After Clint mentioned that the accessory pack didn't include Instant Coffee Type 2, I was waiting for him to say "now let's get this onto a tray...NICE!"
Same, but feel blessed that I lived to witness some of the most exciting advances in computer technology. The pace of change seems to have slowed in recent years.
I remember upgrading my 33 Mhz 486 to a 66 Mhz and then buying a 75 Mhz Overdrive CPU and and adding a fan to the top with an overclock to 120 Mhz. I thought I was the coolest guy ever! All to get Doom and Warcraft to reliably play without having to use the PC speaker for sound. Eventually I figured out my sound card was really crappy.
What did you do when you discovered that Duke Nukem’ voice ability? Did your have an inner Duke moment? Was it pivotal? It certainly must have been pretty cool.
When we corresponded via email about this, I remember for whatever reason we couldn't figure out, my 486 Overdrive 100MHz chip was performing better than your Pentium Overdrive was with this same motherboard. We never did figure out what the difference was. That still has me stumped and curious both to why the same board still has something significantly different. Though only difference on mine is it's a 5V only version.
Yeah I wouldn't imagine the difference in voltage regulation would make a notable change to performance, but oh well. I've more or less accepted this particular build's performance fate, haha. At least I've got some other well-equipped, faster Socket 3 boards to play with too!
My first ever CPU upgrade was a Pentium 100 to an OverDrive 166. My BIOS would hang if I made any changes and I had to pop in my old CPU whenever I did. It was weird times.
I put one in an Olivetti 486 sx2 50 many years ago, the difference was amazing playing doom 2 and magic carpet. I think it fairly pricey for the time around £270. Not sure what that would be with inflation these days.
First Name: Duke. Last Name: Nukem. Current address: etc? Some months pass by after Clint has posted the warranty. Junk mail starts appearing (at Clint's address even though he used a more relevant one for DN). Dear Mr Nukem thank you for filling in and returning the warranty card for the... are you aware for a further $$ we can offer you a free upgrade to the device you registered with us today. Simply call us on... LOL.
I came across a couple of Overdrive Diag. packs sealed last week at work. Someone got rid of a lot of old stuff I guess - all in one go as well. Together with a Compaq ProLiant 2500 where the SCSI disks didn't go further then 9.1 GB (starting at 2.1 GB). I also have two old CPU's, don't know if you are interested, they are not sealed or anything. And I don't know if they work....
The thing that's holding you back is the write-through cache, which is a function of your motherboard. Write-back cache is generally faster since it only needs to update the cache and not both the cache and memory each time a memory write is performed. You'll need to find another motherboard for your wood-grain 486 to use write-back cache for maximum performance with a Pentium Overdrive, and from what I remember reading back in a 1995 PC Computing magazine those boards can be a little bit tricky to track down. Also, in general the 1995 benchmarks also showed similar performance between a Pentium Overdrive 83 and a DX4-100, as long as the software in question didn't specifically take advantage of Pentium-optimized instructions. The Overdrive chips were heavily marketed towards users with a 486 at 25 or 33 MHz, so that upgrade would have been monstrous!
Not the motherboard, he said L2 cache (on motherboard) is running in write-back mode. The issue is the CPU, only the later model 486DX4-100 class chips had write-back support for the integrated L1 cache.
I was watching this, hearing Clint go on about mysterious bottlenecks and going, "I bet that mobo has an SiS 85C chipset." Sure enough 16:56 "This has an AOpen Vi15G". That little globe above the 'i' in 'SiS' still gives me a bad vibe to this day. :P
Funny you should upload this vid today.....I just found, in amongst my collection of old PC hardware, a motherboard that has a socket 7 with compatibility for Intel, AMD, Cyrix, as well as some named IDT Winchip, and something called RISE MP6. Ever heard of them? The only processors I own that should work in it are Intel Pentium MMX's, and a few AMD K6-2's, but I'm curious about the others....
The AMD 5x86 133 is equivalent to a P75. There is a 150Mhz and 160 MHz variant equivalent to a P80. You could also try a 486 DX4 120 if the MB supports an FSB of 40MHz. Just make sure you have lots of cooling as the DX4 120 gets very hot. I had one and had to put a Pentium heatsink and fan on it
If i remember correctly the performance is lower do to the 25MHz bus compared to the 33MHz bus.. not sure though.. try a higher bus with lower multiplier and se :)
Is this system the one that had some mis-matched timed RAM? Like 60ns and 70ns RAM? Have you looked at having all the RAM be the same speed (either 60 or 70, but not both)?
11:20 I know my AMD K5-133 back then ran quake perfectly fine. (ok, not fair. Higher clocked and it also had the Diamond Monster 3D voodoo 1 4MB (later upgraded to Diamond Monster Voodoo 3D II)
I don't think you have a bottleneck here. You just happen to be comparing these processors where they aren't that different. The 486 has a clock speed advantage over the Pentium but the Pentium has its pipeline advantage. In software that isn't optimized for the Pentium the 83 ends up being about on par with the 100. The FPU is where the Pentium will walk all over the 486 and the only software you ran that could compare that was Quake which didn't run on the Pentium. It should run ~16FPS with the POD. In the end the best processor for a 486-class system running software for a 486 is probably the AMD 5x86-133.
