Same! Interesting though. I never thought about a chip being able to take a 60MHz PCI bus just because the same chip was used in an AGP application. Looks like I need to play with my PCI Voodoo Banshee.
@@hohiss83 Our 486 didn't even have a heatsink. This era was really the beginning of heatsinks as the transistor count and frequency were rapidly climbing.
These are fun to watch for me mostly because back in the day when I ran this sort of hardware, I didn't dare do any overclocking for fear of burning something up. The hardware was just too expensive to risk blowing it up, at least for most of us at the time. So it is cool to see what you could do if you wanted to.
I always thought that version of the AMI BIOS was so cool back in the day. And I have to say that your sleepless nights were worth it, congrats on your successful overclock!
to be honest, this was the time of the transition of going from msdos to windows as windows was getting more and more mainstream... i hated it. I was running dos as long as possible... i really loathed windows
What an awesome video! Thank you for OC'ing old hardware for this. At first, I thought "why on earth would he chose that video card?", but it becomes clear when the insane 60mhz pci bus speed was revealed as the "secret weapon".
It's only taken 25 years to realise the full potential of this platform lol. This was very entertaining and I'm definitely having a go myself, as I have an ADW revision. Maybe it's magic, like yours. Big props to the guys on the Vogons forum that originated this madness, particularly feipoa.
I seriously was never put on the edge of my seat for an overclocking video like this for felt ages. My eyes gone wider and wider as you went up the Mhz. Great stuff!
Congratulations! I loved doing 486 OC since it did big difference in reality. It was time saving during boot and it could be the difference in game between not playable and playable.
I love how excited you got when you saw the Quake FPS value, I was right there with you. My own X5-133 would run at 160Mhz but it was unstable even with additional cooling. I never even attempted 180Mhz. I have a soft spot for the X5-133 platform because it's the first PC I financed and built myself (worked all Summer to afford it). Now I want to see if this can be pushed even further.
It's been 26 years since I worked on the project, but I remember building a synthetic clock board as comp sci undergraduate research assistant at the University of Washington. We used an (I think) 33mhz 486, and dynamically scaled the clock up and down in increments that matched with vesa local bus, ide, memory, and cpu edge timing. The board also had a small amount of buffer to capture/replay any bits on relevant bus interfaces that would get lost during a clock down event. We were able to scale the frequency high enough to completely loose communication with the video card and other peripherals, so implemented device watchdogs to record failures and put together a statistical map of how many faults and different frequencies things occurred. I recalled being able to greatly overclock the actual cpu, and the real issue was line delays in the motherboard itself - the traces were unable to carry the signals at higher frequency with enough precision. This is a neat project that you performed here, and congratulations on pushing the FPS on the quake benchmark. Superscape 3d vr benchmark is always fun to see too.
This is why when I was running servers for MC I was obsessed with hardware optimization that looked nothing like the then big gaming overclockers. I was maximizing on RAM timings and pure latency. Invested in Optane drives to use as pure SSD due to their low latency and high I/O and higher write tolerance being much better than SSDs at the time for their price. When your limit was pure I/O, you start optimizing weird.
One of the best overclocks I had back in the day was an AMD K62-233mhz that would do 500mhz on air cooling with stock voltage. Back then that was pretty impressive, I still have the cpu itself too.
Great videos. I didn't realise Quake would run on a 486. I thought it was compiled with P5 instructions. I remember the first time I played the demo on an early Pentium. Also the first time I saw 'true' colour in Win 3.1 Good times.
I used to have one of those back in the days, and I overclocked it to 166MHz, using a crappy FIC motherboard that I had for years. I had to do some work with a pin in the 486 to be able to use it, I isolated it with glue so it wasn't in contact with the socket. I could use it at that speed for most stuff, including a finite elements assignment, but there were a couple of games always crashing, so I reverted back to a more conservative 150MHz. I now think it was a matter of cooling, but who knows. Nice to see your channel is growing.
Very impressive. If I were to try to beat your world record, I’d keep everything identical, but replace the 14.318MHz Chrystal with a programmable oscillator from Silicon Labs. That way you could push everything to the physical limit and the board and software would be none the wiser.
@@mrfrog8502 that depends on the clock distribution architecture, and the benchmarking software. I’d expect it to take time stamps from the RTC, not from the master clock. System clock timers have been an issue since the 8MHz 8088s broke 4.77MHz games, so I think it’s reasonable to assume benchmarks use a master clock-independent gating system. But I don’t know, I’m just assuming.
My 5x86-133 on an ASUS PVI-486SP3 with an ARK 1000vl VLB graphics card and 32MB regular FPM at stock speed maxes out at 14.3 FPS in Quake and 1498 ticks in Doom, or 49.85 FPS. Looking at your stock result I feel pretty darn pleased with that! :) But to see a 486 get over 20FPS is absolutely remarkable. Amazing work, and thanks for sharing.
A house fire 7 years ago took an entire lifetime of vintage hardware from me, including my favorite rare CPU, an AMD K5 PR-200. Do you have any K5s you could toy around with? I've always wondered if they would function in a dual socket 7 motherboard.
I would be interested in seeing a dual Pentium Pro setup. I always wondered what the performance of those would be like. At the time the thought of NT with mutliple processors was very appealing.
Nice job. When I was a kid I overclocked a 386SX33 to 66mhz by replacing the mobo clock crystal with a 66mhz crystal from an ISA modem. I had to add external cooling and a heatsink, but it was very fast but not super stable. Allowed me to run games that were not permitted to run on such a slow machine. Fast forward 25 or 30 years, and overclocked systems are routine.
thank you for less "yeah". this video is interesting and educative, pleasure to watch. mid 90s is very interesting subject especially because of early 3D
I had one of these and used it at 180mhz from 1997 to 2003. Played unreal on it with a 2MB VLB video card and 32MB of RAM. I used to call it the fastest 486 in the West.
Nice one! Got all nolstalgic from the days where you would do anything to squeeze out an extra megahertz. I noticed though, that you made an error at @22:13 saying "... multiplying by 34" but entered 35. I am not sure that means anything for your results, just worth mentioning!
