20 MHz Intel 486SX Benchmark & Unboxing Overdrive CPU

[@CPUGalaxy]

Some where asking for the Intel Overdrive software which is on the floppy. I uploaded it and you can get it here: www.cpu-galaxy.at/download/intelod.zip

[@Xaltar_]

I remember being given a 486 SX 33 CPU in my early teens and between birthdays, Christmas and saving up managed to put together my own 486 PC. I had an 8088 IBM clone before that so it was a huge upgrade. I still remember playing Wolfenstein 3d and feeling like I was the coolest kid at school, then Doom came out and I had to shrink the view to a tiny box for it to be playable, it didn't stop me playing and enjoying the truly ultra realistic 3d game! It was still a slideshow. I am sorely tempted to purchase another SX 33 and recreate the system, I used the old 10mb MFM drive from my 8088 system and an Oak Technologies EGA/VGA display adapter with 1mb of vRAM. I still remember all the components all these years later, I guess that is what happens when you worked so hard to get them, saving every single cent I earned doing chores and odd jobs for neighbors. The last component I got for the system was a VGA monitor that finally allowed me to play Wolf3d and other SVGA games. I still remember the feeling of acomplishment when I put it together (still using a monochrome display) and installed windows 3.1 on it successfully off 5.25" floppies. My love of tech only grew from there. A few years later my parents upgraded the family PC to a Pentium 120 and I inherited the old 486 DX4 100 as well as the S3 Virge PCI graphics card, DOOM was no longer a slideshow and even MDK ran like a dream. I could not be more grateful to my parents for always supporting my passion, even when times were hard they always found a way. Now PCs are just another necessity but back then, they were a magical window into a whole new world of possibility. Watching videos like this bring back those memories and feelings, thank you.

[@MrKillswitch88]

@line ways LoL those were the days and I miss that dearly back in the late TBC/ early Wrath era as the community was something else back then.

[@tj71520]

Those were the days. I Remember it Very well. I Also had my amiga 500 back then and I was often comparing the same game on amiga and pc.

[@mrbrad4637]

Similar story to mine.. As a young bloke I owned everything from an 8088 XT 10MHz to a 286 12MHz, 386SX 25MHz, 486DX2/66MHz, and finally a DX4/75 overclocked to 100MHz (it was a beast of a machine in its the Day - mid 90s)... Video cards had alot to do with performance back then too.. I could actually run DOOM playably on my 386SX/25 when I upgraded to the best ISA VGA video card I could get my hands on and disabled the sound blaster 16 as that reduced frames on the 386.. the DX4/100 with a decent video card (VLB or PCI-E)was a beast that even ran Quake playably

[@DiscoTheTech]

I'm enlisted in several retro computing groups. It's a great way to revisit old hardware and experiences. Think about joining a few.

[@TattiePeeler]

Old school Intel ceramic triggers a big soft velvety wave of nostalgia in my mind.

[@raven4k998]

imagine if wd decided to make those old 486 chips like they make those old 6502 and 65816 cpu's imagine what people would do with those options

[@Kedvespatikus]

The slowest 80486 was the 16 MHz version of the 80486SX (e.g. sSpec SX431). The reason for the SX line was the integrated FPU, particularly its higher fault rate off the production line. Intel simply disabled the bad FPU on those chips which had no other issues and sold them under the SX brand. As the production process of the 486 matured, the fault rate dropped enough to stop this practice and the SX line vanished.

[@uwezimmermann5427]

that answers my question from "above"! I always had this suspicion, because creating a new mask set for a cheaper CPU appeared to me as unreasonable at the time already.

[@truckerallikatuk]

I too was sure there was an 80486sx-16. Thanks for ensuring I wasn't wrong.

[@Kedvespatikus]

@Lassi Kinnunen 81 Binning is (and was) habit of all chipmakers. And yes, Intel shot itself on the leg with the Celeron 300A, as all Mendocino cores could be clocked up to 450 MHz practically with no exceptions: Thus the Celeron 300A became the overclockers wet dream. :)

[@jari2018]

They sold a SX2-50 mgz so I dont think they stopped selling sx

[@Kedvespatikus]

@@jari2018 That was the last one. No faster SX CPUs were made by Intel. AMD produced an SX2-66 - that was the fastest SX.