Have you ever encountered one of the 133 MHz 486 processors? I had one that was a Texas Instruments chip and it was way better than the pentium overdrives.
The video is amazing! I actually have an overdrive dx4 100 for my socket 3 486 but my DX2 66 with vlb in the system information benchmark is yielding a cpu speed number of 143.6 over your 486 with a dx4 100. Do you presume it may be the board chipset at fault?
@@LGRBlerbs cause someone in my circles are presuming it may be an error as far as jumper settings unless you are certain all is correct. My specs for my socket 3 486: Motherboard chipset: Acer V10-486 ALL IN ONE sis 85C 461 graphics video card: Diamond Speedstar Pro VLB 1 megabyte of vram Ram: 24 megabytes Super IO card: VLB card with two serial ports CPU: i486DX2 66 Sound card: Sound Blaster 16 isa L2 cache: 256k
The 90s really were a time if you bought a computer, it'd truly be 'outdated' in six months, or at least partially outdated. My PC now is six *years* old, and there's honestly no reason to replace it.
@maxxdahl6062 It was an extremely popular computer, so it was supported until the day Commodore collapsed- but by that time, there were "electronic organizers", calculators and updated Game Boy type devices with specs similar to/ better than the C64.
It seemed annoying until the fancy PnP stuff failed you and you wished you still had jumpers. I don't mind explicitly configuring stuff. It was also generally better for DOS, since PnP usually required drivers or TSRs. I hated PnP until it got good enough to be totally transparent. Even then, early jumperless motherboards could be very finicky.
@@Breakfast_and_Bullets He did a funny imitation of Steve in part of one of his videos a while ago. I think it was it was on his main channel; can't remember. I actually found Steve's channel from that lol
If I remember correctly, the Pentium overdrive was the same basic performance as a 486 dx4 100 (as seen here) but it included the additional instruction set of the Pentium. So if for some reason, software really required a Pentium cpu to work, that was your solution. A lot of people bought the Pentium over drive thinking it was better than the 486 and it was not.
Well it was faster...but it was more for keeping an old office PC alive for a few more years..than a serious upgrade. PC's were hellishly expensive even for basic PC's back then...it was a cheapish upgrade.
@@brokeandtired Had to chuckle at this comment. Price is relative, and back in the day, early 90s, the price was WAY more reasonable than during the latter half of the 80s, we're talking 8088 through 80386 class. That 80386 was hellish indeed, the "Compaq 386" was a dream out of reach.
@lungshadow The FSB and the external cache was always the weak link that only really improved when the L2 cache was integrated onto the cpu. The memory controller was more often than not the main culprit where there was only about a third of the expected bandwidth vs what the ram of the period was often rated for.
@@hugiee The move to a 32-bit bus meant the 386 needed a much more expensive motherboard and RAM setup too, same situation as going from 486 to Pentium (which externally moved to 64-bit which means a more expensive chipset, ram and board design).
I bought one of these as a 13-year old, over optimistic kid and then proceeded to try to install it in the wrong socket, bending the outside pins. Lucky for me the store owner was good sports about it and was able to bend them back and gave me a full refund.
I remember getting a Pentium 63Mhz Overdrive Processor for my IBM PS/2, upgrading from a 486/66. It actually didn't work initially, we fortunately lived near a Microcenter and one of the associates informed us that we needed a new bios for the new cpu to work. $10 and 1 new eprom later and I was rocking Command And Conquer Red Alert like it was my job. How I miss the good old days.
A LOOOONG time ago, I had a 486-DX50 that I could overclock to 66MHz on an older VL-BUS mobo. I had to physically replace the oscillator to do so. So front side, processor bus AND cache ran AT 66MHz. It smoked my DX4-120 in most CAD and math operations. It's amazing how, back in the day, FSB was KING! I had CAD customers who insisted on using PentiumPro 233MHz even after the PII-400's came out. The PII's used 66MHz cache bus, whereas the PPro's used native FSB for the cache clock. They really slayed!
I worked in a PC store when those CPUs were hot... We used to call the DX4-100 and DX4-120 processors "Pentium killers". Significantly cheaper, and worked just as well on CURRENT FOR THE TIME software.
@@TheT0nedude Floating point games didn't really exist at the time. If you bought a pentium for FPU performance that would only have been justified with CAD or something that actually used floating point.
Ooh, many questions would need to be answered for this: How long is it guaranteed for, what happens if it fails? Is there a like for like replacement or does it have to be something of equal or better value. At today's prices, of course. LOL. Methinks someone would need to be a time-traveller to get the exact same product in some cases as the item being registered could be almost impossible to source? What information does one put onto the card - information when one purchased it or information relevant to today. I think the funniest answer would be what store did you get this from? Can that store get some props for selling it to you? Where do you send/take it if the store is no more? And finally, how long IS a lifetime guarantee? LOL. So long as they didn't want a receipt... LOL. (Sorry comment is a bit long).
It depends if the box/address is still open and if USPS honors the business reply agreement they had back then (if you didn't need a stamp). Sorry to be the fun police, I work for the mail 😂
I will always fondly remember the very first time I fired up Quake and watched in awe the dark goodness of the Necropolis demo in all its glory on my 166MHz Cyrix system back in 1998 after unpacking 17 pirated ARJ-compressed diskettes. Aaah, good times!
