As a teen in the 90's, I got many free 286's 386's ram chips, graphics ram chips, PSU's etc, all from various skips. My mother used to dread when I was late coming home as it usually meant I had found something new.
CPU Galaxy overclocked an AMD 133 Mhz 486 upgrade to 200 Mhz. And I remember seeing those Pentium Overdrive chips on the shelf in my local store back in '96. I was a a new parent and was there with my wife buying baby clothes. I remember picking up the box and wishing I could get one to upgrade my 486, and they were on sale for $249.00. But at the time I couldn't afford it. A year later I was able to upgrade my whole system to a new Pentium 233 MMX. A little over a year after that I was rocking a K6-2 400 Mhz. The tech was moving fast back then. Crazy thing is now that AMD is back in their groove, it's moving fast again! Competition is grand.
Man it was crazy. I remember having a CPU that said 66 Mhz during boot. Next computer was 300 Mhz I think. We got a used computer after a relative passed away and it was 600ish Mhz. These were all wonderful, but I will never forget going to visit my older cousin. He was showing my his computer. As it booted up, it said 1Ghz. I was not prepared to see this thing game!
I have like 32 p75 133s, some run happy 3x60 , just found this channel, time to dig up to oldies again, might be nicer than playing with modern stuff. Although i love to play doom eternal to test rigs
I had that exact board with an Am5x86 as part of a bare bones system I purchased in 1997. Late in its life, I overclocked it to 160 MHz as you did, and added 128 MB 50 ns RAM, experimented with a Riva TNT... just because. I sold that system back in 2007, which I still regret. That was the first computer which was truly mine. Your video helped me to relive some of those memories.
Back in the days i had a Cyrix 486Dx4-100 rig and changed to Socket7 with an Cyrix 6x86MX-PR200. Started collecting CPUs in 2002 and now have DX4-100 Overdrive, the huge POD 83MHz also stable @100 and a 133MHz Overdrive for Socket 4. Love your vids. Very good content and nicely presented.
Thanks very much for your comment! That's awesome that you have the 133MHz overdrive for socket 4 - those are getting super rare and hard to find these days.
@@vswitchzero Thats right. Got mine in 2006 or 2007 together with an Intel Batman MB. The board was working but not very stable. So i only kept the CPU.
@@Stratotank3r Very cool. I've always had a soft spot for socket 4. I have the "Batman's Revenge" Intel board and a later stepping P60 chip in it. I hope to do a video on it one of these days.
@@vswitchzero I wonder if anyone has managed a quad Socket 4 Overdrive? The Pentium Overdrive CPUs for Pentium Pro and 486 were forced out of Intel because of promises they made, tied to investments and other business stuff regulated by government. Intel was faced with a choice of producing *something* or paying big fines. They really didn't want to make those Overdrives, which is why the POD runs at the odd frequencies and the Socket 4 one doesn't run in quad. To use it on a quad P-Pro it can only be used to replace CPU 0 and 1, 2 and 3 have to be empty. Mattel got into the same make something or pay big fines deal with the computer addon for their Intellivision game console. After blowing tons of time and money on a computer for which the game ended up being a peripheral, they did a pivot, produced a POS addon that barely satisfied the SEC, sold a few of them then shut down Mattel Electronics.
Great video, you reminded me of the wrangle I had back in the day. I ended up sticking it out with my 16Mhz 386SX for way too long, saving money, then going for a full Pentium-90 setup. I can't explain how night-and-day it was, especially seeing friends with 486s, but I was seriously blown away by how much of an advance the Pentium was!
One bonus to having a high school job at a computer store was that we could sift through the chips looking for really good overclockers for our personal computers. All the techs were running 5x86 chips at 180 or 200 MHz at one point because of this.
Love those comparisons. I remember in 1996 that I've had AMD 486Dx4 VT8 in 2x50Mhz mode, it was cool as VLB card was faster due to this so I've had some improvements in duke3d and terminal velocity.
In the 90's I built systems for a GIS company to do sales demos on. I found that the software was heavily IO driven. So I found building with a DX50, not a DX2, straight 50Mhz was best IF you had compatible VESABUS cards, video and SCSI. It could out preform a DX2-66
I remember back in those days, my first PC was a 486SX-25 which I ended up needing to replace in less than 9 months with a 486DX2-50 because the MB died. From there, I upgraded to a 486DX4-100 OD chip because I was working at Best Buy and got an offer from the Intel rep to get it at cost. 3 CPUs in 3 years was kind of rough, but it taught me a lot, and I ended up getting into computer support for a career, as well as building my own PC for the next 30+ years since.
Perfect video, very pleasant to watch and to listen to. Great job! The benchmarks reflect well what I remember personally. In integer math based 3D games, my 5x86@160 was able to beat my friends shiny new (and insanely expensive) P90 by a tiny margin. His Quake performance got us 486 owners drooling though. One fun fact I remember on my 5x86@160: It was able to play back MP3's with almost 100% CPU load in Win95, but only Winamp was able to do it stutter free. Encoding took like 20 minutes for an average song.
@@vswitchzero It took me years, but I finally managed to get the exact board/CPU/CDROM combo that I used back in 1996/1997. It'll be fun to do some CD ripping, MP3 encoding and playback on this beast just as in the good old days ;-)
I love the video. Very informative. I am 39 now so I was pretty young when those chips came out. My first experience with a home PC was my friend's 486-dx2 Later on I got a super slow Compaq Pentium 133, sold that and built my first pc, an AMD K6-233... Now an I.T. and still passionate about this stuff. Thanks for the excellent video :) Having tried myself to make some videos (none published)... I know it's work!
I LOVE this kind of stuff. I never went in for it myself when I went from a 486 DX2/80 to a P200 MMX as by the time I did the motherboard and chip wasn't a bad price and could use everything else I had including memory. I did wonder tho what was possible in this arena.
Nice! Quite a few of the AMD DX4/100 chips could do 133MHz too. The one I have has an undocumented 4x multiplier just like the Am5x86, which makes it really easy to do too.
Thank you for saving me money! I was gonna find and buy Cyrix 586 because I read its FPU was much superiour to AMD's 5x86. Even if it technically is, AMD's clearly better for real life use.
I used a 50Mhzx3 AMD 5x86 as my main system (mostly running Linux) from '94 until I replaced it with a K6-2 400 ~Y2K or so. It was then used by other family members until it was finally decommissioned due to poor performance running "modern" web browsers around 2004! It was completely stable all that time. It was a VLB system fully loaded with cache with a Mach64 and cached Fast SCSI2 both VLB cards which worked fine at 50MHz. It was a terrific little system.
Hi, this is so cool, what a shame the POD don't fall to 1.5x when the fan is not detected, that would help in achieving very interesting FSB overclocks, hell maybe 66MHZ like CPU galaxy did when he OC to 200 his AMD chip! BTW what software do you use for editing? These bar charts look pretty "pro" to me.
Very true. Anything under 2.5x and above 1x would make for some very interesting overclocking options .. Nothing fancy with the charts. They are just done in excel with a dash of creativity with colors and shadows etc :)
Great video! I felt like watching one of my videos 🙃, just with more details in this video from you. Definitely a huge like from me and one sub more for you. keep up your great work. 💪🏼
I like your videos. :) Just got my hands on a 4x86 100mhz overdrive. Machine needs some work, battery was dead, but at least not leaking. If i might make a small request, if you get your hands on some Pentium Pros.. My father had a dual Pentium Pro machine, he did CAD and Structural Analysis back in the 90s. I remember bringing that beast to a lan party... :P Would love to see some benchmarks on such a system.
Thanks! I do have a Pentium Pro system (200MHz CPU and Intel VS440FX board) but not any dual CPU systems. One of these days I'll definitely do a video on the Pentium Pro :)
Back then I had an AMD DX4-120 and LOVED it! I "upgraded" to a real Pentium 100 system, and returned it the next day to go back to my good 'ol AMD system, and I've been true to AMD since.
There's several DOS utils that tend to favor and improve perf of AMD & Cyrix chips. They're bundled in Phil's Benchmark pack. MTRRLFBE & CPUSPEED might be fun to try.
i've had all of them. still have a cyrix someplace, and i've kept all my 5x86's. those are my 486 beast of choice. the intels were too expensive, and are a little rare these days, and the cyrix has some.. interesting quirks at times.
Yeah, I had rotten luck with Cyrix CPUs back then. The 6x86s I had would often crash playing specific games. They probably patched the games but there wasn't really a way to get them back then.
I had the Am5x86-P75. I actually kept the CPU until recently, gifted it to a friend who collects old hardware and had a good motherboard. Its still running.