You have to be quite lucky to manage that speed. But 160MHz should be doable with many more chips. Personally, I don't dare overclocking my retro stuff... I can't afford to risk damaging anything, but I'm certainly impressed by these numbers. Heck, that 486 is faster at Quake than my K5 100MHz, despite the K5 being a 5th gen chip.
thank you. yeah, I know how hard it was for me as well when my channel was smaller. and the big ones are not reacting or answering. Even LGR ist not answering to my mails today... I am not after revenue on youtube, I do this because of passion and if i can help and promote smaller channels who are very professional as well, the whole community has a benefit out of that and we will get more interesting videos on youtube.
@@CPUGalaxy Thank you for replying! Yeah, I fear they simply get overloaded, hard to sift through the relevant information etc with to many people trying to get your attention. I'm hoping to start my own channel sooner or later, and that's partly because I don't feel I can discuss the subjects presented in larger RUclipsrs videos, due to being completely smothered by the other comments.
I can't believe that C&T mae such a 486 motherboard, its insane, considering there were other companies making extreme boards at the time. Having cache modules on a 486 was extremely rare, I only saw them on later PII and DEC Alpha machines. Your board is similar to my SOYO 486 with all types of connections but you may be able to have 1MB of cache by combining bothe the module and the empty surface mount if you can find and solder the chips. Not a fan of AMI or Phoenix BIOS though, I'm an Award fan. All things considered, you have one of the best 486 platforms to work on. Good job. I have overclocked my 486 machines back in the day, but considering how old they are now, I don't want to stress the electronics, so they run at vanilla specs. You are very lucky to find that motherboard with the cache module. I couldn't find one after months of searching for a RISC motherboard that I had so I gave up.
Awesome video! Worth noting for anyone taking up the challenge, even if you were to achieve say 200mhz (50mhz x4) you likely still wouldn't beat the Quake score because you would be limited to 25mhz on the PCI bus or 50mhz if you have a board like this that can be tricked into bypassing the divider or a PCI enabled board that lacks the divider entirely. Ideally you would want to run at a 66mhz FSB setting, this will net you higher PCI speeds. You will need a PCI Graphics card that uses the same GPU as an AGP card (like the one used here). This will guarantee you are able to run at the full 66mhz as supported by AGP. Other tips would be larger, faster lvl2 cache. I think the key here is overclocking the floating point unit as far as possible in conjunction with a 66mhz PCI bus. I don't know if CPU Galaxy tried this but I would be very curious what the result would be with 66mhz FSB with a multi of 2.5, would the extra 6mhz on the PCI bus make up for the lower overclock, 166mhz vs 180mhz. How much of the uplift is coming from the faster PCI bus and how much is caused by the faster clocked FPU? The ideal would be to run at 66mhz x 3 but finding a CPU stable at 200mhz will be difficult, if not impossible. Videos like these make me sad that I no longer have my collection of 486 and early Pentium/AMD K6 CPUs/boards. Sadly I moved country and could not bring them with me. Now they cost more than they are worth to replace.
3x66 MHZ and also 66 mhz on the pci bus is already in work 🙃. But with another board and I need some active cooling the cpu to 0 degrees... soon, here on my channel. 😉
man this is my "the first computer" cpu, and motherboard if not the same it is very very similar. you have much better graphics though the bios is the same i am already crying from nostalgia that sound counting memory and you even have 16 megs of ram also i love it
A legend is born. The real masterpiece here is the overclocking of the PCI bus. Yes, the Game Blaster could take that 60 MHz, but most likely there were other devices on that bus (IDE controller etc.). Insane and ingenous! Now, do you see any chance for that magical 200 MHz? :) :)
Thank you! Yes, I am still testing but the results are already very good for a 200 MHz setup. It will be a quiet interesting video as well. Another mainboard, 66.6 MHz Busspeed and multiplier of 3. I am going to beat my own records again. But I need to bring the cpu to 0 degrees to be stable. 😉
@@CPUGalaxy I'm quite angry with myself... I didn't keep my 5x86... it was posting and running with 200Mhz without special cooling.... but the Matrox Graphicscard didn't like it, so I just ran it at I believe 150Mhz.
No way! I didn't realize what I had. I was watching the video and thought this looked familiar. I got an X5-133ADW from a failed estate sale, with an "X" marked on it. It's definitely a cool conversation piece on how different CPUs are today.
1. Try sticking a bit of red or orange electric tape over that 7 segment display to make it more readable for the camera. 2. I think it should be possible to modify the BIOS to override that 2x PCI clock divider. Or even better, write simple tool to change the setting on the fly from DOS (as long as there is any decent documentation available for the chipset).
brings back memories! we overclocked the living daylights out of a similar CPU back in the days. We scavenged a radiator from an amplifier and modded it to fit the motherboard then mounted two cone shaped extension brackets to funnel air from a big industrial 5V 160mm fan to 120 , then to 80mm to fit on the radiator. that fan was way way too powerful for the fan header, so I rigged the one of the rails to supply the wattage and the amps to the fan. you know you've made a big mistake when the air coming off it can tear stuff of the MB. but hey it worked and we had something in the region of 25 to 30% overclock on the cpu.
Ahh the good old M919. The traces for the two (Unpopulated) cache chips are rather 'interesting' on this board! I had one back in the 90's which had the fake cache chips soldered on :)
@@SireSquish The space was for cache RAM to be soldered to the board. In the case of some revisions of this board, the circuit traces only link the two cache chips together and do not connect to the rest of the board! Pretty useless. For a shot period in the mid 90's cache RAM was very expensive so companies cheated and used fake chips. More detail can be found here... redhill.net.au/b/b-bad.html The board used in this video has a real cache module installed in the slot in front of the PCI connectors.
@@DevilishDesign That's a combination of surprising, not surprising, hilarious and infuriating. So many things were dodges like that before widespread Internet knowledge.
