one so badly back in the day. I'll hopefully do a video on it one of these days :)
I used to have the IBM DX4-133mhz overdrive, and it would out perform my friends P1-90mhz by a long run.
The 5800X3D back in the days 🥲
I had a 486DX 4 100 with 256MB and 8meg gfx card for get the card do think is was sort of matrix. Also 32bit sound blaster it did play quake and doom very well. Also used on ham radio for decoding morse and sending telex. Then moved to a P2 the P4 never did own a P3 until years later. Had external liquid cooling. Do miss the old stuff worked so well.
i remember when i was 13 my parents went out and bought a p60 Legend 300cd packard bell. that pc cost them like 3 grand. Fond memories!
the good ole 486 that was my first processor. boy how times have changed.
Maby should go dig up my p83OD from storage and put it up on eBay since I dont have or plan to run a 486 based system anytime soon (or ever again)
I actually can improve my English just by listening your voice
the pentium 60 was my first, i later upgraded to a 166. was a beast, it had 24mb ram and an ati mach64 2mb gfx. could just play need for speed without lagging too much
On my raspberry I always use some Standart superglue for heatsinks. Did peal them off from time to time. A screwdriver + a little push and they come off. But I never used it for CPU's . There I always did it how it should be done.
Interesting tho, our household went from IBM PS/2 286 to a Pentium 60 was blazing fast in the 90's :)
I have 2 Intel overdrive with stock fans, I didn't know they are so expensive these days jjajaj
i had a 486SLC/2 @66 that i was able to extend the life of with a Cyrix 133 drop in cpu replacement.
Awesome video. One thing I'd like to see is an AMD 5x86-133 running at 150 and/or 160mhz on the same board to compare performance. I ran mine at 150mhz back in the day after benchmarking and seeing the mhz bus more than made up for the 10mhz frequently loss. I guess I just got lucky that my Diamond Stealth 32 VLB video card had zero issues with it. I did always wonder back then though if I had an overdrive chip how it would perform in integer performance. Even Quake ran around what a p55-90 would output though, so I wonder how that would compare too.
I commented before the end of the video and saw that 160mhz was tested. Was 150 mhz tested though? The extra bus clock really helped, and I have no idea how my i/o card and crap 30 pin simms handled it.
Thanks for your comment. I'll be doing another video comparing the AM5x86, Cyrix 5x86 and the POD. I will be including overclocking results in that one.
I remember working at Computer City. We had a Pentium Overdrive in a small display mold for displaying it. I later asked if I could have the CPU displayed (we now had slot type Pentium II, so AMD and Cyrix CPUs could no longer fit) and got the broke the mold and took out the processor, being careful of the pins... It worked!!!
Haha that's an awesome story. I'm surprised it had a functional CPU inside too. Thanks for sharing :)
I think i still have the Kingston overdrive chip - was a Cyrix chip on a board that masqueraded it as a Pentium
Very cool vid and very cool song
i would check voltages and caps by oscilloscope. because multimeter has integrator curcuit and u cant see sparks and needles on line.
I got 15 years ago a PODPMT66X200 for 20 bucks but lack a compatible mainboard.
I was working as tech support for windows 95 when these were new, they were a pain when trying to install windows. I don't recall what was the root cause, but every system that had one of these installed, setup would error out very early in the process. I told the end user to put in the original chip for the install, then put in the overdrive. :P
its actually pretty cool how most of the times silicon is either completely broken or completely fine in my experience
I have a couple of 486 CPUs (one of which is AMD 5x). I've had such a rough time finding a good board for the AMD. I found one that supports it but I can NOT get the mouse to work on it at all. What board(s) do you recommend in terms of price to supporting features/compatibility? I prefer PCI for some specific silliness I have planned rather than an ISA/VLB-only board.
It's getting harder and harder to find good 486 boards these days, unfortunately. The prices also vary wildly on eBay. I personally like the 486 boards based on the UMC 8881/8886 PCI chipset, like the Shuttle HOT-433 I used in this video but there are other good ones out there too. The Lucky Star ls486e is a popular one based on the SiS 85C496/497 chipset. The ls486e is known for being a potent overclocker, and because of this the price can be high. There are others that can be found more cheaply based on the same PCI chipset that may be a good choice. Sticking with the latest 486 PCI chipsets will help to ensure you'll have working L1 write-back cache capability too. Many earlier boards have broken WB implementations. Best of luck in your search and let me know what you find!
@@vswitchzero Thanks for your thoughts!
would be nice if Intel could make overdrive CPUs for Core series systems
i had an overdrive processor, and then went to be sadly disappointed with a cyrix 686 or was it 586 i forget
Cool, we needed this video 30 years ago :-). I need to videotape it and send it to myself back in time.
mechanical pencil why didn't i think of that.. i've some cpu's to fix later.
no matter which resistance i tried, i had the best performance with the sensor and ground jumped without resitances
Yuk. DX4 for me. If all you could afford was a Cyrix you had my sympathy.
I hade Pentium over drive 150MHz but it was for socket 5/7 . Very strange
I'd cover the cap with some kind of lacquer to prevent oxidation
hey I owned one of these way back :D was a good system. a whopping 48 megs of ram lol
I remember these and the 386 DX (32 bit) and SX (16 bit) chips.