I remember buying 22 disks from PC WORLD thinking that I had to put the RAR files on discs, when I downloaded Terminator : Skynet from an FTP site. It was later that day I found the .nfo file and felt like a complete twat... What a game though! Played surprisingly well on the AMD PR-133 I was using at the time. Actually ended up buying the game. Like any honest Pirate should! ARRRR!
if I remember correctly there were a rash of 'Fake write back cache" motherboards by dubious manufactures back in the day that were poor performers. One of the caveats was the bus speed as well. You could get better performance from a native 486 @ 33Mhz than a Pentium Overdrive @ 25Mhz. Thanks for the great video, I had forgotten much about my early years as a system builder back then, a lot of forgotten knowledge that was completely useless until now.
Yep there was indeed, I was one of the people that ended up buying one and not knowing till later! I don't remember the make of it but I later on found out that the cache ram was fake despite it saying it had 256 kb Write -back at bootup (rigged bios I assume) as a test program or two that I used said it was 0 kb! Couple that with the 'It's ST' DX2-50 Cyrix clone I had on it and it was probably quite a bit slower than it should've been!
I bought one of these new in 95 or 96. Made a huge difference over what I had before (33?). This was the best era for the PC.. when you could just plunk in a different CPU and see a major change. PCs are plenty powerful today but they're not as fun as they used to be.
Yup. _That_ era of massive performance gains with just a CPU swap. Systems back then were more CPU-bound, too. Todays are more diversified, thus less "spectacular" when upgrading single parts (unless you know what kind of performance you're looking after). _sigh_ I miss those times.
CPU upgrades aren't dead... at least on AMD if you buy into a new socket architecture there's a good chance you'll be able to pop in a chip 2 generations later. I went from a Athlon 64x2 to an AthlonIIx4 on AM2+ and recently from a Ryzen 1600 to a Ryzen 3700X on AM4. But yeah it's still not quite like popping in a 486 that's literally 3x faster. sigh.
@@marcusborderlands6177 I've noticed big gains going from an ancient i7-920 to a Ryzen 5.. but it still doesn't feel quite as across the board dramatic as it did back when I was upgrading in the late 80s and early 90s.
@@TechTimeTraveller in terms of general OS "feel" (i guess thats the term?) its not that big of a difference, but games and programs run WAYYYYY faster on modern cpus, although a 920 was a decent cpu to begin with. If you just want that feeling of everything being wayyyy faster, try slapping in an ssd, felt like when i went from a single core pentium to a 3 core phenom back in the day lol
Woot Woodgrain 486, er Pentium upgrade video. Time to update my play list Maybe I'll binge watch the whole play list tonight... Edit Yup I ended up rewatching the while Woodgrain saga
If you want the fastest Intel 486, you should get a DX4 with the &EW print on it. It has a slightly improved core and faster cache. And it should run in Write Back.
About this "iCOMP® Index" - I guess that those benchmarks also doing some floating point tests. Pentium was slightly faster "clock per clock" than 486'es in integer operations (that's why 83Mhz Pentium Overdrive is more or less the same as 100Mhz 486), but it was WAY faster in floating point operations (famously: that's why Quake was running so much better on Pentiums). Thing is, that back in the 90s, floating point calculations were used rather sparsly, even in benchmarks - so I guess all those benchmarks that gave comparable performance were mostly integer based. I bet Pentium would be much faster in some floating point benchmarks. Quake would probably show a difference - but it didn't work sadly... Also: Pentium Overdrive would be slower than "real" Pentiums with PCI bus, newer motherboards - so that has to be counted as well.
You are right. Only Quake in the games he tested used FPA. Most game of that era were doing their "floating" calculus on fixed arithmetic... which is Integer based... Doom did so, Build based games too, so a pentium didn't made the cut for those.
Pentium has two pipelines, optimized microcode, better cache architecture, some instructions hardwired so much faster. Pentium optimized code is at least 2x faster than 486 clock-for-clock for integer.
The Floating Point checks were interesting. I guess they were put in to reassure people that Intal could make a fully working FPU, unlike the ones they put in the original Pentiums. At the time I saw a funny spoof story along the lines of 2000.8977889 An Intel Space Odyssey. "Open the cargo bay doors HAL. :- No I will kill you like I killed the other 2.83 crew" :-)
@@emmanueloverrated Build used a little bit of floating point for some setup for slopes. It really hurts you on an 486SX system (with no FPU), but isn't enough to really benefit pentium greatly over a DX system. You can search the source code for Doom though and you'll only find a single float instruction in there and it is not used when compiling for X86.
@@soylentgreenb Of course when talking about a subject like that, we infer the critical parts, not the routines that are nearly never called nor those impacting the frame rate. You're right about Doom. I messed with its source code back them, the arithmetic is very well done.
Few DOS games made extensive use of floating point, Quake being the one major exception which is why it tends to run way better on Pentium systems over 486 systems. If you can get Quake working on a different mobo with both CPUs then you might be able to test that out yourself better. I know, 8.1 to 10.2 FPS may not seem like a big jump but that's literally a 25% boost in the framerate! (Plus that could've also been bottlenecked by the graphics card in that test.)