[@elementbr]

486 20mhz! Didn't know that they made such a slow chip! Excellent video as always. :)

[@Kedvespatikus]

There was even a 16 MHz 486SX. :)

[@elementbr]

@@Kedvespatikus wow!

[@eng3d]

Intel did a lot of nonsense back then, such as selling next gen cpu slower than old gen but at the double of the price

[@Choralone422]

Beyond the 20 mhz clock speed the lack of L2 cache is what is totally killing the gaming & graphics performance on that board. More highly integrated motherboards (often with the 486 SX) started showing up after the 486 had been on the market about 2 years. Those types of motherboards that were highly integrated & lacked L2 were often seen in "lower cost" PC's used in point of sale (POS) applications sold by lots of system integrators (SIs) and by OEM's in the US like Packard Bell, Acer & Compaq in their lowest priced desktops. In the early 90s not having L2 was a significant cost savings for the seller and was seen as acceptable for applications like a POS terminal or basic word processing PC. Also, in the POS market they were especially popular due to their simplicity and smaller overall size compared to a "full size" desktop that required multiple add-in cards to function.

[@LUNATIC75]

I had a 486 sx2/50 as my second PC. That computer felt like a quantum leap over my old 386sx 33. Though that may have been because the 486 system actually had a sound card fitted!

[@cellsplicer2008]

I am trying to imagine the musty new old stock smell you got a whiff of when you opened the Overdrive box!

[@CPUGalaxy]

😍, yeah, love that smell 😅

[@lx_srs]

Your videos are always fascinating. Tons of retro gear I didn't know existed. Keep it up.

[@savagemadman2054]

This reminds me very much of my old IBM PS/1. I bought it used for really cheap in the mid 1990s, quickly found out why when I started up Doom. It was SO much slower than the 486 in our family room. Even adding a Overdrive 486 (different model from yours with a integrated heatsink) didn't help much due to the lack of an L2 cache and very slow video chipset.

[@pacman6169]

Wow! This Video brings back so many memorys for me. When i was a Kid in the 90s we had a Olivetti PC , probably with this exact Board. That was one of the First PC Memorys i have besides my Dad's Commodore C64 :) And i also remember playing Blockout and Werner Flaschbier on it :D Those were the good Days. Thanks for the Video keep up the Good Work :) -greets from Germany

[@pablopicaro7649]

Back long ago, the overdrive chip cost more than an entire new MotherBoard and CPU and more RAM. They where ridiculous.

[@keeler1701]

Always enjoy your videos this reminds me of my 1st pc a 486dx4 100

[@RetroSwim]

Nothing makes me happier than seeing these things removed from their packaging and enjoyed, rather than gathering dust sitting in a "collection". Great work, man!

[@thomassmith4999]

I got one of these in around 1998 as some "ancient" machine from the basement at work. It was the first time I ever used a remote desktop. Really the only way it was usable in a graphic environment with Linux was to connect to the desktop on my dual slot one celeron.

[@shamrice]

I've had my Laser 486SX-25 for almost 30 years now. I finally threw in an Overdrive chip in it last year to boost it to 50mhz. Honestly, I feel like it's a big improvement, even in Doom. But then again, mine has 16MB of RAM instead of 8MB. I'm sort of bummed I didn't do it earlier. Then again, these days it's regulated to basically hobby programming in QB4.5 or MS COBOL 5.0...

[@atheatos]

Great video again... BTW You can very easily change the crystal. The best move is to replace it with a DIP 8 socket. Then check ebay for "Oscillator 8 pin" these are easily available up to 100 -125 MHz.

[@CPUGalaxy]

Thanks 😊

[@peterbrown6224]

The Olivettis were marketed in pretty cases but their non-standard motherboards made them a poor choice for tinkerers. Amazing to see the Overdrive. I could never afford one.