Just put together Cx5x86-100 -machine. Mobo is QDI 471, 256KB cache, 2x50MHz bus and ALL settings set to tightest in BIOS, and feats enabled on CPU (BTB_EN, LSSER off, FP_FAST). Display card is Cirrus 5434 VLB with 2MB. Quake gives 14,8fps. 💪 Edit: RAM needs to be set to 'faster', 'fastest' setting was not 99% stable, but almost.
nice work, well done your benchmark data. i will admit i went from an amd 486 dx2-66 to the playstation, but then a pentium 133 with a matrox mystique happened so i missed this little group.
Back in 95 I had a Compaq Presario CDS 924 with a 486 DX2/66. I decided to get the Evergreen because it had a higher clock speed and cost less. Thankfully, my motherboard supported the write back cache, which gave a visible boost to games, especially Quake. I honestly wish I could've afforded the POD, but the Evergreen served me well until I got my first true gaming rig.
FYI about the Cyrix 5x86-133Mhz: I remember reading an article back in the 90's stating that all Cyrix 5x86s at 133Mhz were sold to Evergreen (or another upgrade company?) to make upgrade chips out of them. So that would explain why they are very difficult to find. 1. I still have a Cyrix 5x86-120Mhz Windows 95 machine which I use to play old games like the first XCom DOS games. 🙂 2. And I also still have a Kingston AMD 5x86-133Mhz chip, which I used to upgrade my old 486-66Mhz. That also was a nice boost. 3. CPU upgrade nostalgia: The last "upgrade CPU" I bought was a Powerleap Tualatin Celeron at 1.2Ghz... I used this to upgrade my Pentium 2 400 to a Tualatin Celeron at 1.2Ghz... wow, that Celeron had a motor on it. 🙂
I built and rebuilt a lot of Am5x86 systems for friends and family in the late 90s, they were certainly the best of the common 486 upgrade CPUs! I almost never saw the Socket 3 PODs, though Socket 5 ones were more common. One of my tests for a system was, "under Windows 95, can I do other useful things and also leave Winamp running in the background?" On a DX4 that answer was often "not really" (depends a lot on the motherboard, cache/RAM, and hard disk performance), but most Am5x86 systems could handle it.
Back in the day I went from an Intel 486 DX2 66Mhz to a AMD 5x86 133Mhz using in socket voltage converter as I had an early 486 board that only had 5v socket and only supported running up to 40Mhz FSB. Much like you said it was so much cheaper to go that route than to look into the POD despite the clear FPU benefit of the POD. Also, I seem to remember seeing a lot of results in magazines at the time that showed that on paper the Cyrix 5x86 should have been the clear winner in many cases, but in real world tests it usually didn't pan out that way. Those type of results seemed to have kept dogging Cyrix later on with the relative low FPU performance and heat issues of the M1 6x86 chips and lack of clock speed scaling of the M2 6x86 chips especially compared to the AMD K6-2/3 CPUs.
I actually upgraded my system to a NextGen P90 processor back then. The only problem with doing that was you also had to purchase a Motherboard that would work with the socket it came with. Also the NextGen processors created the MMX system, and they were purchased by AMD who licensed this technology to Intel. So when you see the Intel w/MMX it was licensed from AMD.
Back in 1995, we still had our 486DX-50 but that 50Mhz bus speed did not play well with VLB graphics so when that machine was "retired", a Pentium 133Mhz fully replaced it. The AMD 5x86 CPUs are an impressive surprise. Thank you for such a detailed benchmark set and historical account.
From what i remember of owning a PC back in early 1995 wasn't what CPU it came with, but whether or not you were going to get a motherboard with FAKE L2 Cache. There was no easy way to know back then what you were going to get when purchasing a motherboard. BOTH VLB and PCI boards suffered from fake cache.
Awesome, 486 DX my very first build. Playing on AOL and paying by the hour, my first addiction one of many games as I got older. But they had a MMO 2D. D&D Neverwinter Nights, Cleric/mage grinding gear by resetting a monster encounter. Even had PVP in player vrs player map sections.
I bought a pretty cool socket 3 motherboard a year back (biostar MB8433) and the seller just threw in the IBM branded 5x86 100mhz. no blue heatsink tho! still, quite a cool surprise :) i gotta try it out again for these extra FPU options you've shown. great vid!
My first big PC upgrade was a Cyrix 5x86-100 and PCI motherboard back in late 1995. Was a great upgrade from my much slower Cyrix 486slc33 which was my first desktop PC (at least my first desktop PC which was all mine). A year later I upgraded to a Cyrix 6x86-P133+ and sold the Cyrix 5x86 and board to my dad to upgrade his PC, but sadly shortly after it failed. The chip had a green heatsink on it but no fan, I don't know if it was a temperature issue but the CPU just wasn't stable (wasn't overclocked either). Shortly afterwards my dad upgraded to an AMD Am5x86-P75 with a heatsink and fan and that was much more stable and worked well until he upgraded again a couple of years later. For budget upgrades they were great CPUs. Of course I'd have loved to have had a Pentium back in the day but they were just a tad too expensive, and the Cyrix CPUs were ideal for my needs (well, until Quake came out, but I was more of a Doom and Duke 3D player anyway). I'd be interested to see a comparison of Pentium class CPUs. I upgraded my Cyrix 6x86-P133+ to an IDT WinChip 200 in 1997, it was then where I got my first taste of virtualisation using a very early version of VMWare Workstation, I seem to remember it performed like a 386, but was still pretty cool to run a PC inside a PC :-D
Thanks for sharing! I'd definitely like to do something similar for the Socket 5/7 class CPUs in the future as well including the Pentium, AMD K5, Cyrix 6x86 etc.
Enjoyed this video, very informative, thank you :) I assume the ST versions of the DX/2 and DX/4 were identical to the Intel? Although I do have a DX/2 80 in my possession!
Thanks very much! As far as I know any DX/2 and DX/4 with ST or Texas Instruments branding would be a Cyrix 486 design. The AMD 486s are pretty much identical to Intel.
The AMD ADW version had a lower TDP than the ADZ version and it was 5 volt tolerant. I owned a few of them I ran at 4x40Mhz at 5V with no problems. How? By careful preparation of the heat sinks. Most 486 heat sinks were pretty arse, not at all flat on the bottom side. The solution was to clamp a flat file in my bench vise and run the heat sink over the file until it was flat. Then I glass bead blasted the rest of it to strip off the color and thick oxide layer from the anodizing. The bead blasting also left a satin finish which I figured slightly increased the surface area for better heat radiation and conduction to the air being blown over it. For applying thermal compound I used a fingertip to dab a thin layer over the whole top of the CPU. Press on the heat sink and anywhere it didn't transfer got a finger dab of compound. That got the absolute thinnest layer of compound with guaranteed 100% contact. Too much compound with poor coverage can drastically hinder heat transfer. If you don't want to have to clean a finger after doing this, wear a nitrile glove. I'd love to see someone do a thermal test on Socket 4 CPUs with a heat sink that's been filed flat on the bottom, then test again with it glass bead blasted all over, except of course the bottom. The Cyrix 5x86 would be an ideal tester for this. In my experience those run HOT. I once got a 2nd degree burn with a blister when I accidentally barely brushed the stock, green heat sink with the tip of a little finger. No fan on it, and that silly flat plate atop the fins to hinder convection. What was Cyrix thinking? A lot of motherboards couldn't set the correct signals to make the AMD chips run at 4x multiplier. There was an easy fix by jumpering from a Vcc pin to the pin which activated 4x. Fortunately the two pins were right at the edge with only one pin between. So I'd take a piece of one strand from some wire, bend it around the pin in the middle so it wasn't touching, then loop it around the Vcc and 4x pin. Then I'd take it off, tighten the loops a little and push it back on. The mod could be done by soldering wires to the bottom of the socket and installing a switch or 2 pin header for a jumper, but the "hotwire" method was pretty much invisible and removable. Running at 50Mhz FSB was out of reach on any PC I had then because I couldn't afford the eye watering prices of the higher speed DIP SRAM cache chips that would require. I had one MicronPC that was solid at 3x50 (might also have been good at 4x50) but only with L2 disabled. With no L2 it was way slower than at 4x40 or even 3x40. At 3x50 with L2 it would boot DOS then crash in a few seconds. I did have one POD system, a Packard Bell pizza box 486-25SX with a POD63. The board had a jumper to change FSB between 25 and 33 but the poor POD absolutely would not overclock to 83 Mhz. Buying a POD83 was not an option. I could buy most of the cost of a new-to-me Socket 7 board, CPU and RAM for the price of a POD83 so I suffered along with the POD63 until I saved up the $.