When I was working on those systems when they were new, I always found the SIS chipset boards to be a bit slower. Also, found that not all cache chip configurations and cache vendors the same. Max cache memory on some of those boards also slowed them down slightly in some configurations.
Maybe you're banging up against the FPM memory speed. You have to keep the processor fed with instructions and data (ignoring I/D Caches). Also WB cache can help but there's issues with exclusion ranges for DMA on devices. Is there a way to set exclusion ranges for I/O memory used by DMA devices?
Can't beat a fast 486, I remember a friend of mine having a DX4-120 when we'd all moved to pentiums. It was still hanging in there and cool even back then :D Love the little steve1984 nod there too ;)
@Mat Speedle Heck yeah, I had one too, a cyrix chip, and as long as the games or programs didn't look at processor type, only speed, I could run stuff meant for pentium 90/100. Good time for building PC's back then for sure. 👍
LGR-viewing veterans will know my Steve1989MREInfo references go back a ways 😁
ruclips.net/video/hXk1AjRT2Pk/видео.html
They always catch me off guard, but I'm glad to know you're into the same obscure RUclips oddities I am.
My channels are all colliding! Now do This Old Tony and LockPicking Lawyer!
INDEED!
I love this channel!
No hiss, nice!
I remember that vid... 2018... oof, that hurts
It’s like Clint read my mind. He said accessory packet and I immediately thought of Steve… nice.
“Nice”
"Nice hiss."
Nice.
Nice!!!
Nice
Shame no coffee instant type 2. Steve would be disappointed 😔
I died laughing when I heard that reference 🤣
Nice!
No smokes either
Let's get the processor out on a reclosable chip tray. Nice.
OK, femcel.
I love that LGR’s MRE is an Intel Overdrive!
yum!
@@patrickglaser1560 lets get this out onto a motherboard.. nice
I love how that SCSISelect™ line just straight-up lifts the curtain on how they did the graphical logos.
After Clint mentioned that the accessory pack didn't include Instant Coffee Type 2, I was waiting for him to say "now let's get this onto a tray...NICE!"
crazy how those ol sounds of games starting up like give ya that blink of absolute joy you felt back in the day
Unboxing old tech will always be interesting to me, its the coziest content
486 DX4 100 ... such a awesome cpu. Had one for a couple years. Let's get this cpu out into the socket! Nice!
5:50 Your gibberish is impeccable. I too speak it randomly, and I have no idea why.
Years ago I had the ODP chip in an old CompuAdd desktop computer. I remember it absolutely flew with Duke3D.
Between the “box for display” and the “nice” this is my Steve bridge video.
🤣🤣 wrote that before I heard the coffee instant comment
“Coffee instant type two”…. Nice
I still remember when a 486 was the best CPU available. I feel so old.
Same, but feel blessed that I lived to witness some of the most exciting advances in computer technology. The pace of change seems to have slowed in recent years.
When I was a kid I didn't understand what MMX was other than it sounded cutting-edge. I didn't even know it was meant to help gaming.
i do remember my Dad upgrading to 100MHz 486 OverDrive just to enjoy Chuck Yeager Air Combat and Top Gun Fire At Will
Got my 386 up to 100mhz back in the mid 90s ran hot a hell
Loved the Mre reference. Instant coffee type 2... nice lol
The best part of getting one of these NIB is the chip puller tool.
LGR squad reporting!
lets put this out on the table. NICE!
The 60Mhz Pentium and the DX4 486/100 were comparable performance back in the day. The difference was just in instruction set.
Those box opening designers gave absolutely no thought to the future collectable box enthusiasts.
I remember upgrading my 33 Mhz 486 to a 66 Mhz and then buying a 75 Mhz Overdrive CPU and and adding a fan to the top with an overclock to 120 Mhz. I thought I was the coolest guy ever! All to get Doom and Warcraft to reliably play without having to use the PC speaker for sound. Eventually I figured out my sound card was really crappy.
uhhh this is gooood! Cant wait too see...Long time fan of you!
Love the Steve1989 reference!
What did you do when you discovered that Duke Nukem’ voice ability? Did your have an inner Duke moment? Was it pivotal? It certainly must have been pretty cool.
That is a thing of beauty 3:43
Back in approximately 1997, I tried the Overdrive Pentium. It worked OK, but nothing like when SSDs came out.
Did I just catch a SteveMRE reference? Nice
Great Steve1989mre reference, nice!
When we corresponded via email about this, I remember for whatever reason we couldn't figure out, my 486 Overdrive 100MHz chip was performing better than your Pentium Overdrive was with this same motherboard. We never did figure out what the difference was. That still has me stumped and curious both to why the same board still has something significantly different.
Though only difference on mine is it's a 5V only version.
Yeah I wouldn't imagine the difference in voltage regulation would make a notable change to performance, but oh well. I've more or less accepted this particular build's performance fate, haha.
At least I've got some other well-equipped, faster Socket 3 boards to play with too!
Check nanosecond speed on RAM and L2 chips. Lower numbers are better. Do not mix speeds, as this will drop FBS to lowest rate. Great videos. Удачи!