[@alvaroacwellan9051]

Fun fact: in the info text of Crystal Dream II they wrote 'we didn't buy a 486-50 to code 386 demos' :D Actually, most of the demo runs well on a fast 386 or your "DX2-40". I love 486s by the way, unfortunately my only SX-20 overdrive has horribly corroded and even missing pins :( Not that I can't replicate the feeling with any common DX2 and a Highscreen/FIC board that can do 20MHz (it can go even lower than 16 but the chipset can't really stomach it :D) It's kinda like having a 386 that can handle large HDDs. Which is very nice.

[@AshtonCoolman]

This thing is basically a fast 386 which is kinda cool if you like 386 era games and hardware.

[@spitefulwar]

A glorified typewriter (befitting Olivetti's past prime produce).

[@Kedvespatikus]

The 80486SX is much more than a fast 80386. It contains a lot of improvement, the most important of which are the three-stage pipeline and the on-die 8 kB L1 cache. But also improved MMU, BIU and other developments helped this chip to be significantly faster than a 386 running on the same clockspeed..

[@AshtonCoolman]

@@Kedvespatikus I'm aware of the architectural changes. I own every generation of cpu from the 8088 to Core 2 including all AMD Athlons. I'm a collector. My point was just a comparison of their gaming performance, really. If you benchmark Doom on 386 Dx40 and a 20mhz 486, the 486 will only be slightly faster.

[@Kedvespatikus]

@@AshtonCoolman Fun fact: if you disable the on-die and on-board caches, even a Northwood processors drops down to the performance of a 386DX. The cache _really_ matters.

[@DonCarlosofFreiburg]

Scharf! Das ist das erste Mal, dass ich Sokoban bei jemand anderem sehe! Ich spiele es auf meinem Highscreen 386-SX 😊

[@uwezimmermann5427]

oh - es gibt noch funktionierende Vobis Highscreen-Rechner? ☺️

[@DonCarlosofFreiburg]

@@uwezimmermann5427 Ja, der läuft noch :)

[@_..---]

intel wanted to kill their own CPUs to harm the clones, what a crazy time that was

[@Velktron]

There's a specific term for that in marketing parlance -usually your worst competitors are your own, previous products and the market ecosystem built around them. Killing them off makes sense, if you can ensure that won't backfire and consumers prefer sticking to the old ways.

[@Lilithe]

This performance is BRUTAL! I had a 486 SX 25Mhz growing up and it was an AST pre built computer. The graphics chip was soldered to the botherboard directly on the bus, so that probably helped performance. I used to play DOOM on that thing. :D

[@sergheiadrian]

I didn't know there was an overdrive CPU for the 486SX. I always thought they started the overdrive "trend" with the Pentium.

[@matthewday7565]

I have a sneaking suspicion that there were two overdrives, the ODP (which sat in the 487 socket) and the ODPR (replacement) which replaced a socketed CPU - ODPR difference was that it was a 5V model - for the DX4 which was 3.3V in standard form

[@binarysun_]

My first own pc was a Siemens Nixdorf with a 486 sx 25 with 4MB of Ram and a 1MB onboard gpu despite being low end it still cost my parents 3000 DM in 1992 and it was the world to me. Squeezed out every last drop of it and even had Descent running on it. I loved it. Now my am5x86 p75@150MHz with 64MB Ram, 4MB Virge DX and Trident mm pro (which I even had back then) bring back those fond memories ✌️😍

[@Daz555Daz]

I found a 486SX-25 PC in my local recycling centre today (just thrown in a skip). Put it in my car and when I fired it up when I got home it actually worked! I have some DX CPUs sitting around somewhere so certainly going to try those to see if the mobo is compatible.

[@Rouxenator]

Very cool video, I never realized they made a SX2/66 - madness!

[@maxmaier9110]

Very interesting. Thanks for showing this nice Overdrive and the content of the box.

[@pipschannel1222]

Nice video! Love the unboxing of the infamous Overdrive chip :-) I think the on board WDC90C11 video card of this system is a clear bottleneck. My 25Mhz Ti 486DLC already gets 17 fps on 3dbench with a fast Tseng ET4000 (Diamond Speedster) videocard while the machine itself is a lot slower than this one so changing that will speed up games like Doom significantly.. The WDC90C31 is also a very speedy ISA option. About as fast as the ET4000 👍

[@JonWhitton]

Great, no graphite pencil! Thanks for sharing another brilliant video. 486 CPU such a classic chip, regardless off SX, DX or speed

[@CPUGalaxy]

thanks 😊. Yeah, some were always complaining that I am using a graphite pencil, so I made this wooden stick with yellow tip 😉. And I agree, 486 is classic, no matter which version.