I may have missed you mentioning it, but does your PCI bus actually run at 50MHz when the FSB is increased or is there a divider that keeps it at 33 and you had to adjust it? Your 160MHz 5x86 runs marginally quicker than mine overall, but it's good to see a direct comparison. Might be the RAM timings and such that make the difference, as you're pretty good at tweaking those. I would agree that the POD isn't worth it. Intel had to deliver it because they'd made such a fuss with their 'vacancy' ad slogan, but they definitely priced it to discourage buyers. OEMs *hated* upgrade chips if it meant users delayed upgrading their entire system for a couple of years. I still want one so I can put it in my 5V motherboard. 🙂
Thanks for your comment! Yes, it is indeed running at the full 50MHz. The Shuttle HOT-433 only has two settings, 1:1 and 1:1/2, unfortunately. It was either 50MHz PCI or 25MHz PCI at a 50MHz bus. Not many of my PCI cards could handle it.. all of the S3 cards I have would get really weird at that speed. Thankfully the Millennium II is totally happy and I have a newer Permedia 2 PCI card that is too.
Back in the day with performance of CPUs increasing so rapidly alot of companies used those upgrade chips with the voltage converter to extend the life of their branded computers by an extra 18 months or so that was easy. I have always gone down the generic root I actually had the 5x86-133 p75 myself on my own home computer it was a generic 486 PC that i had swapped out the motherboard a few times ( from a 286) and eventually decided to start again so i sold it at auction and it struggled to sell are people knew it wasnt a proper Pentium. Oddly enough my current PC's which i have had for at least 5 years and were all second hand when i bought them are still powerful enough for what i use them for ( and i'm a software developer/ data cruncher) and i'm thinking about upgrading just to get windows 11.
I'd avoid 11 at all costs. I actually stopped using MS products right after 11 came out. I'm happily using the latest Debian Linux distro and can run all my games, including ones that wouldn't run on 10 or 11, and am still able to do all of my programming IDEs.
My 12 year old self didnt know much about computer back then so i convinced my dad to buy a 2nd hand 486dx chip thinknig we could put it in the upgrade overdrive slot. After bending some pins and realizing it didnt fit, i gave up my dream to run duke3d at respcetable frames and settles to playing it at my friends, or watching him play. I still had doom2 so honed my FPS chops there, and ended up in a duke3d tournament that happened to have me and that one friend i used to watch play Duke in the finals. There was no chance I was lightyears ahead using a mouse while he was aiming with arrow keys.. players back then still used keyboard alone lol but surpsingly well. I didnt win by a huge margin and It was only thanks to the mouse I was able to skillfully aim the singlebarrel shotgun and do damage from far away, it was like a sniper just with a lousey scope. I took home the prize of $200 gift certificate and chioce of any game in the shop. That being said the 486 dx chip we bought was relatively inexpensive like $60, consiering the system cost $5000 jus a few years earlier it wasnt a huge loss and learned my first lesson in computer upgrading. Check the manual, see what the system is capable of upgrading too.
It's crazy just how far tech has come. You mentioned some of these being $300 or more at launch while I paid less than that for my Ryzen 7 3800X during black friday a few years ago. And even my original R5 1400 is leagues ahead of these old chips and isn't even worth $100 anymore. I always find it fascinating and interesting just how fast technology exploded in performance over such a short time. Only 30 years and now we got 16 core monstrosities with clock speeds pushing 6ghz at the top tier, like the i9-14900k or R9 7950X3D. (I also can't help but to find it funny that those old AMD chips have prefixes of "AM5" and now they've created socket AM5... Full circle hehe...)
I was one of those few that ran my AMD 5x86-133 at 150 mhz and it was super stable. I used a Diamond Stealth 32 vlb card and just got lucky with the cache on board I guess. I ran it for 2-3 years before I finally upgraded. It became a backup machine once I built a pentium system so it stayed around longer than I would have expected. It ended once my then gf cousin shorted out the motherboard, but I still have the chip to this day. One of these days I'll get around to seeing if it will still boot.
Thanks for sharing! A 50MHz bus makes a huge difference in performance, that’s for sure! That’s great that you had a VLB video card that could handle it 👍
Sweet collection. I made do with a 486DX-120 on a VESA only board. Which isn't a bad deal in retrospect. The later PCI boards would penalize you almost for using 40mhz, they would declock the PCI bus to keep it from running over spec at 40mhz.
Thanks! I really love VLB systems. To me, that's more of a "true" 486 platform :) .. thankfully the Shuttle HOT-433 seems to respect the 1:1 setting for FSB:PCI clock, but I've heard other boards don't.
Cyrix FPU is basically what killed Cyrix in their later chip too. What is interesting is that knowing this chip was released they could have benchmarked quake in-house to see the possible problems for their future gen too. For integer performance I think AM5 is beasting over Cyrix because all tests are highly optimized for 486 hardware - likely avoiding branches with unrolling and maybe not having enough headroom in pipelineing to compensate. That is basically gains of the PoD and Cyrix does not totally shine with software highly optimized for...486s and quake shines here, but Cyrixs slow FPU is burden there... What is also interesting is that 586s have also new instruction sets, so I guess you can use all new instructions with cyrix and Pod but not sure of the AM5 (maybe yes and emulated inside silicon). Thus for software development those might be good choice in case you only want to support new instruction sets with software you make, but not want to buy full systems for it yet. PS.: I had 40Mhz Cyrix 486 with a good motherbord and Vesa local bus card, then switched to pentium 1 MMX 200Mhz. But switched likely much later than 95 I think. Maybe like 97 or 98 and only because dad worked in IT. Before all that we had an Elon Enterprise 128 that we gave away to family and lost track of... so sad for that one haha
I learned the hard way that these Cyrix 586 chips were not Pentium chips. When I got Might and Magic VI The Mandate of heaven, it would not run. It looked at the 586 chip and said "fugedaboudid"
i'm a p90 overdrive fan, i did so many amazing things with the SiS board i had, and that chip. even had 1gb(4x256mb) edo ram in my 4 slots, they were making huge chips near the end. had pci bus, was using a radeon 7000, the shit played quake 3 arena, and it played pretty good.
I had the AMD 5x86 chip that i swapped in for my old 486 33mhz. that computer was pretty awesome for the time. Cirrus Logic VESA bus video card too lol
According to your charts, Doom performs better with the AM5 running at 150 mhz than it running at 160 mhz. Any idea why the higher FSB gives Doom that much of a boost?
Even though the CPU clock is 10MHz slower, the 50MHz bus really improves L2 cache and main memory bandwidth/latency, which helps a lot in Doom. On my system the PCI bus is also running at the full 50MHz, which helps with VGA performance a bit too. If only I had a chip that could handle 4x50MHz.. that would be really something 😁
I really liked those Shuttle motherboards back in the day, Interesting they are still in business, but make all in one systems, and micro PCs, probably for industrial situations, cause they have kiosks as well. I guess everyone finds their niche! :D I think shuttle was my go to 486 motherboard, and built many PCs for family and friends. AMD was often my top choice too, they seemed to provide the best value and compatibility of the time. The Cyrix and Via worked well, but there were a few compatibility issues as I remember. AMD was usually way way cheaper than intel and about the same price as Cyrix. The local computer shop sold them at tray prices, and you got the chip in an anti-static foam square, opposed to retail box, so they were really cost effective. The local shop had trays and trays of AMD chips, he must have gotten a good price on them buying so many too.
As far as Overdrive chips, I had a Dell 486SX 33 and installed a DX4 100 Overdrive. It was a drop in that just worked. I assume it was just just a regular DX4 100 with a 3X multiplier hard coded, because the board didn't support multipliers. I also built a separate machine with a 5x86 133 clocked at 160.
The Am5x86 was fastest Desktop 486 CPU released during the 486 era. AMD continued the line with the Elan line of CPUs. SiS/DM&P produced odd hybrid architecture CPUs in the early version of the Vortex86 CPU line which were neither Pentium nor Pentium II though they had MMX but also lacked some of the Pentium & Compare/Exchange instructions. The early ones were weird kind of super 486 DXs with fast CPU clocks (300MHz-1GHz) and MMX. Compatibility and real perf was poor though.
Interesting how well the Cyrix did in the synthetic benchmarks, but fell short so much in Quake even with the additional features enabled. Then again, Quake's software renderer under-performed even on later Pentium-esque AMD chips compared to Intel CPUs.
Well back in those days I DID put my money into an Am5x86 - and, thankfully, these are still quite available so I could easily put together an Am5x86 system again, one that - unlike my original one - can do 160MHz truly flawlessly. Btw HOW did you make the HOT-433 do 50MHz PCI?
The HOT-433 rev4 board I have has a BIOS option for setting the HOST:PCI divider. There are two options 1:1 and 1:1/2. I just make sure it's set to 1:1 and it matches the FSB frequency.