My first ever CPU upgrade was a Pentium 100 to an OverDrive 166. My BIOS would hang if I made any changes and I had to pop in my old CPU whenever I did. It was weird times.
I put one in an Olivetti 486 sx2 50 many years ago, the difference was amazing playing doom 2 and magic carpet. I think it fairly pricey for the time around £270. Not sure what that would be with inflation these days.
It is the Woodgrain Overdrive now! :)
Nice, I see you are sorting things you recently. A slow 486, a fast 486 and maybe a proper Pentium soon.
You should try to register the warranty 😂
First Name: Duke. Last Name: Nukem. Current address: etc? Some months pass by after Clint has posted the warranty. Junk mail starts appearing (at Clint's address even though he used a more relevant one for DN). Dear Mr Nukem thank you for filling in and returning the warranty card for the... are you aware for a further $$ we can offer you a free upgrade to the device you registered with us today. Simply call us on... LOL.
Gonna be bus speed especially on a via or sis chipset.
I came across a couple of Overdrive Diag. packs sealed last week at work. Someone got rid of a lot of old stuff I guess - all in one go as well. Together with a Compaq ProLiant 2500 where the SCSI disks didn't go further then 9.1 GB (starting at 2.1 GB). I also have two old CPU's, don't know if you are interested, they are not sealed or anything. And I don't know if they work....
The thing that's holding you back is the write-through cache, which is a function of your motherboard. Write-back cache is generally faster since it only needs to update the cache and not both the cache and memory each time a memory write is performed. You'll need to find another motherboard for your wood-grain 486 to use write-back cache for maximum performance with a Pentium Overdrive, and from what I remember reading back in a 1995 PC Computing magazine those boards can be a little bit tricky to track down.
Also, in general the 1995 benchmarks also showed similar performance between a Pentium Overdrive 83 and a DX4-100, as long as the software in question didn't specifically take advantage of Pentium-optimized instructions. The Overdrive chips were heavily marketed towards users with a 486 at 25 or 33 MHz, so that upgrade would have been monstrous!
Not the motherboard, he said L2 cache (on motherboard) is running in write-back mode. The issue is the CPU, only the later model 486DX4-100 class chips had write-back support for the integrated L1 cache.
Hi there! It would be awesome if you could test 386(sx) to above Cyrix/similar upgrades. Thanks - great show!
I was watching this, hearing Clint go on about mysterious bottlenecks and going, "I bet that mobo has an SiS 85C chipset." Sure enough 16:56 "This has an AOpen Vi15G". That little globe above the 'i' in 'SiS' still gives me a bad vibe to this day. :P
Man I am always wondering where you get these old new stock things. Been in the market for an ODPR forever but there are not even used ones here
The ODB-1
It’s got your money.
Funny you should upload this vid today.....I just found, in amongst my collection of old PC hardware, a motherboard that has a socket 7 with compatibility for Intel, AMD, Cyrix, as well as some named IDT Winchip, and something called RISE MP6. Ever heard of them? The only processors I own that should work in it are Intel Pentium MMX's, and a few AMD K6-2's, but I'm curious about the others....
The AMD 5x86 133 is equivalent to a P75. There is a 150Mhz and 160 MHz variant equivalent to a P80. You could also try a 486 DX4 120 if the MB supports an FSB of 40MHz. Just make sure you have lots of cooling as the DX4 120 gets very hot. I had one and had to put a Pentium heatsink and fan on it
If i remember correctly the performance is lower do to the 25MHz bus compared to the 33MHz bus.. not sure though.. try a higher bus with lower multiplier and se :)
Is this system the one that had some mis-matched timed RAM? Like 60ns and 70ns RAM? Have you looked at having all the RAM be the same speed (either 60 or 70, but not both)?
11:20 I know my AMD K5-133 back then ran quake perfectly fine. (ok, not fair. Higher clocked and it also had the Diamond Monster 3D voodoo 1 4MB (later upgraded to Diamond Monster Voodoo 3D II)
Nice I can smell the plastic nice video
I don't think you have a bottleneck here. You just happen to be comparing these processors where they aren't that different. The 486 has a clock speed advantage over the Pentium but the Pentium has its pipeline advantage. In software that isn't optimized for the Pentium the 83 ends up being about on par with the 100. The FPU is where the Pentium will walk all over the 486 and the only software you ran that could compare that was Quake which didn't run on the Pentium. It should run ~16FPS with the POD. In the end the best processor for a 486-class system running software for a 486 is probably the AMD 5x86-133.
14:17 The Pentium is essentialy just a 486DX and SX glued together, isn't it?
Have you ever encountered one of the 133 MHz 486 processors? I had one that was a Texas Instruments chip and it was way better than the pentium overdrives.
Yep, I’ve got one from AMD, I believe!
how much do you want for one? I'd love to build a 486 gaming machine and these were the best 486 cpu hands down.
I think this is cool, aswell !!
The video is amazing! I actually have an overdrive dx4 100 for my socket 3 486 but my DX2 66 with vlb in the system information benchmark is yielding a cpu speed number of 143.6 over your 486 with a dx4 100. Do you presume it may be the board chipset at fault?