Geez…This is freaking AMAZING 😳 I mean reaching about ten times the normal CPU clock speed alone is sub-zero but the fact that the north bridge as well as the RAM modules is still willing to work at 60MHz is something I had never expected would be feasible 😶 Outstanding work! 😍
Wow! I remember playing the original Half Life using an AMD 486 (5x86?)120 Megahertz, slightly over clocked. I can't remember the speed I managed to get it up to as it was so long ago. I also was using a rather crappy PCI graphics card at the time and I actually enjoyed the experience! My friends could not believe I could actually do this until they saw for themselves. I wish that I had your setup at the time as I can only imagine how much faster it might have been! I think that I may still have that old motherboard and processor around somewhere, minus the HUGE tower case that I had it installed in. I miss those days..... Great video by the way! Subscribed! 👍👍
Great content from this channel as always. For PC enthusiasts, CPUG is without peer on RUclips. Hopefully this will start a 486 war and we'll finally see just how much could have been squeezed from that CPU. I'd be happy to see the same for earlier Intel chips. Often the PC chassis they were put in didn't do them justice.
I have that exact motherboard, only the two unpopulated pads in the corner have Fake Cache(TM) on them. It truly is glorious how the traces wrap around from one side of the fake cache area and reconnect back on the other side.
Wow, absolutely amazing! I have the same setup and a couple of AMD X5s but I don't even dare to try! What about using another graphics card? I remember testing a GF2 MX400 just for fun on an M915 with a DX4-100 and noticed a huge improvement in Doom, although I didn't test Quake. Can't wait to see the 200mhz video!!!!
This is dangerous for me. I have almost the exact same setup you're playing with in this video! I actually have heard of the strategy you're employing here, but nobody who explained it on Vogons went into this level of detail.
43rd week of 1996 is quite impressively late for the 486 / 5x86 chipset. The P6 Pentium Pro was already available commercially for a year that point, and Pentium MMX was also literally launched just that week (~October 22, 1986). The AM5x86-133 (@160 MHz w/VL Bus cards) got me through a rather "poor" period time of my life after a bunch of stuff happened - a lot of value for the $, and I used it from 1995-1997 as my main PC and for another 3 years as a network node to help me get my MCP and MCSE for WindowsNT certifications. The final hurrah for the system came in 2000 when I decided to see if it would run under mineral oil for cooling (and yes of course it worked great). Unfortunately with no way to clean the board, the board and processor went in the trash :/. I do have a "Powerleap 5x86-133" sitting in a box though today. P.S. Wow! I remember that BIOS!
Very impressive. I dabbled with this a long time ago, but could never get the VGA card to work - knew the CPU was working, because removing the card resulted in angry beeps. Perhaps it's worth another go, just for fun, though I doubt any of the cards I have that might run at this speed would be very fast in DOS. I still feel the WinChip is overlooked here. It's kinda '486-Like' but runs in boards with AGP and SDRAM, as well as being clocked at over 200MHz right out of the box. It just isn't the same, though.
AWESOME. Still have one of these boards with a 5x86 chip and the fastest RAM I could find in the day (50ns). Used to scare the pentium 90 users with it clocked to 50MHz bus @ 150MHz CPU. I remember having trouble getting cards that would work with bus setting at 50MHz. Used to run it at 160MHz on a 40MHz bus also. But 180MHz, thats fantastic.
Enjoyed the video. I had an AMD 133Mhz CPU that I overclocked to 166MHz. No FPU though. I didnt add any extra cooling to it and it died several months later. That did give me an excuse to get a new CPU with an FPU so I could finally play quake without going to my Universities computer labs.
I once ran a sempron 2500+ 1750Mhz 1.6volt cpu at 2150Mhz stable on air with a load temp of 55 celsius at 2.2volts. Ran it for years like that. Used a 90CFM bathroom fan as a blower over a solid copper heatsink to keep it cool. it was loud.
Pretty neat. That board is definitely a unicorn among 486 boards! I also had one of those AMD chips in my 486 board back in the mid 90's. I ended up having to run mine at 3x40 for a 120 mhz total speed. My board would not recognize anything higher than a 3x multiplier no matter what settings I tried so I ran it at the max bus speed of 40 mhz. By the same time that board was released you could buy a non-MMX Pentium up to 200 mhz which would blow that 486 chip out of the water in Quake. But it's still neat to see it clocked that fast!
The PR133 is super rare? Dammit! Mine went to landfill many years ago. I think it was the only drop-in replacement processor that impressed me. I noticed a significant performance boost after replacing my 486dx2100 and as you mentioned, you got Pentium performance for the price of a 486
The fastest setups of these old days machines have be lost to time 20 years ago. Almost no one remembers even the slot one records or mobile barton records anymore. It's a real shame but at least we can try again now.
Used to do this sort of thing back in the day, if you're really looking to get 100% you'll definitely want to hijack the PLL output and replace it with some kind of dynamically adjustable oscillator.. I've seen people do this with FPGA's and other more hardware based approaches using some timing circuits. But, you should be able to get much finer clock adjustment than the standard configurations of the multiplier or PLL chip allow. Your chip may not be stable at 200Mhz, but could potentially hit 190Mhz with a custom PLL clock.
lol. funny that you say that now. Coz exactly now I am sitting in front of a PII mobo and was overclocking a 300 Mhz PII to 450 MHz and very surprised that this is working stable.
@@CPUGalaxy Lots of deschutes core P2's would do 450. 500 was a little rarer though. All Covington celerons and most all celeron 300A cpu's would as well.
@@wishusknight3009 The celeron 300a's would nearly all run over 500mhz and were much faster than the Pentium 2. I had a dual CPU celeron 300A at just over 500.. Drilled pin to enable SMP and voltage mods.
@@thomassmith4999 Not in my experience back in the day. I had several examples where they didn't. Even with volt mods we rarely got them to 504 as it took me a good 30 examples before I had one in my personal machine running 504. We used to sell them pre-overclocked at our little shop back when they were available. About 1 in 5 would not run 450 unless they were at 2.4 volts. But most would do 450 with only a 2.1v mod or no volt mod at all.