[@stevef6392]

"Oh, this is nice - an airplane!" Made me grin. :)

[@CPUGalaxy]

🙃

[@idahofur]

I had a 486sx-25 board for years. went from 4mb of ram to 8mb or ram. My next upgrade was a new board with a celeron 333. At some time I ended up with a piii500 and 768 mb of and windows xp. Before moving onto a amd. etc etc etc .

[@timtomli]

This green motherboard was looking SO nice ~

[@cantstandya112]

I'm guessing "slow" setting takes place of a "turbo" button which would slow a CPU down for older software that relied upon the cpu clock for timing and speed.

[@R.B.]

Technically that was the purpose of "Turbo" for XTs. It would just be bad marketing to call it "Slow Down."

[@wandergranda1]

I have large cnc machine still running on 486SX, great stuff !

[@therealfox]

These are the wet dreams of my 14 year old self to have an intel overdrive. They were so expensive and usually i tended then to swap cpus instead after i found out the amd cpus are cheaper and have more speed. Then the limiting factor was the gpu. My first gpu was a trident something and i remember after win95 told me i need a directx gpu for my pc i went to vobis and asked for directx gpu. I got an whopping ati rage with 16mb of ram for 199 dm. That was really expensive but i had a income due to working at my parents business since i was 12 or so. I am so glad i found this channel only 1 day ago, thanks to youtube algorithm. Hope to see more interesting content to come. Would be nice to see also a german version of the video, maybe you can make a second "tonspur"?

[@KJohansson]

Nice, just what I wanted. Some layback retro hardware. And these where no joke back in the days, I upgraded my AcerPower with one of these.

[@Zerbey]

I was expecting this to be similar to my 486SLC-33 which also suffered from low cache and no FPU, but it's noticeably slower even than that! Doom for example was quite playable. Hope you can review one some day.

[@mrbrad4637]

The video card makes a big difference too doom.. Doom ran better on my 386SX/25 than this but I had a very good video card in it... I'm confident Doom would be very playable on this if it had a VLB S3 brand graphics accelerator or similar.. Doom on my 486DX/33 was fully playable full screen with a half decent graphics card

[@Zerbey]

@@mrbrad4637 I had a bog standard Cirrus Logic at the time.

[@mrbrad4637]

@@Zerbey Yeah that was a very common brand card of the day and typically garbage.. I found S3 made good graphics accelerator cards for VLB and if it is an ISA board then from memory the Tseng Labs ET4000 was a good choice.. But yeah I was surprised at how badly Doom ran on the 40mhz overdrive setup, even the 20mhz 486 was slower than I remembered.. Maybe the lack of cache along with a poor video card is the cause for such poor performance... Doom was well-known to run great on all 486 systems.

[@jrherita]

This brings back a ton of good memories - thanks CPU Galaxy! :).

[@xav500011]

My first PC was a Olivetti 486SX 25mhz that I rented from a Radio Rentals shop in the UK for £30 a month. Until the mid 1990's renting TV, video was a big thing in the UK. When a £400 24" CRT TV was a lot of money compared to average wage earnings. I did that in 1993 when I started to do computers at college. I did the PC rental thing for 2 years until university where in 1995 I spent £1200 from a student loan on a complete Pentium 90mhz 16MB RAM system with monitor. That first 486 PC was a revelation because it had a 120 MB hard drive. Before that I used a Commodore Amiga A600 that my parents brought for me and my brother.

[@osgrov]

How nice! I've never seen inside that OverDrive box, that was fun to see. I remember these well, but never actually had one. I almost bought a Pentium OverDrive when they first appeared, to upgrade my 486-50, but they just cost too much to be worth it. Maybe you could look into those as well? I'm curious how well a Pentium would do in a 486 motherboard. Probably not too well. Great video, and thanks for sharing that floppy disk! :)

[@R.B.]