Quite likely, it’s always been a bit of a slower board overall
@@LGRBlerbs cause someone in my circles are presuming it may be an error as far as jumper settings unless you are certain all is correct.
My specs for my socket 3 486:
Motherboard chipset: Acer V10-486 ALL IN ONE sis 85C 461 graphics video card: Diamond Speedstar Pro VLB 1 megabyte of vram Ram: 24 megabytes Super IO card: VLB card with two serial ports CPU: i486DX2 66 Sound card: Sound Blaster 16 isa L2 cache: 256k
"So many things to test all the time" - LGR unable to keep up with the tech avalanche of 30 years ago
Still catching up on the mid-90s, it’s true
The 90s really were a time if you bought a computer, it'd truly be 'outdated' in six months, or at least partially outdated. My PC now is six *years* old, and there's honestly no reason to replace it.
@@MattExzy The C64 lasted for 12 years.
@@MattExzy With windows 11 you got another 4 years.
I'm going over to Linux as i don't want to upgrade my lovely hardware.
@maxxdahl6062
It was an extremely popular computer, so it was supported until the day Commodore collapsed- but by that time, there were "electronic organizers", calculators and updated Game Boy type devices with specs similar to/ better than the C64.
The one thing i do NOT miss from those days is configuring jumpers
I thought it was kind of nice! 😬
It seemed annoying until the fancy PnP stuff failed you and you wished you still had jumpers. I don't mind explicitly configuring stuff. It was also generally better for DOS, since PnP usually required drivers or TSRs.
I hated PnP until it got good enough to be totally transparent. Even then, early jumperless motherboards could be very finicky.
I had an FIC motherboard back then. It was jumper hell. I believe it was the VA-503+ socket 7.
@@wazaagbreak-head6039 yeah things are going great now
And cutting your fingers on stuff.
I keep imaging duke nukeem saying "overdrive" whenever this boots up.
There probably are ways to actually make this a reality I mean changing the boot sound was a possibility with other OS versions too
And I can't help think of Riviera's "Overdrive!" meter.
Perhaps an S'Express - 'Theme From S'Express' ('Overdrive' reference or two when it boots instead?), and when turning off - 'Oh, that's bad!'?
"Don't see any coffee instant type 2" .... nice.
Didn't get it out on to a tray, either
Confirmed: Clint watches Steve!
@@Breakfast_and_Bullets He did a funny imitation of Steve in part of one of his videos a while ago. I think it was it was on his main channel; can't remember.
I actually found Steve's channel from that lol
@@hayleyxyz I must have missed that one
Doesnt everyone watch Steve1989? ....Nice hiss.
lets get this out onto a motherboard..nice.
This is Blerbs1989
I remember that, he posts Field Ration videos monthly.
*cuts plastic*
"No hiss"
"This spray dried chip has nice, robust, earthy overtones with a slightly plastic aftertaste."
...Mmmkay.
*Nice click*
If I remember correctly, the Pentium overdrive was the same basic performance as a 486 dx4 100 (as seen here) but it included the additional instruction set of the Pentium. So if for some reason, software really required a Pentium cpu to work, that was your solution. A lot of people bought the Pentium over drive thinking it was better than the 486 and it was not.
Well it was faster...but it was more for keeping an old office PC alive for a few more years..than a serious upgrade. PC's were hellishly expensive even for basic PC's back then...it was a cheapish upgrade.
@@brokeandtired Had to chuckle at this comment. Price is relative, and back in the day, early 90s, the price was WAY more reasonable than during the latter half of the 80s, we're talking 8088 through 80386 class. That 80386 was hellish indeed, the "Compaq 386" was a dream out of reach.
@@brokeandtired faster how??
@lungshadow The FSB and the external cache was always the weak link that only really improved when the L2 cache was integrated onto the cpu. The memory controller was more often than not the main culprit where there was only about a third of the expected bandwidth vs what the ram of the period was often rated for.
@@hugiee The move to a 32-bit bus meant the 386 needed a much more expensive motherboard and RAM setup too, same situation as going from 486 to Pentium (which externally moved to 64-bit which means a more expensive chipset, ram and board design).
I bought one of these as a 13-year old, over optimistic kid and then proceeded to try to install it in the wrong socket, bending the outside pins. Lucky for me the store owner was good sports about it and was able to bend them back and gave me a full refund.
What year was it and how much?
@@scoobyrex247 any 13 year old being able to buy these must have been pretty rich. Certainly he could afford a better RUclips name than you!!! lol
I remember getting a Pentium 63Mhz Overdrive Processor for my IBM PS/2, upgrading from a 486/66. It actually didn't work initially, we fortunately lived near a Microcenter and one of the associates informed us that we needed a new bios for the new cpu to work. $10 and 1 new eprom later and I was rocking Command And Conquer Red Alert like it was my job. How I miss the good old days.
Rapporting?!?! Acknowledged!!!
Clint! teach me things from my past that we couldn't afford as geek kids!
I think the fault lies with the ISA bus speed or the Chipset used, Shelby from Tech Tangents ran into a similar issue with the same 486 chip.
4:10 I knew he watches Steve 😂😂
"No Coffee-Instant Type II." I'm just waiting for you to next say "Now let's get this out on the tray...NICE!"