@@wishusknight3009 Were you in the #celeron group on EFNET? those were great days. I didn't see anyone not being able to run 450 back then but getting 504 stable was a bit of a challenge. My CPUs were lapped back to copper. I was using the DFI board, the capacitors failed in the late 2000s but I'm going to try and fix it soon. I could run 450 on standard voltage.
And now it is time to grab a voodoo 3 PCI version. The voodoo 3 works well on slow computers and is also capable running at that pci bus speed. You will have to cool the voltage regulator on de voodoo 3 card, because it gets hotter at higher pci bus speeds. Then run quake 1 and 2 and other 3d games. And also try to use a soundcard, it will change the quake and doom score. Would be nice to see how much it changes the outcome. Use a Creative AWE64. It uses the least ammount of cpu time. I have tested serveral cards and that one came out best. Back in the day I played on my 160Mhz amdX5 the following games. Monstertruck madness, Quake 1 and 2, nfs 2 SE, motorscross madness and Descent. I used a Voodoo 1 from Trust in combination with drivers from Diamond. My graphics card was a (i think it was a Trident tgui 9440) graphics card with 1MB of ram.
Great video! I could only source one am5x86 capable of 180 mhz so far - boots up with 200 but it's unfortunately a no go. The i486Dx4 goes up to 133 max. - and that's pushing it.
I've recently been playing around with a Motorola 68360, rated at 33MHz but it seemed to run quite comfortably at 50MHz. That's where I stopped, so maybe it will go further, bit it was getting noticeably warmer so I decided not to push it any more. I wonder then if this one came from the middle of a wafer!
Ah, the Chips M919, a board famous for questionable build quality and fake L2 cache, though this later board is a little higher quality and didn't bother to install the fake cache chips (though the pads and pointless traces are still visible at the bottom left at the beginning of the video). Red Hill Computer has a pretty good write-up about this (and many other vintage PC bits). PCI standard originally allowed for 16-37.5MHz operation to support the variety of CPU bus speeds common in the early '90s, with a 66MHz option introduced in the late '90s. AGP is essentially PCI signaling at higher speed and with a dedicated channel directly to RAM (as the AGP aperture) for additional texture storage, which is why there were so many video cards using the same chip for both PCI and AGP (later AGP/PCIe cards have to use bridge chips because the signals are too different).
Very impressive overclock. Out of interest how does this effect the ISA bus? I ask because to make a system out of this you'd probably want a sound card and would they be effected by a faster bus clock? Yes I know in reality you'd probably just run at the slower speed for day to day use, just simply curious if you could get a sound card to also sit stable at the high bus speeds.
yeah, good question. I will anyhow do a follow up to this setup with a soundcard. I will measure the clock of the Isa bus with my oscilloscope. good input! thank you
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There's something so comfy about the gui of that bios.
Indeed, haven't seen this one in a while!
There is also a mouse support if you plug one 🙂
he is faking, its UEFI with a ryzen 3 gen cpu )))
I’ve got this bios (or very very close) on a slot 1 system, and I absolutely hate it! 😆
It's called WinBIOS, and It's pretty comfortable for me :)
Something inside me broke when I saw your PCI bus running at 60MHz... stable.
Same! Interesting though. I never thought about a chip being able to take a 60MHz PCI bus just because the same chip was used in an AGP application. Looks like I need to play with my PCI Voodoo Banshee.
Something approaches.
Gabe is watching.
I was more impressed by the heatsink
@@al73r xD me too
@@hohiss83 Our 486 didn't even have a heatsink. This era was really the beginning of heatsinks as the transistor count and frequency were rapidly climbing.
These are fun to watch for me mostly because back in the day when I ran this sort of hardware, I didn't dare do any overclocking for fear of burning something up. The hardware was just too expensive to risk blowing it up, at least for most of us at the time. So it is cool to see what you could do if you wanted to.
I always figured it would be worth the gamble to impress my friends at school. Not long till I fried my first motherboard... ;-)
I remember that moment in time when you either had a pentium 75, 90, 100, 120, 133, or 166
I always thought that version of the AMI BIOS was so cool back in the day. And I have to say that your sleepless nights were worth it, congrats on your successful overclock!
Thank you!
AMI always made the best looking/most interesting BIOSes... Especially back in the 286 to 486 era
I remember AMI WinBIOS; I think it was on my Pentium 90.
Even my current BIOS doesnt have any windows. It does have mouse support going for it though.
to be honest, this was the time of the transition of going from msdos to windows as windows was getting more and more mainstream... i hated it. I was running dos as long as possible... i really loathed windows
What an awesome video! Thank you for OC'ing old hardware for this. At first, I thought "why on earth would he chose that video card?", but it becomes clear when the insane 60mhz pci bus speed was revealed as the "secret weapon".
It's only taken 25 years to realise the full potential of this platform lol. This was very entertaining and I'm definitely having a go myself, as I have an ADW revision. Maybe it's magic, like yours. Big props to the guys on the Vogons forum that originated this madness, particularly feipoa.
Needs sub ambient.
I seriously was never put on the edge of my seat for an overclocking video like this for felt ages.
My eyes gone wider and wider as you went up the Mhz.
Great stuff!
OMG, I just love your channel!
So much good stuff for my retro heart. :D
Congratulations! I loved doing 486 OC since it did big difference in reality. It was time saving during boot and it could be the difference in game between not playable and playable.
thank you. Yes, exactly that is the point why 486s are fascinating.
I love how excited you got when you saw the Quake FPS value, I was right there with you. My own X5-133 would run at 160Mhz but it was unstable even with additional cooling. I never even attempted 180Mhz. I have a soft spot for the X5-133 platform because it's the first PC I financed and built myself (worked all Summer to afford it). Now I want to see if this can be pushed even further.
... you will see it how I am going to push it to the limits 😊
It's been 26 years since I worked on the project, but I remember building a synthetic clock board as comp sci undergraduate research assistant at the University of Washington. We used an (I think) 33mhz 486, and dynamically scaled the clock up and down in increments that matched with vesa local bus, ide, memory, and cpu edge timing. The board also had a small amount of buffer to capture/replay any bits on relevant bus interfaces that would get lost during a clock down event.