What Killed Cyrix was the fact it could not do CPU + FPU math simultaneously unlike Intel's or AMD CPU's, something that Quake used and (to a point) would make the system (maths wise) be like a dual core cpu. With Cyrix this would not work as INT math would not run simultaneously with Floating point math crushing the maximum performance available.
see the p90 overdrive took the win, i always know what works best. i can literally feel the difference when playing games. 16:26 and ya thank you for the walk down memory lane.
what part of Ontario are you in? if your not to far and into doing reviews i got a old Compaq Presario cdtv 520. it is a pretty cool all in one machine and one of very few old machines i have ever seen with a tv tuner and was powered by a 486.
Very cool looking all-in-one! Compaq made some nice ones, that's for sure. Thanks very much for the offer, as much as I'd love to review it, I have quite a backlog of videos that I need to get through before I can take on anything new. Perhaps in the future though! Thanks again.
@@vswitchzero no worries. i completely understand. i have no plans of getting rid of this machine. if you ever need parts i do got some 386-p1 stuff kicking around. likely wont even use half what i got anymore. don't have the patience to play with it much anymore. i am only 30 minutes north of Brampton.
Those overclock scores are something - my AM5x86 running at 160Mhz (40x4) can only get to 75.3 fps in 3DBench and about 45 in Doom with a Trio64 (barely edging out a Virge/DX), 90+ and 57 are incredible results. Is that UMC chipset so much more performing than the SiS496? (the fact I also get around 16.2 fps in Quake, which is not a world away from your 17, makes me think that yeah, the chipset is the big difference)
Thanks for your comment! I have noticed that benchmark scores can vary a lot on 486 platforms. Some of it must be due to the chipset, but wait state configuration and timings can make a big difference too. Some boards automatically implement PCI dividers when frequencies go above 33MHz. On this board, I can force it to stay 1:1 with the FSB. I've also noticed that some boards (I have a VIA based 486 PCI board) have really slow default PCI settings in the BIOS. I guess there were compatibility issues with really early PCI cards. On that board I could get huge boosts through various BIOS tweaks.
@@vswitchzero That is very interesting, I hadn't thought about the possibility of my board having PCI defaulting at 33Mhz. I now want to get one of these clock display cards. As for the BIOS, there isn't much I can change - the board is a relatively late one (LS-486e Rev.F), but it doesn't have many options beside the usual wait states - which do indeed make a massive difference, I get the 75.3 FPS in 3D Bench in the "most squeezed out" configuration, essentially one setting shy of crashing on the memory test.
I had Cyrix 133 cpu, wasn't that fast. Before of that, i had P 100. I swapped it for MMX intel. I already used OC ofc, i could not live without it :D One of my very best OC is on barton mobile 2500+ (2750-2800 Mhz) and 939 3800+ x2(2950 Mhz) on air. I loved them.
Had 2 x 1700+ tbred b hard modded to mp at 2600MHz on Asus dual socket a a7m mobo then xp2500 m at 2700, duron 1600 applebred at 2400. 939 3500+ Venice at 2900 (posted at 3300mhz air) then booted at 3280mhz to xp. Also had 939 a64 3800+ x2 toledo at 2800mhz with 1.35v.
@eizo monitor that's a very good clock. Mine was a good chip too but clocked worse as time went on. Did 2750 on 1.35v and 3.03ghz at 1.5v when I got it.
If I understand it correctly, Intel DX4 has some enhancements backported from the Pentium line, that's why it performs better if you compare it to Am486 DX4 with 16kB cache. Am486 is a clone of DX2 after all, with no such enhancements. The same applies to 133MHz version.
Have you run into any dual processor 486 motherboards? From what I remember, they somehow use both CPUs to emulate one processor. At least the one I saw. I'd love to see one or more of those bench marked. NCR, ALR, and Compaq and all had models.
I do know that the dual 46 motherboards did exist they are very rare piece of hardware to find I believe they were mostly industrial-based motherboards.
1996 tax season (Feb is when I got my return), I had a budget and the 486 was the best that I could afford. I found 5x86 prebuilt that fit in my budget. Also the first and last time I purchased a prebuilt system.
I missed this whole era, i went from a DX2-66 to an SGI Indy, then Octane , didn't pick up x86 again till they were into the PII 333 range.. shame to miss it all, but at that point x86 couldn't run Softimage and A|W in any fashion that made sense.
I've never been able to run a PCI 486 board at 40mhz for very long without hard drive corruption. Maybe my bad luck but the IDE controllers just can't handle the full bus speed. I'm talking bad enough to trash the OS files requiring a reinstall bad. Good for benchmarking, but not real world use. At first I wouldn't believe it because 'everyone' runs the 5x86 at 160mhz, but it just kept happening. I suspect alot of people who had success were inadvertently running their PCI bus at 20mhz, as most boards automatically set a 1/2 divider for the PCI. That's why I like the POD. Uses in spec 33mhz bus, but is still very quick. The 5x86 at 150mhz (50x3) is also very good, but you usually have to run the PCI at 25mhz, like a Pentium 75. 50Mhz PCI gave me awesome benchies, but again dead Win95 install after less than a day. It even corrupted my Transport Tycoon save game :( The ultimate luxury is having a 486 PCI board that can run the PCI bus at a 2/3 divider. This means 33mhz for a 50mhz FSB, and 27mhz for a 40mhz FSB. Very workable, but not common. It's not just the 486 that does this either. I have an i815 Tualatin board that refuses to budge over 37.5mhz PCI without constantly getting scandisk runs at boot and corrupting my files randomly. This is the dirty secret that overclockers often don't like to mention ;)
Very interesting, thanks for sharing! I think I may just be very lucky with the systems I've used. The Shuttle HOT-433 4.0 seems to have a very tolerant IDE controller and seems quite stable at 40MHz. I haven't done any extensive use of the system at 50MHz, so I can't say for sure how it would handle it longer-term. I think I'd find out a lot more quickly if I installed Windows 95 on the system. A 2/3 divider would be great to have. This board only has 1:1/2 or 1:1, unfortunately. I can't say I've used PCI 486 systems much. Most of my experience has been with VLB/ISA based systems.
I went for the overdrive got it’s cheap as I was years behind. Basically bought one for almost nothing in a box that was taped up to keep it together was a nice upgrade but my motherboard kept throwing up voltage error warnings Ended up binning it a year later. What a shame
As a teen in the 90s, I got an 83Mhz POD for $1 at a yard sale. Best upgrade of my life.
As a teen in the 90's, I got many free 286's 386's ram chips, graphics ram chips, PSU's etc, all from various skips.
My mother used to dread when I was late coming home as it usually meant I had found something new.
If you have a POD chip for sale let me know!
CPU Galaxy overclocked an AMD 133 Mhz 486 upgrade to 200 Mhz. And I remember seeing those Pentium Overdrive chips on the shelf in my local store back in '96. I was a a new parent and was there with my wife buying baby clothes. I remember picking up the box and wishing I could get one to upgrade my 486, and they were on sale for $249.00. But at the time I couldn't afford it. A year later I was able to upgrade my whole system to a new Pentium 233 MMX. A little over a year after that I was rocking a K6-2 400 Mhz. The tech was moving fast back then. Crazy thing is now that AMD is back in their groove, it's moving fast again! Competition is grand.
in '98 people didn't really know computers enough to really care about them, 2 years later you could get them used/cheap.
Man it was crazy. I remember having a CPU that said 66 Mhz during boot. Next computer was 300 Mhz I think. We got a used computer after a relative passed away and it was 600ish Mhz. These were all wonderful, but I will never forget going to visit my older cousin. He was showing my his computer. As it booted up, it said 1Ghz. I was not prepared to see this thing game!
AM5x86 P75 fond memories, running at 4x40Mhz all day with a 3Dfx card, out performing cheap P90 pre-builds.
I have like 32 p75 133s, some run happy 3x60 , just found this channel, time to dig up to oldies again, might be nicer than playing with modern stuff. Although i love to play doom eternal to test rigs
if only you waited around for a radeon 7000, lol.
(you lose) :D
I had that exact board with an Am5x86 as part of a bare bones system I purchased in 1997. Late in its life, I overclocked it to 160 MHz as you did, and added 128 MB 50 ns RAM, experimented with a Riva TNT... just because. I sold that system back in 2007, which I still regret. That was the first computer which was truly mine. Your video helped me to relive some of those memories.
One of the down sides of not being wealthy is you often have to sell your fondest memories in effort to be able to make new ones. It sucks.
Back in the days i had a Cyrix 486Dx4-100 rig and changed to Socket7 with an Cyrix 6x86MX-PR200. Started collecting CPUs in 2002 and now have DX4-100 Overdrive, the huge POD 83MHz also stable @100 and a 133MHz Overdrive for Socket 4. Love your vids. Very good content and nicely presented.
Thanks very much for your comment! That's awesome that you have the 133MHz overdrive for socket 4 - those are getting super rare and hard to find these days.
@@vswitchzero Thats right. Got mine in 2006 or 2007 together with an Intel Batman MB. The board was working but not very stable. So i only kept the CPU.