Shout out to @Steve1989MREInfo
'Coffee instant type 2'
Inhales from cigarette 'I haven't heard that name in a long time'
Nice dry pull on that 75 year old cigarette
@@psychorabbitt *coughing profusely*
Lets get this out on the Tray ;)
Nice hiss ?
Nice
It feels so weird to see a new and sealed 486 box, my brain has started to see the processors of that era as archeological artefacts for some reason
A LOOOONG time ago, I had a 486-DX50 that I could overclock to 66MHz on an older VL-BUS mobo. I had to physically replace the oscillator to do so. So front side, processor bus AND cache ran AT 66MHz. It smoked my DX4-120 in most CAD and math operations. It's amazing how, back in the day, FSB was KING! I had CAD customers who insisted on using PentiumPro 233MHz even after the PII-400's came out. The PII's used 66MHz cache bus, whereas the PPro's used native FSB for the cache clock. They really slayed!
I think your Pentium OverDrive had a buggy Protected Mode implementation, and thus crashed UNIX-y software?
Just as I ran out of things to watch!
Same. But, is there ever really a shortage of content on RUclips? 😅
@@AdamChristensen yes.
I would love for you to send one of those registration cards in one day, just to see what happens!
I think should photocopy and send in every single one every time and see if anything ever comes back lol
I worked in a PC store when those CPUs were hot... We used to call the DX4-100 and DX4-120 processors "Pentium killers". Significantly cheaper, and worked just as well on CURRENT FOR THE TIME software.
Not for floating point software, Quake also runs MUCH smoother on a P60 than even the dx4-120 because of this.
@@TheT0nedude Floating point games didn't really exist at the time. If you bought a pentium for FPU performance that would only have been justified with CAD or something that actually used floating point.
Blessed with a 20 minute video on the second channel! How do you sound so nonchalant about changing the jumpers? "Only a few" What? SO MANY
After years of screwing with the same set of them, it becomes pretty mundane :)
Question. If you sent in the registration now, would it be homoured? It was sealed in box, so is new. Technically.
I was just thinking it would be so cool if Clint was to send a bunch of them in and make a video about the responses :)
Ooh, many questions would need to be answered for this: How long is it guaranteed for, what happens if it fails? Is there a like for like replacement or does it have to be something of equal or better value. At today's prices, of course. LOL. Methinks someone would need to be a time-traveller to get the exact same product in some cases as the item being registered could be almost impossible to source? What information does one put onto the card - information when one purchased it or information relevant to today. I think the funniest answer would be what store did you get this from? Can that store get some props for selling it to you? Where do you send/take it if the store is no more? And finally, how long IS a lifetime guarantee? LOL. So long as they didn't want a receipt... LOL. (Sorry comment is a bit long).
It depends if the box/address is still open and if USPS honors the business reply agreement they had back then (if you didn't need a stamp). Sorry to be the fun police, I work for the mail 😂
I will always fondly remember the very first time I fired up Quake and watched in awe the dark goodness of the Necropolis demo in all its glory on my 166MHz Cyrix system back in 1998 after unpacking 17 pirated ARJ-compressed diskettes.
Aaah, good times!
I remember buying 22 disks from PC WORLD thinking that I had to put the RAR files on discs, when I downloaded Terminator : Skynet from an FTP site. It was later that day I found the .nfo file and felt like a complete twat...
What a game though! Played surprisingly well on the AMD PR-133 I was using at the time. Actually ended up buying the game.
Like any honest Pirate should! ARRRR!
4:09 "lets get this Steve1989MREInfo reference onto a video, NICE."
4:11 that MRE reference was pretty... nice.
132 points in SysInfo sounds quite slow. As far as I remember I'm getting 144 points on dx2-66 without any tweaking. Strange.
PCI motherboard?
Man wish i could be as happy with my job as Clint
if I remember correctly there were a rash of 'Fake write back cache" motherboards by dubious manufactures back in the day that were poor performers. One of the caveats was the bus speed as well. You could get better performance from a native 486 @ 33Mhz than a Pentium Overdrive @ 25Mhz. Thanks for the great video, I had forgotten much about my early years as a system builder back then, a lot of forgotten knowledge that was completely useless until now.
Yep there was indeed, I was one of the people that ended up buying one and not knowing till later! I don't remember the make of it but I later on found out that the cache ram was fake despite it saying it had 256 kb Write -back at bootup (rigged bios I assume) as a test program or two that I used said it was 0 kb! Couple that with the 'It's ST' DX2-50 Cyrix clone I had on it and it was probably quite a bit slower than it should've been!
coffee instant type 2
been watching SteveMREInfo again?
You down with ODP? Yeah, you know me!
20MHz faster than a supercomputer from 20 years before. Stuff moves quick!
I bought one of these new in 95 or 96. Made a huge difference over what I had before (33?). This was the best era for the PC.. when you could just plunk in a different CPU and see a major change. PCs are plenty powerful today but they're not as fun as they used to be.
Yup. _That_ era of massive performance gains with just a CPU swap. Systems back then were more CPU-bound, too. Todays are more diversified, thus less "spectacular" when upgrading single parts (unless you know what kind of performance you're looking after).
_sigh_ I miss those times.