We were able to scale the frequency high enough to completely loose communication with the video card and other peripherals, so implemented device watchdogs to record failures and put together a statistical map of how many faults and different frequencies things occurred. I recalled being able to greatly overclock the actual cpu, and the real issue was line delays in the motherboard itself - the traces were unable to carry the signals at higher frequency with enough precision.
This is a neat project that you performed here, and congratulations on pushing the FPS on the quake benchmark. Superscape 3d vr benchmark is always fun to see too.
This is why when I was running servers for MC I was obsessed with hardware optimization that looked nothing like the then big gaming overclockers. I was maximizing on RAM timings and pure latency. Invested in Optane drives to use as pure SSD due to their low latency and high I/O and higher write tolerance being much better than SSDs at the time for their price. When your limit was pure I/O, you start optimizing weird.
One of the best overclocks I had back in the day was an AMD K62-233mhz that would do 500mhz on air cooling with stock voltage. Back then that was pretty impressive, I still have the cpu itself too.
You sure it wasn't a K6-2+?
Great videos. I didn't realise Quake would run on a 486. I thought it was compiled with P5 instructions. I remember the first time I played the demo on an early Pentium. Also the first time I saw 'true' colour in Win 3.1 Good times.
It will even run on a 386 with a 80387 co processor installed.
I used to have one of those back in the days, and I overclocked it to 166MHz, using a crappy FIC motherboard that I had for years. I had to do some work with a pin in the 486 to be able to use it, I isolated it with glue so it wasn't in contact with the socket. I could use it at that speed for most stuff, including a finite elements assignment, but there were a couple of games always crashing, so I reverted back to a more conservative 150MHz. I now think it was a matter of cooling, but who knows. Nice to see your channel is growing.
Very impressive. If I were to try to beat your world record, I’d keep everything identical, but replace the 14.318MHz Chrystal with a programmable oscillator from Silicon Labs. That way you could push everything to the physical limit and the board and software would be none the wiser.
Would this not show the wrong values everywhere because you'd effectively change master clock reference used for time/speed counting?
That might not work. The ASIC itself likely runs at that clock speed and you might not get far before overclocking that value causes a problem.
@@kylejones8392 likely, but this is all an academic exercise anyway. If you can eke out another, say, percent, that may be worth it. Or not 🤷🏻
@@mrfrog8502 that depends on the clock distribution architecture, and the benchmarking software. I’d expect it to take time stamps from the RTC, not from the master clock. System clock timers have been an issue since the 8MHz 8088s broke 4.77MHz games, so I think it’s reasonable to assume benchmarks use a master clock-independent gating system. But I don’t know, I’m just assuming.
@@bertholtappels1081 Very true, every percent counts when you're smashing records!
I love watching your channel before sleeping, it relaxes me.
Awesome result, seriously impressive performance!
Really loving your channel!
incredible !! really enjoyed your video !! congratulations for the fastest 486 on earth !!!
My 5x86-133 on an ASUS PVI-486SP3 with an ARK 1000vl VLB graphics card and 32MB regular FPM at stock speed maxes out at 14.3 FPS in Quake and 1498 ticks in Doom, or 49.85 FPS. Looking at your stock result I feel pretty darn pleased with that! :) But to see a 486 get over 20FPS is absolutely remarkable. Amazing work, and thanks for sharing.
A house fire 7 years ago took an entire lifetime of vintage hardware from me, including my favorite rare CPU, an AMD K5 PR-200. Do you have any K5s you could toy around with? I've always wondered if they would function in a dual socket 7 motherboard.
cool idea. i have enough k5 and also a nice dual s7 board 🤩
@@CPUGalaxy Can't wait to see that! Thanks for your video!
@@CPUGalaxy not all heros wear capes!
I would be interested in seeing a dual Pentium Pro setup. I always wondered what the performance of those would be like. At the time the thought of NT with mutliple processors was very appealing.
actually I have a sealed Dual Socket 8 board here. 😀
7:18 i love that amibios already support mouse input... i used umc based chipset too for my 486 back in the day
Nice job. When I was a kid I overclocked a 386SX33 to 66mhz by replacing the mobo clock crystal with a 66mhz crystal from an ISA modem. I had to add external cooling and a heatsink, but it was very fast but not super stable. Allowed me to run games that were not permitted to run on such a slow machine. Fast forward 25 or 30 years, and overclocked systems are routine.
thank you for less "yeah". this video is interesting and educative, pleasure to watch. mid 90s is very interesting subject especially because of early 3D
aw what? I love all the "ja" please keep it
Ja?
@@ozmobozo “Ja” is Yes/yeah auf Deutsch (in German)
Another "ja" fan checking in
I had one of these and used it at 180mhz from 1997 to 2003. Played unreal on it with a 2MB VLB video card and 32MB of RAM. I used to call it the fastest 486 in the West.
Unreal on 5x86? How many fps?
@@mixal31 probably like 12 or so ^^
@@phreeze83 yeah 12 but per minute :-)
Sir, you are now... the man - the legend!
Nice one! Got all nolstalgic from the days where you would do anything to squeeze out an extra megahertz.
I noticed though, that you made an error at @22:13 saying "... multiplying by 34" but entered 35. I am not sure that means anything for your results, just worth mentioning!
Thank you. I said by mistake 34 but entered the right value into the calculator.
180MHz 486? Damn, didn't even know the X5-133 can clock so high.
You have to be quite lucky to manage that speed. But 160MHz should be doable with many more chips. Personally, I don't dare overclocking my retro stuff... I can't afford to risk damaging anything, but I'm certainly impressed by these numbers. Heck, that 486 is faster at Quake than my K5 100MHz, despite the K5 being a 5th gen chip.
😉
That's silicon lottery for ya
@@rebeccaschade3987 X5-133 chips are extremely common, so don't worry about damaging a rare piece of hardware.
@@Zerbey They still cost money, and I'm more worried about damaging the motherboard (voltage regulators etc.)
Your best material yet. Keep it up.