@@Stratotank3r Very cool. I've always had a soft spot for socket 4. I have the "Batman's Revenge" Intel board and a later stepping P60 chip in it. I hope to do a video on it one of these days.
I’ve never seen a Cyrix DX4-100, I bet that’s worth a few $$’s.
@@vswitchzero I wonder if anyone has managed a quad Socket 4 Overdrive? The Pentium Overdrive CPUs for Pentium Pro and 486 were forced out of Intel because of promises they made, tied to investments and other business stuff regulated by government. Intel was faced with a choice of producing *something* or paying big fines. They really didn't want to make those Overdrives, which is why the POD runs at the odd frequencies and the Socket 4 one doesn't run in quad. To use it on a quad P-Pro it can only be used to replace CPU 0 and 1, 2 and 3 have to be empty.
Mattel got into the same make something or pay big fines deal with the computer addon for their Intellivision game console. After blowing tons of time and money on a computer for which the game ended up being a peripheral, they did a pivot, produced a POS addon that barely satisfied the SEC, sold a few of them then shut down Mattel Electronics.
I've been advocating for 3x50 Am5x86 on vogons for a little while now. Glad to see someone corroborating my results
I had the Am586, was a huge and affordable upgrade to me over the 486SLC I came from! Served me well through 2 years of college.
Great video, you reminded me of the wrangle I had back in the day. I ended up sticking it out with my 16Mhz 386SX for way too long, saving money, then going for a full Pentium-90 setup. I can't explain how night-and-day it was, especially seeing friends with 486s, but I was seriously blown away by how much of an advance the Pentium was!
Fun side-note, Epson built a notebook with the Am5x86-133.
One bonus to having a high school job at a computer store was that we could sift through the chips looking for really good overclockers for our personal computers. All the techs were running 5x86 chips at 180 or 200 MHz at one point because of this.
Love those comparisons. I remember in 1996 that I've had AMD 486Dx4 VT8 in 2x50Mhz mode, it was cool as VLB card was faster due to this so I've had some improvements in duke3d and terminal velocity.
In the 90's I built systems for a GIS company to do sales demos on. I found that the software was heavily IO driven. So I found building with a DX50, not a DX2, straight 50Mhz was best IF you had compatible VESABUS cards, video and SCSI. It could out preform a DX2-66
I remember back in those days, my first PC was a 486SX-25 which I ended up needing to replace in less than 9 months with a 486DX2-50 because the MB died. From there, I upgraded to a 486DX4-100 OD chip because I was working at Best Buy and got an offer from the Intel rep to get it at cost. 3 CPUs in 3 years was kind of rough, but it taught me a lot, and I ended up getting into computer support for a career, as well as building my own PC for the next 30+ years since.
Perfect video, very pleasant to watch and to listen to. Great job! The benchmarks reflect well what I remember personally. In integer math based 3D games, my 5x86@160 was able to beat my friends shiny new (and insanely expensive) P90 by a tiny margin. His Quake performance got us 486 owners drooling though. One fun fact I remember on my 5x86@160: It was able to play back MP3's with almost 100% CPU load in Win95, but only Winamp was able to do it stutter free. Encoding took like 20 minutes for an average song.
Thanks very much and thanks for sharing! Yeah MP3 playback on a 486 was not an easy thing to achieve back then, that's for sure!
@@vswitchzero It took me years, but I finally managed to get the exact board/CPU/CDROM combo that I used back in 1996/1997. It'll be fun to do some CD ripping, MP3 encoding and playback on this beast just as in the good old days ;-)
I had the 83MHz POD. Took my 486 SX2/50MHz though the roof. Later went from that to a Pentium MMX when that came out.
I love the video. Very informative. I am 39 now so I was pretty young when those chips came out. My first experience with a home PC was my friend's 486-dx2
Later on I got a super slow Compaq Pentium 133, sold that and built my first pc, an AMD K6-233...
Now an I.T. and still passionate about this stuff. Thanks for the excellent video :)
Having tried myself to make some videos (none published)... I know it's work!
Thanks very much!
Your videos are super entertaining and the quality is really nice! Keep up the good work!
Thanks very much for the kind words, it means a lot! 👍🙂
Great vid! Brings back memories. The first fast computer I built was a dx4 100.
I LOVE this kind of stuff. I never went in for it myself when I went from a 486 DX2/80 to a P200 MMX as by the time I did the motherboard and chip wasn't a bad price and could use everything else I had including memory.
I did wonder tho what was possible in this arena.
I'm glad you got all that good stuff, great overclocking work, thanks for the in depth benchmarks. Thanks Lee!
Great analysis Mike!
Back then I upgraded my DX2-66 to a 120MHz AMD. Overclocked it to 133MHz
Nice! Quite a few of the AMD DX4/100 chips could do 133MHz too. The one I have has an undocumented 4x multiplier just like the Am5x86, which makes it really easy to do too.
Thank you for saving me money! I was gonna find and buy Cyrix 586 because I read its FPU was much superiour to AMD's 5x86. Even if it technically is, AMD's clearly better for real life use.
I used a 50Mhzx3 AMD 5x86 as my main system (mostly running Linux) from '94 until I replaced it with a K6-2 400 ~Y2K or so. It was then used by other family members until it was finally decommissioned due to poor performance running "modern" web browsers around 2004! It was completely stable all that time. It was a VLB system fully loaded with cache with a Mach64 and cached Fast SCSI2 both VLB cards which worked fine at 50MHz. It was a terrific little system.
Hi, this is so cool, what a shame the POD don't fall to 1.5x when the fan is not detected, that would help in achieving very interesting FSB overclocks, hell maybe 66MHZ like CPU galaxy did when he OC to 200 his AMD chip!
BTW what software do you use for editing? These bar charts look pretty "pro" to me.
Very true. Anything under 2.5x and above 1x would make for some very interesting overclocking options .. Nothing fancy with the charts. They are just done in excel with a dash of creativity with colors and shadows etc :)
Where have you been!!!!! Omg i love this show down!!
Great video! I felt like watching one of my videos 🙃, just with more details in this video from you. Definitely a huge like from me and one sub more for you. keep up your great work. 💪🏼
Thank you so much for the kind words! I'm a big fan of your channel and this really means a lot! :-)
I can't seem to get enough of these
Interesting, because from memory I always found for gaming the Cyrix chips were utterly pants compared to Intel and AMD back in the good old days.
I like your videos. :) Just got my hands on a 4x86 100mhz overdrive. Machine needs some work, battery was dead, but at least not leaking.
If i might make a small request, if you get your hands on some Pentium Pros.. My father had a dual Pentium Pro machine, he did CAD and Structural Analysis back in the 90s. I remember bringing that beast to a lan party... :P Would love to see some benchmarks on such a system.
Thanks! I do have a Pentium Pro system (200MHz CPU and Intel VS440FX board) but not any dual CPU systems. One of these days I'll definitely do a video on the Pentium Pro :)
That Shuttle/UMC board was often bundled with the Cx586 at the time, believe it or not. I actually bought a few for BBS use at the time.
Holy cow I had the evergreen overdrive processor when I was younger. I haven't seen that thing in forever.
Back then I had an AMD DX4-120 and LOVED it! I "upgraded" to a real Pentium 100 system, and returned it the next day to go back to my good 'ol AMD system, and I've been true to AMD since.
There's several DOS utils that tend to favor and improve perf of AMD & Cyrix chips. They're bundled in Phil's Benchmark pack. MTRRLFBE & CPUSPEED might be fun to try.
i've had all of them. still have a cyrix someplace, and i've kept all my 5x86's. those are my 486 beast of choice.
the intels were too expensive, and are a little rare these days, and the cyrix has some.. interesting quirks at times.
Yeah, I had rotten luck with Cyrix CPUs back then. The 6x86s I had would often crash playing specific games. They probably patched the games but there wasn't really a way to get them back then.
I really like your videos and can't wait for the next one.
I had the Am5x86-P75.
I actually kept the CPU until recently, gifted it to a friend who collects old hardware and had a good motherboard. Its still running.
Just put together Cx5x86-100 -machine. Mobo is QDI 471, 256KB cache, 2x50MHz bus and ALL settings set to tightest in BIOS, and feats enabled on CPU (BTB_EN, LSSER off, FP_FAST). Display card is Cirrus 5434 VLB with 2MB. Quake gives 14,8fps. 💪 Edit: RAM needs to be set to 'faster', 'fastest' setting was not 99% stable, but almost.
nice work, well done your benchmark data. i will admit i went from an amd 486 dx2-66 to the playstation, but then a pentium 133 with a matrox mystique happened so i missed this little group.
Thanks very much!