As I recall, the Overdrive processor in the second slot actually disabled the original CPU die. For that reason you could actually remove the original CPU from the socket and nothing would change.

[@ColdSphinX]

I played blockout soooo much as a kid

[@lemagreengreen]

"The SX stands for sucks" - Romero, wasn't it? That motherboard does remind me of the days when they didn't seem to care much where cables ended up, that AT power connector placement and the IDE ports seem to be in just the wrong place :)

I have one PC 486 20MHz ... nostalgic time.

[@fungo6631]

Doom would likely run much better with a proper video card. The thandor benchmark says it gets 11 FPS, which is higher than a 386DX 40.

[@thomassmith4999]

Ark logic/ET4000-6000

[@helldog3105]

That's interesting to note. I have an IBM PS/1 and it does not have a L2 cache location on the board either. There doesn't appear to be a connector to add a board or anything else to add it either. It's a 2154-G54 I believe. Fascinating stuff. What's crazy is that it scores LOWER than the Packard Bell Multimedia with the same 486SX-25 MHz processor with no cache. But the horrible packard bell can add up to 256Kb of L2 cache with the right chips and TAG. Still I find the PS/1 to be a very fascinating machine. It won't work with any of the Overdrive chips I have, but none of them have the extra pin.

[@Velktron]

The choice between "slow" and "fast" made sense with some software -especially older games designed for 8088 and 8086 PCs- that got their timing routines wrong with "fast" CPUs. Most played too fast, some played too slow (like Novalogic's Bubble Bobble) and most never got patched to account for that. Hence the infamous "Turbo" button, BIOD setting or Ctrl-Alt-Plus/Minus button combo. :-)

[@ПавелВоробей-ь4ж]

Просто РЕЛАКС для ГЛАЗ И ДУШИ!!!

[@adr-richard5581]

My first PC, a 386DX25 with 4mb ram and a 40mb harddrive (double spaced) played Doom better than my brothers 486sx25 :)... great times for computing, was able to upgrade every couple of months!

[@floriansretrokiste6844]

Ich wollte gerade ins Bett gehen, da habe ich das neue Video auf ihrem Kanal gesehen. Ich konnte nicht widerstehen es zu gucken. 😀 Das Video war äußerst interessant und hatte wieder sehr, sehr viel Substanz! 👍👍 Beim auspacken der CPU habe ich schon das schlimmste befürchtet. LG aus Weyhe im Herzen von Niedersachsen

[@CPUGalaxy]

Vielen Dank 😊

[@gordonfreeman320]

Excellent video. I would LOVE to see a Pentium Pro Overdrive video, if you happen to have one. They are quite uncommon and weren’t around for very long.

[@thomassmith4999]

They aren't any different to a slot 1 233mhz PII really.

[@CPUGalaxy]

Thank you! yes, I have a PPro Overdrive and there will come for sure a video about it. ☺️

[@gordonfreeman320]

@@CPUGalaxy I have a pair of 256K Pentium Pros, a 512K, and a black-top 1MB Pentium Pro, but I don’t have a Pentium Pro Overdrive, as they are quite expensive.

[@BurleyBoar]

@@CPUGalaxy I look forward to this! Thank you for covering all the loose threads in my mind about computers from my teens!

[@joegee2815]

Very interesting, but I don't miss those days. Lived through the entire evolution building my own systems including 386, 486, pentiums, all the way until today. I'd suggest trying an older version of Linux but there was so little software back then, not sure what that would prove.

[@mattj5155]

Wow. A 486DX2-40 Overdrive is really rare.

[@HighTreason610]

There's always something strangely endearing about low-end hardware, if only for seeing how far it can be made to go. Had to laugh at your remark about the CPU speed option. It's surely supposed to be there for compatibility, but somewhat ironically, it seems unlikely that even this CPU would be slow enough to be XT compatible with that toggle on. Also, great, watching your VLB 386 video again convinced me to repair mine again. Thanks for the 387 pinouts, as they were the first to show up when searching.