Another excellent vid. And thanks for recommending Atheatos channel. Looks 👍
I must say that I love your videos and I wish you would post more often.
I send you all the love I can from the United States
That was fun! Congratulations on your world record.
Congratulations, and well done.
Your channel is going to be huge.
This is such a cool channel I'm so glad I happened to find it!
Thanks for sharing his page! My favourite when larger RUclipsrs recommend notable smaller RUclipsrs, subscribed!!
thank you. yeah, I know how hard it was for me as well when my channel was smaller. and the big ones are not reacting or answering. Even LGR ist not answering to my mails today...
I am not after revenue on youtube, I do this because of passion and if i can help and promote smaller channels who are very professional as well, the whole community has a benefit out of that and we will get more interesting videos on youtube.
@@CPUGalaxy Thank you for replying! Yeah, I fear they simply get overloaded, hard to sift through the relevant information etc with to many people trying to get your attention. I'm hoping to start my own channel sooner or later, and that's partly because I don't feel I can discuss the subjects presented in larger RUclipsrs videos, due to being completely smothered by the other comments.
Amazing. Congratulations!
You just taught me about CPU wafer binning. Appreciate that.
Great work and congratulations
I can't believe that C&T mae such a 486 motherboard, its insane, considering there were other companies making extreme boards at the time. Having cache modules on a 486 was extremely rare, I only saw them on later PII and DEC Alpha machines. Your board is similar to my SOYO 486 with all types of connections but you may be able to have 1MB of cache by combining bothe the module and the empty surface mount if you can find and solder the chips. Not a fan of AMI or Phoenix BIOS though, I'm an Award fan. All things considered, you have one of the best 486 platforms to work on. Good job. I have overclocked my 486 machines back in the day, but considering how old they are now, I don't want to stress the electronics, so they run at vanilla specs. You are very lucky to find that motherboard with the cache module. I couldn't find one after months of searching for a RISC motherboard that I had so I gave up.
I'm amazed the PCI embedded IDE/SuperIO controller works at 60Mhz too!
yeah, I was amazed as well. 😊
That's a fast 486! Little late in the cycle though. Wasn't long after that came out that I had me a Pentium II rig! (w/agp!!!)
Awesome video!
Worth noting for anyone taking up the challenge, even if you were to achieve say 200mhz (50mhz x4) you likely still wouldn't beat the Quake score because you would be limited to 25mhz on the PCI bus or 50mhz if you have a board like this that can be tricked into bypassing the divider or a PCI enabled board that lacks the divider entirely. Ideally you would want to run at a 66mhz FSB setting, this will net you higher PCI speeds. You will need a PCI Graphics card that uses the same GPU as an AGP card (like the one used here). This will guarantee you are able to run at the full 66mhz as supported by AGP. Other tips would be larger, faster lvl2 cache. I think the key here is overclocking the floating point unit as far as possible in conjunction with a 66mhz PCI bus.
I don't know if CPU Galaxy tried this but I would be very curious what the result would be with 66mhz FSB with a multi of 2.5, would the extra 6mhz on the PCI bus make up for the lower overclock, 166mhz vs 180mhz. How much of the uplift is coming from the faster PCI bus and how much is caused by the faster clocked FPU? The ideal would be to run at 66mhz x 3 but finding a CPU stable at 200mhz will be difficult, if not impossible. Videos like these make me sad that I no longer have my collection of 486 and early Pentium/AMD K6 CPUs/boards. Sadly I moved country and could not bring them with me. Now they cost more than they are worth to replace.
3x66 MHZ and also 66 mhz on the pci bus is already in work 🙃. But with another board and I need some active cooling the cpu to 0 degrees... soon, here on my channel. 😉
@@CPUGalaxy Excellent, looking forward to the results :)
man this is my "the first computer" cpu, and motherboard if not the same it is very very similar. you have much better graphics though
the bios is the same i am already crying from nostalgia that sound counting memory and you even have 16 megs of ram also
i love it
This was fantastic, well done. Can't wait to see if this can be beat, not by much I guess, because that is a bad ass 486 you have put together here!
A legend is born. The real masterpiece here is the overclocking of the PCI bus. Yes, the Game Blaster could take that 60 MHz, but most likely there were other devices on that bus (IDE controller etc.). Insane and ingenous! Now, do you see any chance for that magical 200 MHz? :) :)
Thank you! Yes, I am still testing but the results are already very good for a 200 MHz setup. It will be a quiet interesting video as well. Another mainboard, 66.6 MHz Busspeed and multiplier of 3. I am going to beat my own records again. But I need to bring the cpu to 0 degrees to be stable. 😉
@@CPUGalaxy I'm quite angry with myself... I didn't keep my 5x86... it was posting and running with 200Mhz without special cooling.... but the Matrox Graphicscard didn't like it, so I just ran it at I believe 150Mhz.
No way! I didn't realize what I had. I was watching the video and thought this looked familiar. I got an X5-133ADW from a failed estate sale, with an "X" marked on it. It's definitely a cool conversation piece on how different CPUs are today.
The intro sting alone was enough for me to subscribe
So, how many X5-133's do have to test to find one that will clock this fast? You must have a pretty huge drawerfull!
1. Try sticking a bit of red or orange electric tape over that 7 segment display to make it more readable for the camera.
2. I think it should be possible to modify the BIOS to override that 2x PCI clock divider. Or even better, write simple tool to change the setting on the fly from DOS (as long as there is any decent documentation available for the chipset).
GREAT work!!!
brings back memories! we overclocked the living daylights out of a similar CPU back in the days. We scavenged a radiator from an amplifier and modded it to fit the motherboard then mounted two cone shaped extension brackets to funnel air from a big industrial 5V 160mm fan to 120 , then to 80mm to fit on the radiator. that fan was way way too powerful for the fan header, so I rigged the one of the rails to supply the wattage and the amps to the fan. you know you've made a big mistake when the air coming off it can tear stuff of the MB. but hey it worked and we had something in the region of 25 to 30% overclock on the cpu.