Back in 95 I had a Compaq Presario CDS 924 with a 486 DX2/66. I decided to get the Evergreen because it had a higher clock speed and cost less. Thankfully, my motherboard supported the write back cache, which gave a visible boost to games, especially Quake. I honestly wish I could've afforded the POD, but the Evergreen served me well until I got my first true gaming rig.
Thanks for sharing! Those evergreen chips were great performers and were very popular back then. It’s great that you could enable WB L1 too 👍
Interesting you mention that. In all my benchmarking, Quake and Doom actually run faster with L1 write back disabled.
@@jaeger8882 I tested Doom with write through and write back. Write back made the game noticeably smoother. What motherboard did you have?
Great vid! Love those AMDs
Thanks very much! The Am5x86 was such a legendary chip, that's for sure!
FYI about the Cyrix 5x86-133Mhz: I remember reading an article back in the 90's stating that all Cyrix 5x86s at 133Mhz were sold to Evergreen (or another upgrade company?) to make upgrade chips out of them. So that would explain why they are very difficult to find.
1. I still have a Cyrix 5x86-120Mhz Windows 95 machine which I use to play old games like the first XCom DOS games. 🙂
2. And I also still have a Kingston AMD 5x86-133Mhz chip, which I used to upgrade my old 486-66Mhz. That also was a nice boost.
3. CPU upgrade nostalgia: The last "upgrade CPU" I bought was a Powerleap Tualatin Celeron at 1.2Ghz... I used this to upgrade my Pentium 2 400 to a Tualatin Celeron at 1.2Ghz... wow, that Celeron had a motor on it. 🙂
I built and rebuilt a lot of Am5x86 systems for friends and family in the late 90s, they were certainly the best of the common 486 upgrade CPUs! I almost never saw the Socket 3 PODs, though Socket 5 ones were more common.
One of my tests for a system was, "under Windows 95, can I do other useful things and also leave Winamp running in the background?" On a DX4 that answer was often "not really" (depends a lot on the motherboard, cache/RAM, and hard disk performance), but most Am5x86 systems could handle it.
Back in the day I went from an Intel 486 DX2 66Mhz to a AMD 5x86 133Mhz using in socket voltage converter as I had an early 486 board that only had 5v socket and only supported running up to 40Mhz FSB. Much like you said it was so much cheaper to go that route than to look into the POD despite the clear FPU benefit of the POD.
Also, I seem to remember seeing a lot of results in magazines at the time that showed that on paper the Cyrix 5x86 should have been the clear winner in many cases, but in real world tests it usually didn't pan out that way. Those type of results seemed to have kept dogging Cyrix later on with the relative low FPU performance and heat issues of the M1 6x86 chips and lack of clock speed scaling of the M2 6x86 chips especially compared to the AMD K6-2/3 CPUs.
Thanks for sharing! Always great to hear first hand experiences from back in the day. Cheers! 🙂👍
I actually upgraded my system to a NextGen P90 processor back then. The only problem with doing that was you also had to purchase a Motherboard that would work with the socket it came with. Also the NextGen processors created the MMX system, and they were purchased by AMD who licensed this technology to Intel. So when you see the Intel w/MMX it was licensed from AMD.
Back in 1995, we still had our 486DX-50 but that 50Mhz bus speed did not play well with VLB graphics so when that machine was "retired", a Pentium 133Mhz fully replaced it.
The AMD 5x86 CPUs are an impressive surprise. Thank you for such a detailed benchmark set and historical account.
Thanks very much 👍
From what i remember of owning a PC back in early 1995 wasn't what CPU it came with, but whether or not you were going to get a motherboard with FAKE L2 Cache. There was no easy way to know back then what you were going to get when purchasing a motherboard. BOTH VLB and PCI boards suffered from fake cache.
Yes, I remember the fake cache well! There was a very popular PC Chips board with fake chips on it and I’m sure there were others too.
The AMD 4x86 was stellar... Over locked them to both 160 and once, on a great MB, with fast RAM and lots of fast cache, 200MHz...
Awesome, 486 DX my very first build.
Playing on AOL and paying by the hour, my first addiction one of many games as I got older. But they had a MMO 2D.
D&D Neverwinter Nights, Cleric/mage grinding gear by resetting a monster encounter. Even had PVP in player vrs player map sections.
We got the Kingston 120mhz upgrade for our Pac bell 25 mhz 486. It was astonishing how much the performance improved.
I bought a pretty cool socket 3 motherboard a year back (biostar MB8433) and the seller just threw in the IBM branded 5x86 100mhz. no blue heatsink tho! still, quite a cool surprise :) i gotta try it out again for these extra FPU options you've shown. great vid!
Thanks very much! Let me know how the chip does with the extra features enabled :)
At 23:06, changing the colors of 640x480 vs 320x200 compared to the previous slide threw me off for a second.
Haha oops! I totally missed that. The two data points are reversed in the second chart too. 320x200 should be on the top and 640x480 on the bottom.
Yep. Back in the day, I had a Cyrix 5x86. Got it to play Quake. Didn't do the trick. Had to buy a Voodoo card.
My first big PC upgrade was a Cyrix 5x86-100 and PCI motherboard back in late 1995. Was a great upgrade from my much slower Cyrix 486slc33 which was my first desktop PC (at least my first desktop PC which was all mine). A year later I upgraded to a Cyrix 6x86-P133+ and sold the Cyrix 5x86 and board to my dad to upgrade his PC, but sadly shortly after it failed. The chip had a green heatsink on it but no fan, I don't know if it was a temperature issue but the CPU just wasn't stable (wasn't overclocked either).
Shortly afterwards my dad upgraded to an AMD Am5x86-P75 with a heatsink and fan and that was much more stable and worked well until he upgraded again a couple of years later. For budget upgrades they were great CPUs. Of course I'd have loved to have had a Pentium back in the day but they were just a tad too expensive, and the Cyrix CPUs were ideal for my needs (well, until Quake came out, but I was more of a Doom and Duke 3D player anyway).
I'd be interested to see a comparison of Pentium class CPUs. I upgraded my Cyrix 6x86-P133+ to an IDT WinChip 200 in 1997, it was then where I got my first taste of virtualisation using a very early version of VMWare Workstation, I seem to remember it performed like a 386, but was still pretty cool to run a PC inside a PC :-D
Thanks for sharing! I'd definitely like to do something similar for the Socket 5/7 class CPUs in the future as well including the Pentium, AMD K5, Cyrix 6x86 etc.
Enjoyed this video, very informative, thank you :) I assume the ST versions of the DX/2 and DX/4 were identical to the Intel? Although I do have a DX/2 80 in my possession!
Thanks very much! As far as I know any DX/2 and DX/4 with ST or Texas Instruments branding would be a Cyrix 486 design. The AMD 486s are pretty much identical to Intel.
The AMD ADW version had a lower TDP than the ADZ version and it was 5 volt tolerant. I owned a few of them I ran at 4x40Mhz at 5V with no problems. How? By careful preparation of the heat sinks. Most 486 heat sinks were pretty arse, not at all flat on the bottom side.
The solution was to clamp a flat file in my bench vise and run the heat sink over the file until it was flat. Then I glass bead blasted the rest of it to strip off the color and thick oxide layer from the anodizing. The bead blasting also left a satin finish which I figured slightly increased the surface area for better heat radiation and conduction to the air being blown over it.
For applying thermal compound I used a fingertip to dab a thin layer over the whole top of the CPU. Press on the heat sink and anywhere it didn't transfer got a finger dab of compound. That got the absolute thinnest layer of compound with guaranteed 100% contact. Too much compound with poor coverage can drastically hinder heat transfer. If you don't want to have to clean a finger after doing this, wear a nitrile glove.
I'd love to see someone do a thermal test on Socket 4 CPUs with a heat sink that's been filed flat on the bottom, then test again with it glass bead blasted all over, except of course the bottom. The Cyrix 5x86 would be an ideal tester for this. In my experience those run HOT. I once got a 2nd degree burn with a blister when I accidentally barely brushed the stock, green heat sink with the tip of a little finger. No fan on it, and that silly flat plate atop the fins to hinder convection. What was Cyrix thinking?
A lot of motherboards couldn't set the correct signals to make the AMD chips run at 4x multiplier. There was an easy fix by jumpering from a Vcc pin to the pin which activated 4x. Fortunately the two pins were right at the edge with only one pin between. So I'd take a piece of one strand from some wire, bend it around the pin in the middle so it wasn't touching, then loop it around the Vcc and 4x pin. Then I'd take it off, tighten the loops a little and push it back on. The mod could be done by soldering wires to the bottom of the socket and installing a switch or 2 pin header for a jumper, but the "hotwire" method was pretty much invisible and removable.
Running at 50Mhz FSB was out of reach on any PC I had then because I couldn't afford the eye watering prices of the higher speed DIP SRAM cache chips that would require. I had one MicronPC that was solid at 3x50 (might also have been good at 4x50) but only with L2 disabled. With no L2 it was way slower than at 4x40 or even 3x40. At 3x50 with L2 it would boot DOS then crash in a few seconds.