[@CPUGalaxy]

yeah, the hell, I tried to set this to low and man, this was then really ridiculous 😅. oh yeah, the 386 VLB is really a cool board. I will post soon a video comparing 386, rapid cad and different 486 in 387 pinout.

[@CAESARbonds]

I remember an Olivetti pc where such a board was seated. It had an integrated screen and speakers. Solely for office use Man it was so slow. I upgraded the ram, and the painfully slow hdd which helped a bit. As always an entertaining video. How about a smaller screen for doom or a better vga card. Subscribed, rgds

[@qubex]

Back in 1992 I had a 386SX-16 from 1988 and I swear I could’ve killed to be the kid with the 486SX-25.

[@160rpm]

I like how "label" gets translated to "Datenträgerbezeichnung"

[@kokodin5895]

sokoban, arkanoid, blackout, qbird and prince of persia did not need 486 at all, they run pretty well on my oldest pc with 286 1 mb of ram integrated on board and hercules graphics if i was adventurous with turbo button i could also sometimes launch wolfpack submarine simulator on that

[@_LM_]

I remember playing Blockout on a green CGA monochrome monitor. Then I eventually upgraded to a grayscale VGA monitor. Good times! :)

[@p_mouse8676]

I actually still play Sokoban every now and then, lol! :)

[@yogibear2k220]

I was amazed the got a 486 running that slow, until i read the 16Mhz version? Boy, I bet they are a rare beast. But, if you manage to get one I would love to see that running Doom!

[@lowersaxon]

At that time I started with a 486 SX. Even scrolling down Excel sheets was terribly slow. I upgraded by installing a mathematical coprocessor. After that no complaints.

[@charonunderground8596]

It would be more interesting to test the first 486DX that is 25Mhz. Maybe you would like to do one someday ? Of course this material is also great !

[@halkneeble7612]

My first PC was 8088 based and then I got a job and bought a Gateway 486-33 and could not believe how fast it was. I'm on my 10th PC now 30 years later but have never again seen that kind of a jump in performance. Funny that Intel and AMD are still fighting for dominance.

[@benjaminrondeau3148]

Being a board with an Intel 340DX chipset (VLSI TopCat), which was made primarily for 386s, I will assume that they either had issues sourcing 386 CPUs or that it was easier to market a 486 PC at the time. In reality, it's just a 386 PC with a 486 CPU socket and without any of the typical advantages (VLB, faster FPM ram, large L2 cache, etc.) which made sense to equip with the lowest 486 on the totem pole. No redesign required, an easy solution from Intel indeed to kill their 386 line. I have a RapidCAD based PC with the same chipset that basically provides the same performance.

[@Desmobrenner]

Großartiger content... bitte mehr von allem. Super geil... viele Grüsse aus Hamburg

[@EdwinSteiner]

The graphical design on that Intel box is more precious than the OverDrive!

[@BurleyBoar]

The math never worked out for using these upgrades! By the time you had an itch to upgrade, the latest CPUs were so much faster compared to the upgrade chip! Along with that you would have significant uplift getting PCI and then AGP. It got worse in the Athlon/P2/3 eara.

[@xyzconceptsYT]

Loved the video. Great work.

[@zorinlynx]

It's sad that this particular motherboard is hard wired at 20Mhz using that oscillator crystal. Many 486 boards had jumpers which you could use to select the system clock, anywhere from 16MHz all the way up to 50MHz! Even though this particular OverDrive is labelled as being for 20MHz systems, if you ran the board at 33MHz it would likely run great at 66MHz. By 1992-93 pretty much all 486DX2 chips were binning at 66MHz and they just sold the "slower" versions to fill market demand. Don't expect them to run at 80 or 100 though!

[@160rpm]

The Bios looks like something from a 286

[@CPUGalaxy]

yeah, strange.

[@Bellthorian]

My first PC was a 486SX 25Mhz I bought from Radio Shack......great times!!!!!