CPU upgrades aren't dead... at least on AMD if you buy into a new socket architecture there's a good chance you'll be able to pop in a chip 2 generations later. I went from a Athlon 64x2 to an AthlonIIx4 on AM2+ and recently from a Ryzen 1600 to a Ryzen 3700X on AM4. But yeah it's still not quite like popping in a 486 that's literally 3x faster. sigh.
You can totally have a massive jump like that today. Upgrading from a Celeron or pentium to an i5 is a massive jump. Same with an athlon to an r5
@@marcusborderlands6177 I've noticed big gains going from an ancient i7-920 to a Ryzen 5.. but it still doesn't feel quite as across the board dramatic as it did back when I was upgrading in the late 80s and early 90s.
@@TechTimeTraveller in terms of general OS "feel" (i guess thats the term?) its not that big of a difference, but games and programs run WAYYYYY faster on modern cpus, although a 920 was a decent cpu to begin with. If you just want that feeling of everything being wayyyy faster, try slapping in an ssd, felt like when i went from a single core pentium to a 3 core phenom back in the day lol
Woot Woodgrain 486, er Pentium upgrade video. Time to update my play list
Maybe I'll binge watch the whole play list tonight...
Edit
Yup I ended up rewatching the while Woodgrain saga
Nice SteveMRE reference LOL!
If you can set the cache to Write-Back instead of Write-Through you will improve performance considerably!
"Greetings and blerbs" is going on my christmas cards this year
If you want the fastest Intel 486, you should get a DX4 with the &EW print on it. It has a slightly improved core and faster cache. And it should run in Write Back.
About this "iCOMP® Index" - I guess that those benchmarks also doing some floating point tests. Pentium was slightly faster "clock per clock" than 486'es in integer operations (that's why 83Mhz Pentium Overdrive is more or less the same as 100Mhz 486), but it was WAY faster in floating point operations (famously: that's why Quake was running so much better on Pentiums).
Thing is, that back in the 90s, floating point calculations were used rather sparsly, even in benchmarks - so I guess all those benchmarks that gave comparable performance were mostly integer based. I bet Pentium would be much faster in some floating point benchmarks. Quake would probably show a difference - but it didn't work sadly...
Also: Pentium Overdrive would be slower than "real" Pentiums with PCI bus, newer motherboards - so that has to be counted as well.
You are right. Only Quake in the games he tested used FPA. Most game of that era were doing their "floating" calculus on fixed arithmetic... which is Integer based... Doom did so, Build based games too, so a pentium didn't made the cut for those.
Pentium has two pipelines, optimized microcode, better cache architecture, some instructions hardwired so much faster. Pentium optimized code is at least 2x faster than 486 clock-for-clock for integer.
The Floating Point checks were interesting. I guess they were put in to reassure people that Intal could make a fully working FPU, unlike the ones they put in the original Pentiums. At the time I saw a funny spoof story along the lines of 2000.8977889 An Intel Space Odyssey. "Open the cargo bay doors HAL. :- No I will kill you like I killed the other 2.83 crew" :-)
@@emmanueloverrated Build used a little bit of floating point for some setup for slopes. It really hurts you on an 486SX system (with no FPU), but isn't enough to really benefit pentium greatly over a DX system. You can search the source code for Doom though and you'll only find a single float instruction in there and it is not used when compiling for X86.
@@soylentgreenb Of course when talking about a subject like that, we infer the critical parts, not the routines that are nearly never called nor those impacting the frame rate.
You're right about Doom. I messed with its source code back them, the arithmetic is very well done.
GREEEETINGS KING BLEEERB! Making my shitty monday just that much less crap.
Few DOS games made extensive use of floating point, Quake being the one major exception which is why it tends to run way better on Pentium systems over 486 systems. If you can get Quake working on a different mobo with both CPUs then you might be able to test that out yourself better. I know, 8.1 to 10.2 FPS may not seem like a big jump but that's literally a 25% boost in the framerate! (Plus that could've also been bottlenecked by the graphics card in that test.)
When I was working on those systems when they were new, I always found the SIS chipset boards to be a bit slower. Also, found that not all cache chip configurations and cache vendors the same. Max cache memory on some of those boards also slowed them down slightly in some configurations.
I know this is Blerbs but your skill of filming CRTs never ceases to amaze me. It's beautiful and truly appreciated.
Maybe you're banging up against the FPM memory speed. You have to keep the processor fed with instructions and data (ignoring I/D Caches). Also WB cache can help but there's issues with exclusion ranges for DMA on devices. Is there a way to set exclusion ranges for I/O memory used by DMA devices?
Can't beat a fast 486, I remember a friend of mine having a DX4-120 when we'd all moved to pentiums. It was still hanging in there and cool even back then :D Love the little steve1984 nod there too ;)
@Mat Speedle Heck yeah, I had one too, a cyrix chip, and as long as the games or programs didn't look at processor type, only speed, I could run stuff meant for pentium 90/100. Good time for building PC's back then for sure. 👍
A fast 486 still sucked at Quake though... Couldn't compete with Pentium-optimized assembly code.
Played _so_ much Quake on my DX4 100MHz, tweaked & reduced window size 👌
Yeah it could run pretty playably tbh.