I did have one POD system, a Packard Bell pizza box 486-25SX with a POD63. The board had a jumper to change FSB between 25 and 33 but the poor POD absolutely would not overclock to 83 Mhz. Buying a POD83 was not an option. I could buy most of the cost of a new-to-me Socket 7 board, CPU and RAM for the price of a POD83 so I suffered along with the POD63 until I saved up the $.
I may have missed you mentioning it, but does your PCI bus actually run at 50MHz when the FSB is increased or is there a divider that keeps it at 33 and you had to adjust it? Your 160MHz 5x86 runs marginally quicker than mine overall, but it's good to see a direct comparison. Might be the RAM timings and such that make the difference, as you're pretty good at tweaking those. I would agree that the POD isn't worth it. Intel had to deliver it because they'd made such a fuss with their 'vacancy' ad slogan, but they definitely priced it to discourage buyers. OEMs *hated* upgrade chips if it meant users delayed upgrading their entire system for a couple of years. I still want one so I can put it in my 5V motherboard. 🙂
Thanks for your comment! Yes, it is indeed running at the full 50MHz. The Shuttle HOT-433 only has two settings, 1:1 and 1:1/2, unfortunately. It was either 50MHz PCI or 25MHz PCI at a 50MHz bus. Not many of my PCI cards could handle it.. all of the S3 cards I have would get really weird at that speed. Thankfully the Millennium II is totally happy and I have a newer Permedia 2 PCI card that is too.
Back in the day with performance of CPUs increasing so rapidly alot of companies used those upgrade chips with the voltage converter to extend the life of their branded computers by an extra 18 months or so that was easy. I have always gone down the generic root I actually had the 5x86-133 p75 myself on my own home computer it was a generic 486 PC that i had swapped out the motherboard a few times ( from a 286) and eventually decided to start again so i sold it at auction and it struggled to sell are people knew it wasnt a proper Pentium. Oddly enough my current PC's which i have had for at least 5 years and were all second hand when i bought them are still powerful enough for what i use them for ( and i'm a software developer/ data cruncher) and i'm thinking about upgrading just to get windows 11.
I'd avoid 11 at all costs. I actually stopped using MS products right after 11 came out. I'm happily using the latest Debian Linux distro and can run all my games, including ones that wouldn't run on 10 or 11, and am still able to do all of my programming IDEs.
Great vid! I've got the AMD 133 and a DX4 100. Obv use the 133 lol.
My 12 year old self didnt know much about computer back then so i convinced my dad to buy a 2nd hand 486dx chip thinknig we could put it in the upgrade overdrive slot. After bending some pins and realizing it didnt fit, i gave up my dream to run duke3d at respcetable frames and settles to playing it at my friends, or watching him play. I still had doom2 so honed my FPS chops there, and ended up in a duke3d tournament that happened to have me and that one friend i used to watch play Duke in the finals. There was no chance I was lightyears ahead using a mouse while he was aiming with arrow keys.. players back then still used keyboard alone lol but surpsingly well. I didnt win by a huge margin and It was only thanks to the mouse I was able to skillfully aim the singlebarrel shotgun and do damage from far away, it was like a sniper just with a lousey scope. I took home the prize of $200 gift certificate and chioce of any game in the shop. That being said the 486 dx chip we bought was relatively inexpensive like $60, consiering the system cost $5000 jus a few years earlier it wasnt a huge loss and learned my first lesson in computer upgrading. Check the manual, see what the system is capable of upgrading too.
When I played Q1 back in the days on my DX4@100Mhz, my system ran at 20 FPS constantly (Using a ATI Rage IIc graphics card).
It's crazy just how far tech has come. You mentioned some of these being $300 or more at launch while I paid less than that for my Ryzen 7 3800X during black friday a few years ago. And even my original R5 1400 is leagues ahead of these old chips and isn't even worth $100 anymore. I always find it fascinating and interesting just how fast technology exploded in performance over such a short time. Only 30 years and now we got 16 core monstrosities with clock speeds pushing 6ghz at the top tier, like the i9-14900k or R9 7950X3D.
(I also can't help but to find it funny that those old AMD chips have prefixes of "AM5" and now they've created socket AM5... Full circle hehe...)
I was one of those few that ran my AMD 5x86-133 at 150 mhz and it was super stable. I used a Diamond Stealth 32 vlb card and just got lucky with the cache on board I guess. I ran it for 2-3 years before I finally upgraded. It became a backup machine once I built a pentium system so it stayed around longer than I would have expected. It ended once my then gf cousin shorted out the motherboard, but I still have the chip to this day. One of these days I'll get around to seeing if it will still boot.
Thanks for sharing! A 50MHz bus makes a huge difference in performance, that’s for sure! That’s great that you had a VLB video card that could handle it 👍
Sweet collection. I made do with a 486DX-120 on a VESA only board. Which isn't a bad deal in retrospect. The later PCI boards would penalize you almost for using 40mhz, they would declock the PCI bus to keep it from running over spec at 40mhz.
Thanks! I really love VLB systems. To me, that's more of a "true" 486 platform :) .. thankfully the Shuttle HOT-433 seems to respect the 1:1 setting for FSB:PCI clock, but I've heard other boards don't.
Great video! Grats!
Thanks very much! :)
I had this AMD, but my mainboard used only 4x30Mhz= 120Mhz and in this frequency had better Dhrystones than P75
Cyrix FPU is basically what killed Cyrix in their later chip too. What is interesting is that knowing this chip was released they could have benchmarked quake in-house to see the possible problems for their future gen too.
For integer performance I think AM5 is beasting over Cyrix because all tests are highly optimized for 486 hardware - likely avoiding branches with unrolling and maybe not having enough headroom in pipelineing to compensate. That is basically gains of the PoD and Cyrix does not totally shine with software highly optimized for...486s and quake shines here, but Cyrixs slow FPU is burden there...
What is also interesting is that 586s have also new instruction sets, so I guess you can use all new instructions with cyrix and Pod but not sure of the AM5 (maybe yes and emulated inside silicon). Thus for software development those might be good choice in case you only want to support new instruction sets with software you make, but not want to buy full systems for it yet.
PS.: I had 40Mhz Cyrix 486 with a good motherbord and Vesa local bus card, then switched to pentium 1 MMX 200Mhz. But switched likely much later than 95 I think. Maybe like 97 or 98 and only because dad worked in IT. Before all that we had an Elon Enterprise 128 that we gave away to family and lost track of... so sad for that one haha
I learned the hard way that these Cyrix 586 chips were not Pentium chips. When I got Might and Magic VI The Mandate of heaven, it would not run. It looked at the 586 chip and said "fugedaboudid"
i'm a p90 overdrive fan, i did so many amazing things with the SiS board i had, and that chip. even had 1gb(4x256mb) edo ram in my 4 slots, they were making huge chips near the end.
had pci bus, was using a radeon 7000, the shit played quake 3 arena, and it played pretty good.
I had the AMD 5x86 chip that i swapped in for my old 486 33mhz. that computer was pretty awesome for the time. Cirrus Logic VESA bus video card too lol
According to your charts, Doom performs better with the AM5 running at 150 mhz than it running at 160 mhz. Any idea why the higher FSB gives Doom that much of a boost?
Even though the CPU clock is 10MHz slower, the 50MHz bus really improves L2 cache and main memory bandwidth/latency, which helps a lot in Doom. On my system the PCI bus is also running at the full 50MHz, which helps with VGA performance a bit too. If only I had a chip that could handle 4x50MHz.. that would be really something 😁
I really liked those Shuttle motherboards back in the day, Interesting they are still in business, but make all in one systems, and micro PCs, probably for industrial situations, cause they have kiosks as well. I guess everyone finds their niche! :D I think shuttle was my go to 486 motherboard, and built many PCs for family and friends. AMD was often my top choice too, they seemed to provide the best value and compatibility of the time. The Cyrix and Via worked well, but there were a few compatibility issues as I remember. AMD was usually way way cheaper than intel and about the same price as Cyrix. The local computer shop sold them at tray prices, and you got the chip in an anti-static foam square, opposed to retail box, so they were really cost effective. The local shop had trays and trays of AMD chips, he must have gotten a good price on them buying so many too.
As far as Overdrive chips, I had a Dell 486SX 33 and installed a DX4 100 Overdrive. It was a drop in that just worked. I assume it was just just a regular DX4 100 with a 3X multiplier hard coded, because the board didn't support multipliers.
I also built a separate machine with a 5x86 133 clocked at 160.