[@CosmoRiderDE]

Hey buddy, excellent content again. Didnt know they made a 20mhz SX snail too? Thought the 25Mhz was the ultimate base of 486 slowness. Basically not faster than a 386 DX-40. Intel was also clever back then, they developed the ODP to put it on the free second socket while the original CPU had to remain on the mainboard so one couldnt sell it. i have an Olivetti here with a soldered SX25. And an empty socket 3 next to it. Might it work with an ODPRDX2-66? When the R stands for replacement.... Have not tested yet. I do not own any ODP overdrive. Only ODPR that are missing a special pin to switch off the onboard CPU.

[@RuruFIN]

Well, even a SX-16 exists though it's pretty rare.

[@stephenkennedy6358]

have you contemplated swapping out the clock crystal

[@MonochromeWench]

A better motherboard with L2 and VLB video card would have done great things for doom

[@Rocky1138]

I'd love to see the performance improvement for games if you put a decent graphics card in there.

[@mstcrow5429]

Don't see any VLB. Unsure how far it would help.

[@DanafoxyVixen]

The Cyrix 486SLC 20Mhz CPU was even slower and would definitely take the title of slowest 486 CPU. I had one in an old laptop a few years ago and forced it to run win98... it was hilarious how long it took to install/run

[@DanafoxyVixen]

(For those who don't know, you can bypass WIn98's processor detection by using the /NM switch at the start of the setup and force win98 on any 486 class CPU without a math co processor built in)

[@BenjiKimba]

At that time they make laptop CPU slower than for desktop.

[@Q5Grafx]

remember those days i had a 486 DX 2-66 and a 486 DX4-100 a few cyryx machines. id love to see someone do a video on how we did 3d animation and modelling in those days using those machines. we had to severely cripple poly counts and use tons of bump maps to cause the illusion of more detail. I still have the Lightwave 3d 5.5 which can still be run today with dongle and is quite capable software but has the 65535 point count limit per object and there is no real layering you have multiple modelling layers but if you closed out it would save all those layers to a single layer object that if over 65535 could never again be opened. i remember making million poly objects that would be something like 30 different files parented together for animation. i made an ak47 model with just about a million polys and it was something like 265 objects in a parent tree so all the inner workings could be animated ans which made the Babylon 5 and Star Trek modelling seem simple. At spacebattles.com Johan Alm still has up some animations he made on a 486 and to be honest they are quite impressive considering we had almost no memory and storage space was at a premium i remember my first 1GB HDD it was quite the boost considering i was using 2 240 meg HDDs. Glad those days are gone but still remember how much fun and the community we had back then in the early days.

[@flashstar99]

Does the Overdrive CPU remove any bottlenecks when paired with a faster GPU? I'm guessing the 20mhz bus is a big limitation for ISA performance.

[@JeremyLevi]

The ISA bus would be a big limitation for sure, but not because of the 20MHz bus. The ISA bus standard is fixed at 8MHz regardless, which is an even worse problem.

[@flashstar99]

@@JeremyLevi I still think it would be interesting to see a graphics performance comparison from CPU Galaxy with and without a 16 bit ISA video card. It seems the integrated gpu is a graphics bottleneck now but I can't tell how much the ISA bus is the bottleneck and I don't have the equipment to test this myself. I suspect that gamers back in the early 90's would have considered a video card upgrade.

[@JeremyLevi]

@@flashstar99 I'm sure you could get *some* gains, I doubt that integrated chip is exactly a top performer even for ISA bus chipsets. I still wouldn't expect good frame rates on something like Doom run full screen though.

[@Velktron]

If stuck with an ISA card for whatever reason, the only avenues for getting more performance were ISA bus overclocking and playing with the Wait State settings in the BIOS or jumpers on mobo/card, if they had them. Usually boards from big name OEMs like Olivetti and IBM were pretty vanilla and didn't allow for such experimenting

[@ccanaves]

At 7:40 you correctly point the extra pin that the PGA169 i487SX has to disable the "main" processor, something that the ODP (without the "R") overdrives also have. But you missed that the i487 socket on the motherboard DOESN'T have a hole for that pin, so it's floating and not connected to anything. How does that work? That socket is not the normal "overdrive socket" or "socket 1". Looks more like another "normal" PGA168. Then on page 10 of the documentation that came with the ODP processor (at 13:05) you can see several situations regarding socket availability on the motherboard, and different steps to take to use it. Can you upload pics or a scan of that booklet?