Ahh the good old M919. The traces for the two (Unpopulated) cache chips are rather 'interesting' on this board! I had one back in the 90's which had the fake cache chips soldered on :)
I'd like to hear more about this. What was with those unpopulated spaces anyway?
@@SireSquish The space was for cache RAM to be soldered to the board. In the case of some revisions of this board, the circuit traces only link the two cache chips together and do not connect to the rest of the board! Pretty useless.
For a shot period in the mid 90's cache RAM was very expensive so companies cheated and used fake chips. More detail can be found here... redhill.net.au/b/b-bad.html
The board used in this video has a real cache module installed in the slot in front of the PCI connectors.
@@DevilishDesign That's a combination of surprising, not surprising, hilarious and infuriating. So many things were dodges like that before widespread Internet knowledge.
@@DevilishDesign not "companies", _one company_, PcChips
@@rasz They were certainly the worst offender but boards from Gigabyte and QDI also had fake cache
Amazing video! Continue sending us more content like this. A fan from Brazil
Thank you! Soon it is getting to the limit with the AMD X5 to 200 MHz. 😉. Thanks vor visiting my channel.
Wow the bios gui looks nicer then from my PCs today.
Geez…This is freaking AMAZING 😳 I mean reaching about ten times the normal CPU clock speed alone is sub-zero but the fact that the north bridge as well as the RAM modules is still willing to work at 60MHz is something I had never expected would be feasible 😶
Outstanding work! 😍
Thank you. But check out then my 200 Mhz video. ☺️ ruclips.net/video/LI1_RlVLhu8/видео.html
@@CPUGalaxy you‘re kidding me 😳
😇😉
I great you with the record ! Nice job is done!
Awesome =D Goes without saying the graphics card may be happy at 66Mhz, but the southbridge may evetually die if overlocked too long.
This overclocking video was super exciting and enjoyable.
Nice, higher gains than the increas in clockspeed.
Interesting what difference "Plattform Performance" can make.
Wow! I remember playing the original Half Life using an AMD 486 (5x86?)120 Megahertz, slightly over clocked. I can't remember the speed I managed to get it up to as it was so long ago. I also was using a rather crappy PCI graphics card at the time and I actually enjoyed the experience! My friends could not believe I could actually do this until they saw for themselves. I wish that I had your setup at the time as I can only imagine how much faster it might have been! I think that I may still have that old motherboard and processor around somewhere, minus the HUGE tower case that I had it installed in. I miss those days.....
Great video by the way! Subscribed! 👍👍
Great content from this channel as always. For PC enthusiasts, CPUG is without peer on RUclips.
Hopefully this will start a 486 war and we'll finally see just how much could have been squeezed from that CPU. I'd be happy to see the same for earlier Intel chips. Often the PC chassis they were put in didn't do them justice.
Well done! I really liked watching this moment in history ;-)
I have that exact motherboard, only the two unpopulated pads in the corner have Fake Cache(TM) on them. It truly is glorious how the traces wrap around from one side of the fake cache area and reconnect back on the other side.
Wow, absolutely amazing! I have the same setup and a couple of AMD X5s but I don't even dare to try! What about using another graphics card? I remember testing a GF2 MX400 just for fun on an M915 with a DX4-100 and noticed a huge improvement in Doom, although I didn't test Quake. Can't wait to see the 200mhz video!!!!
Congratulation! ;)
This is dangerous for me. I have almost the exact same setup you're playing with in this video! I actually have heard of the strategy you're employing here, but nobody who explained it on Vogons went into this level of detail.
43rd week of 1996 is quite impressively late for the 486 / 5x86 chipset. The P6 Pentium Pro was already available commercially for a year that point, and Pentium MMX was also literally launched just that week (~October 22, 1986).
The AM5x86-133 (@160 MHz w/VL Bus cards) got me through a rather "poor" period time of my life after a bunch of stuff happened - a lot of value for the $, and I used it from 1995-1997 as my main PC and for another 3 years as a network node to help me get my MCP and MCSE for WindowsNT certifications. The final hurrah for the system came in 2000 when I decided to see if it would run under mineral oil for cooling (and yes of course it worked great). Unfortunately with no way to clean the board, the board and processor went in the trash :/. I do have a "Powerleap 5x86-133" sitting in a box though today. P.S. Wow! I remember that BIOS!
Very impressive. I dabbled with this a long time ago, but could never get the VGA card to work - knew the CPU was working, because removing the card resulted in angry beeps. Perhaps it's worth another go, just for fun, though I doubt any of the cards I have that might run at this speed would be very fast in DOS.
I still feel the WinChip is overlooked here. It's kinda '486-Like' but runs in boards with AGP and SDRAM, as well as being clocked at over 200MHz right out of the box. It just isn't the same, though.
AWESOME. Still have one of these boards with a 5x86 chip and the fastest RAM I could find in the day (50ns). Used to scare the pentium 90 users with it clocked to 50MHz bus @ 150MHz CPU. I remember having trouble getting cards that would work with bus setting at 50MHz. Used to run it at 160MHz on a 40MHz bus also. But 180MHz, thats fantastic.
Enjoyed the video. I had an AMD 133Mhz CPU that I overclocked to 166MHz. No FPU though. I didnt add any extra cooling to it and it died several months later. That did give me an excuse to get a new CPU with an FPU so I could finally play quake without going to my Universities computer labs.
Nice, but wasnt AGP 1.0 "just a 66Mhz PCI"? So any GPU that was available in both PCI and AGP versions should work with your hot-hack? Good video :)
Still loving your new intro!!
I once ran a sempron 2500+ 1750Mhz 1.6volt cpu at 2150Mhz stable on air with a load temp of 55 celsius at 2.2volts. Ran it for years like that. Used a 90CFM bathroom fan as a blower over a solid copper heatsink to keep it cool. it was loud.
Great video. Sad than my similiar woodgrain 486 stoped working. I would totaly atempt to beat you
This channel deserves way more subs than LTT honestly
Pretty neat. That board is definitely a unicorn among 486 boards! I also had one of those AMD chips in my 486 board back in the mid 90's. I ended up having to run mine at 3x40 for a 120 mhz total speed. My board would not recognize anything higher than a 3x multiplier no matter what settings I tried so I ran it at the max bus speed of 40 mhz.