The Am5x86 was fastest Desktop 486 CPU released during the 486 era. AMD continued the line with the Elan line of CPUs. SiS/DM&P produced odd hybrid architecture CPUs in the early version of the Vortex86 CPU line which were neither Pentium nor Pentium II though they had MMX but also lacked some of the Pentium & Compare/Exchange instructions. The early ones were weird kind of super 486 DXs with fast CPU clocks (300MHz-1GHz) and MMX. Compatibility and real perf was poor though.
Interesting how well the Cyrix did in the synthetic benchmarks, but fell short so much in Quake even with the additional features enabled. Then again, Quake's software renderer under-performed even on later Pentium-esque AMD chips compared to Intel CPUs.
My 1st pc was amd 486 dx4 100mhz in 1994...very expensive back in the day 😅
Well back in those days I DID put my money into an Am5x86 - and, thankfully, these are still quite available so I could easily put together an Am5x86 system again, one that - unlike my original one - can do 160MHz truly flawlessly.
Btw HOW did you make the HOT-433 do 50MHz PCI?
The HOT-433 rev4 board I have has a BIOS option for setting the HOST:PCI divider. There are two options 1:1 and 1:1/2. I just make sure it's set to 1:1 and it matches the FSB frequency.
@@vswitchzero Now that you say - it could be the board I saw the option on? I'll have a look when I next have a 486 time....
I've used some of those. AMDX4, Cyrix 586, and I once had a true 50mhz 486.
I later went to p166MMX.
a 100 mhz computer bought at a shop costed $1100 back then. a Micron or IBM forget about it, as they were around $4000-6000.
What Killed Cyrix was the fact it could not do CPU + FPU math simultaneously unlike Intel's or AMD CPU's, something that Quake used and (to a point) would make the system (maths wise) be like a dual core cpu. With Cyrix this would not work as INT math would not run simultaneously with Floating point math crushing the maximum performance available.
see the p90 overdrive took the win, i always know what works best.
i can literally feel the difference when playing games.
16:26 and ya thank you for the walk down memory lane.
what part of Ontario are you in? if your not to far and into doing reviews i got a old Compaq Presario cdtv 520. it is a pretty cool all in one machine and one of very few old machines i have ever seen with a tv tuner and was powered by a 486.
Very cool looking all-in-one! Compaq made some nice ones, that's for sure. Thanks very much for the offer, as much as I'd love to review it, I have quite a backlog of videos that I need to get through before I can take on anything new. Perhaps in the future though! Thanks again.
@@vswitchzero no worries. i completely understand. i have no plans of getting rid of this machine. if you ever need parts i do got some 386-p1 stuff kicking around. likely wont even use half what i got anymore. don't have the patience to play with it much anymore. i am only 30 minutes north of Brampton.
Those overclock scores are something - my AM5x86 running at 160Mhz (40x4) can only get to 75.3 fps in 3DBench and about 45 in Doom with a Trio64 (barely edging out a Virge/DX), 90+ and 57 are incredible results. Is that UMC chipset so much more performing than the SiS496? (the fact I also get around 16.2 fps in Quake, which is not a world away from your 17, makes me think that yeah, the chipset is the big difference)
Thanks for your comment! I have noticed that benchmark scores can vary a lot on 486 platforms. Some of it must be due to the chipset, but wait state configuration and timings can make a big difference too. Some boards automatically implement PCI dividers when frequencies go above 33MHz. On this board, I can force it to stay 1:1 with the FSB. I've also noticed that some boards (I have a VIA based 486 PCI board) have really slow default PCI settings in the BIOS. I guess there were compatibility issues with really early PCI cards. On that board I could get huge boosts through various BIOS tweaks.
@@vswitchzero That is very interesting, I hadn't thought about the possibility of my board having PCI defaulting at 33Mhz. I now want to get one of these clock display cards.
As for the BIOS, there isn't much I can change - the board is a relatively late one (LS-486e Rev.F), but it doesn't have many options beside the usual wait states - which do indeed make a massive difference, I get the 75.3 FPS in 3D Bench in the "most squeezed out" configuration, essentially one setting shy of crashing on the memory test.
I went with the IBM 5x86. Got it off a truck and never looked back.
Great review i like the am5 p75 still have it on a machine with a 3d blaster pci rendition verite
I had Cyrix 133 cpu, wasn't that fast. Before of that, i had P 100. I swapped it for MMX intel. I already used OC ofc, i could not live without it :D One of my very best OC is on barton mobile 2500+ (2750-2800 Mhz) and 939 3800+ x2(2950 Mhz) on air. I loved them.
Barton was the chip that introduced me to this world of pc master race. Loving it since!
Had 2 x 1700+ tbred b hard modded to mp at 2600MHz on Asus dual socket a a7m mobo then xp2500 m at 2700, duron 1600 applebred at 2400.
939 3500+ Venice at 2900 (posted at 3300mhz air) then booted at 3280mhz to xp. Also had 939 a64 3800+ x2 toledo at 2800mhz with 1.35v.
@@benrogers84 My 3800+ x2 did 2950 mhz stable 24/7 just took me so much time to do it in the DFI mobo but it was worth it.
@eizo monitor that's a very good clock. Mine was a good chip too but clocked worse as time went on. Did 2750 on 1.35v and 3.03ghz at 1.5v when I got it.
I had mine @ 50MHz bus and tripled, It was awesome!
If I understand it correctly, Intel DX4 has some enhancements backported from the Pentium line, that's why it performs better if you compare it to Am486 DX4 with 16kB cache. Am486 is a clone of DX2 after all, with no such enhancements. The same applies to 133MHz version.
Have you run into any dual processor 486 motherboards? From what I remember, they somehow use both CPUs to emulate one processor. At least the one I saw. I'd love to see one or more of those bench marked. NCR, ALR, and Compaq and all had models.
Can’t say I’ve ever used a dual 486 system before but it would be very interesting to check out!
I do know that the dual 46 motherboards did exist they are very rare piece of hardware to find I believe they were mostly industrial-based motherboards.
I had the Kingston power leap adapter to upgrade my Packard Bell 486 SX 25 MHz to 586 133 Kingston chip
1996 tax season (Feb is when I got my return), I had a budget and the 486 was the best that I could afford. I found 5x86 prebuilt that fit in my budget. Also the first and last time I purchased a prebuilt system.
Good memories, i486 positive..
I still have the Overdrive 150 for the Pentium PCs . i got it to update my P75 back in the day.
I think that I had the shuttle board, too!
I used 5x86 50x3 in my main pc till 2001. even used it for watching video cds
I missed this whole era, i went from a DX2-66 to an SGI Indy, then Octane , didn't pick up x86 again till they were into the PII 333 range.. shame to miss it all, but at that point x86 couldn't run Softimage and A|W in any fashion that made sense.
I've never been able to run a PCI 486 board at 40mhz for very long without hard drive corruption. Maybe my bad luck but the IDE controllers just can't handle the full bus speed. I'm talking bad enough to trash the OS files requiring a reinstall bad. Good for benchmarking, but not real world use.
At first I wouldn't believe it because 'everyone' runs the 5x86 at 160mhz, but it just kept happening.
I suspect alot of people who had success were inadvertently running their PCI bus at 20mhz, as most boards automatically set a 1/2 divider for the PCI.
That's why I like the POD. Uses in spec 33mhz bus, but is still very quick.
The 5x86 at 150mhz (50x3) is also very good, but you usually have to run the PCI at 25mhz, like a Pentium 75. 50Mhz PCI gave me awesome benchies, but again dead Win95 install after less than a day. It even corrupted my Transport Tycoon save game :(
The ultimate luxury is having a 486 PCI board that can run the PCI bus at a 2/3 divider. This means 33mhz for a 50mhz FSB, and 27mhz for a 40mhz FSB. Very workable, but not common.
It's not just the 486 that does this either. I have an i815 Tualatin board that refuses to budge over 37.5mhz PCI without constantly getting scandisk runs at boot and corrupting my files randomly. This is the dirty secret that overclockers often don't like to mention ;)
Very interesting, thanks for sharing! I think I may just be very lucky with the systems I've used. The Shuttle HOT-433 4.0 seems to have a very tolerant IDE controller and seems quite stable at 40MHz. I haven't done any extensive use of the system at 50MHz, so I can't say for sure how it would handle it longer-term. I think I'd find out a lot more quickly if I installed Windows 95 on the system. A 2/3 divider would be great to have. This board only has 1:1/2 or 1:1, unfortunately. I can't say I've used PCI 486 systems much. Most of my experience has been with VLB/ISA based systems.
oh man, wish i kept my 5x86 amd 133.
Yea, me too, who knew i would miss those 486 :-(
I went for the overdrive got it’s cheap as I was years behind. Basically bought one for almost nothing in a box that was taped up to keep it together was a nice upgrade but my motherboard kept throwing up voltage error warnings Ended up binning it a year later. What a shame
Really great video.