[@roberthorwat6747]

I would have sold my granny for a 20MHz 486SX as my first pc (in 1993).was an Olivetti PCS 86 which had the NEC V30 processor running at a whopping 8MHz. OK for wordprocessing and Lotus 123 but as for games it just about ran 3D battle chess.

[@altbeetle1998]

beautiful motherboard

[@madson-web]

Still an amazing machine

[@MegaFirewalk]

I had an elonex 486 sx 33 as my First pc.

[@d2factotum]

I imagine the main problem with video performance is the machine only having ISA slots? After all, those only run at 8MHz 16-bit regardless of how fast the rest of the machine is.

[@JeremyLevi]

That's what I was thinking too. It's likely the onboard video and IDE controller are also attached internally on the ISA bus as well. Major performance bottleneck.

[@AnotherMaker]

They made a 486sx/16 chip for sure. It was rare, but they made it.

[@AnotherMaker]

en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/80486/486sx-16 is the link to the chip.

[@CPUGalaxy]

i know. kzbin.info/www/bejne/ap-thaaQaKyabtk

[@Revoku]

this board looks the same as my old acer 486 SX from many many years ago, it was a clip together computer, for relatively cheap(compared to other 486 computers)

[@IBM_Museum]

I had the 487SX S-spec SZ494 on my chart, but not the Overdrive S-spec SZ699...

[@makisv67]

The SX is without integrated Numeric Processor. My first 486 DX was the 33. Later the DX4 100 . AMD had the DX4 120 (Mhz). Some Mainboards had also a socket for the Weitek Coprocessor. Never saw this. Never had an overdrive processor.

[@jozsiolah1435]

I had a Compaq 25 mhz laptop, it wasn't slow with 8 mb ram. The coprocessor requires an Intel utility, but there are some fpu boosters online, all of them are demo. Himem sys /w parameter enables the fpu, an existing processor cache driver enables its internal cache and it is not demo.

[@gudenau]

I wonder how many times a second a modern CPU could do that image...

[@remigiusztalaczynski7583]

My first is 286AT 12MHz with EGA(16color) color monitor, 40MB HDD, 5.25 FDD and 1024kB RAM. Next 386SX, next 586amd133, next MMX, Celeron, P4.... But i still remember first PC XT with Hercules and monochrome monitor and game Barbarian :)

[@Константин-ш1ц8ш]

This overdrive processor could be easy overclocked to dx-2/50 or dx-2/66 by changing the oscilator. With good ISA video card the Doom will run at smooth FPS.

[@JeremyLevi]

Unless there's jumpers to adjust the ISA clock independently of the main system clock good luck running the ISA bus at 12.5 or 16.5MHz without causing all those onboard peripherals and most ISA cards to flake out. A lot of those low end 486SX boards were only ever intended to use 16 or 20MHz CPUs and use a fixed 0.5x divisor to derive the ISA clock.

[@Константин-ш1ц8ш]

​@@JeremyLevi 12.5 Mhz is almost acceptable frequency, a lot of ISA cards could use it without problem.

[@jakubkrcma]

19:50 Box in the corner - cannot move it anymore... 🤣😉

[@altbeetle1998]

the tool box looks like an SSD. almost choked on tea. SSD in 1989!

[@SUCRA]

Great video about an obscure subject, I like it very much! How does Wing Commander run on it?

[@lordmmx1303]

intel needs to make 486 overdrive 2 with SSE1-5 , MMX, 3D Now and Turbo Boost

[@Kedvespatikus]

That will not help them. Lisa Su ate them for breakfast. :D

[@uwezimmermann5427]

I always wondered if the 486SX were chips which had the FPU disabled because of errors or performance problems in order to improve Intel's selling yield, or if it was a completely different mask set during production.

[@tsftm4192]

Clearly this motherboard's layout shows that it was designed for SERVERS, because all of the componets face the same direction of airflow. My guess is that there was a production surplus that the company took at a lower price and put in a desktop system by simply creating a case to fit it. You should try to install the 83 MHz overdrive if possible.