By the same time that board was released you could buy a non-MMX Pentium up to 200 mhz which would blow that 486 chip out of the water in Quake. But it's still neat to see it clocked that fast!
The PR133 is super rare? Dammit! Mine went to landfill many years ago. I think it was the only drop-in replacement processor that impressed me. I noticed a significant performance boost after replacing my 486dx2100 and as you mentioned, you got Pentium performance for the price of a 486
OMG, the 90s!
Cool video! This is the CPU I used on my very first PC build.
It is interesting to see a channel where old components are overclocked and benchmarked. I will look if you have Voodoo3 overclocks here.
The fastest setups of these old days machines have be lost to time 20 years ago. Almost no one remembers even the slot one records or mobile barton records anymore. It's a real shame but at least we can try again now.
I had one back in the day. This thing rocked !
Used to do this sort of thing back in the day, if you're really looking to get 100% you'll definitely want to hijack the PLL output and replace it with some kind of dynamically adjustable oscillator.. I've seen people do this with FPGA's and other more hardware based approaches using some timing circuits. But, you should be able to get much finer clock adjustment than the standard configurations of the multiplier or PLL chip allow. Your chip may not be stable at 200Mhz, but could potentially hit 190Mhz with a custom PLL clock.
Now this is great content! 🤘
This reminded me of an awesome Pentium III-333 MHz in Slot 1 format that was in fact 500 MHz and was working awesome at default voltage settings.
lol. funny that you say that now. Coz exactly now I am sitting in front of a PII mobo and was overclocking a 300 Mhz PII to 450 MHz and very surprised that this is working stable.
@@CPUGalaxy Lots of deschutes core P2's would do 450. 500 was a little rarer though. All Covington celerons and most all celeron 300A cpu's would as well.
@@wishusknight3009 The celeron 300a's would nearly all run over 500mhz and were much faster than the Pentium 2. I had a dual CPU celeron 300A at just over 500.. Drilled pin to enable SMP and voltage mods.
@@thomassmith4999 Not in my experience back in the day. I had several examples where they didn't. Even with volt mods we rarely got them to 504 as it took me a good 30 examples before I had one in my personal machine running 504. We used to sell them pre-overclocked at our little shop back when they were available. About 1 in 5 would not run 450 unless they were at 2.4 volts. But most would do 450 with only a 2.1v mod or no volt mod at all.
@@wishusknight3009 Were you in the #celeron group on EFNET? those were great days. I didn't see anyone not being able to run 450 back then but getting 504 stable was a bit of a challenge. My CPUs were lapped back to copper. I was using the DFI board, the capacitors failed in the late 2000s but I'm going to try and fix it soon. I could run 450 on standard voltage.
I really liked that cooling solution :D
thanks for the great video
And now it is time to grab a voodoo 3 PCI version. The voodoo 3 works well on slow computers and is also capable running at that pci bus speed. You will have to cool the voltage regulator on de voodoo 3 card, because it gets hotter at higher pci bus speeds. Then run quake 1 and 2 and other 3d games.
And also try to use a soundcard, it will change the quake and doom score. Would be nice to see how much it changes the outcome.
Use a Creative AWE64. It uses the least ammount of cpu time. I have tested serveral cards and that one came out best.
Back in the day I played on my 160Mhz amdX5 the following games. Monstertruck madness, Quake 1 and 2, nfs 2 SE, motorscross madness and Descent. I used a Voodoo 1 from Trust in combination with drivers from Diamond. My graphics card was a (i think it was a Trident tgui 9440) graphics card with 1MB of ram.
wow, this brings me back, the pc of the house used to be a pentium 100, the motherboard was similar to this
Great video!
I could only source one am5x86 capable of 180 mhz so far - boots up with 200 but it's unfortunately a no go. The i486Dx4 goes up to 133 max. - and that's pushing it.
i did this exactly and ran it for a long time 5x86 133mhz, running at 180mhz 64Mb RAM it was solid and played MK3 very well!
ASUS P5A was annoying but ran this chip very well at 180mhz
@@proffieosultra3048 *sp3 ?
That is awesome!
Congrats !
Yeahhhh this is cool content. If is possible, overclock 486, pendium 233mmx.. will be soo cool. i revember never got 233mmx higher than 266
I've recently been playing around with a Motorola 68360, rated at 33MHz but it seemed to run quite comfortably at 50MHz. That's where I stopped, so maybe it will go further, bit it was getting noticeably warmer so I decided not to push it any more.
I wonder then if this one came from the middle of a wafer!
Awesome video - thanks for all the effort you put into this - I was doing this 20 years ago!
Really well done! Hope you can get a 3x66 mhz FSB working for the next attempt!
I had a 233mmx that ran all the way up to 300. Good times :)
Ah, the Chips M919, a board famous for questionable build quality and fake L2 cache, though this later board is a little higher quality and didn't bother to install the fake cache chips (though the pads and pointless traces are still visible at the bottom left at the beginning of the video). Red Hill Computer has a pretty good write-up about this (and many other vintage PC bits).
PCI standard originally allowed for 16-37.5MHz operation to support the variety of CPU bus speeds common in the early '90s, with a 66MHz option introduced in the late '90s. AGP is essentially PCI signaling at higher speed and with a dedicated channel directly to RAM (as the AGP aperture) for additional texture storage, which is why there were so many video cards using the same chip for both PCI and AGP (later AGP/PCIe cards have to use bridge chips because the signals are too different).
Very impressive overclock.
Out of interest how does this effect the ISA bus? I ask because to make a system out of this you'd probably want a sound card and would they be effected by a faster bus clock? Yes I know in reality you'd probably just run at the slower speed for day to day use, just simply curious if you could get a sound card to also sit stable at the high bus speeds.
yeah, good question. I will anyhow do a follow up to this setup with a soundcard. I will measure the clock of the Isa bus with my oscilloscope. good input! thank you