As someone who was building PCs back when these were new products, I can confirm that PC Chips has been garbage since the start. Even then, everyone with the slightest bit of tech savvy avoided them like radioactive dog poop.
@madigorfkgoogle93499 ай бұрын
I agree on that, PC Chips=Chinese garbage... the problem was thy used the cheapest chipsets, usually not fully compatible with intel...
@pipschannel122210 ай бұрын
Cool content! Did you know the Ti486SXLC2-40 is in fact the exact same CPU as the Ti486SXLC-40? The really cool thing about the Ti Potomac core, (which is an enhanced Cyrix SLC) is that it can run at both 2x20 and 1x40 MHz! So you could have the best of both worlds and desolder the SXLC2-40 from the PC Chips board and solder it onto the ALi board that has the Cyrix SLC on it. You'd have a non clock doubled 40MHz CPU with a 486 instruction set and 8k of L1 cache! Awesome!
@crxxpslvyr788710 ай бұрын
There is a part mising from 11:15
@DKJones9610 ай бұрын
Thanks! I have no idea how that came out blank. Gonna upload the blooper when I'm back in town. That part was so good in comparing cache with no cache! I even had to correct what I'd said. Odd.
@crxxpslvyr788710 ай бұрын
@@DKJones96 We all fail. We all make mistakes. It's what makes us human.
@michaelturner280610 ай бұрын
Your "Cache vs no cache" section looks completely blank to me, no visuals, I just hear you talking about stuff.
@southernflatland10 ай бұрын
Pressure wash it, or use an ultrasonic cleaner, and use an air compressor to dry it faster. We used that technique for hurricane flood damaged systems, and some of the systems we salvaged lasted over ten years later.
@DKJones969 ай бұрын
You know, I have an ultrasonic cleaner and I didn't even think to use it...
@CPU-Z10 ай бұрын
Nice video ! I felt lucky when I found a mainboard with a 486SLC, I don't even expect to find one with a 486SXLC2, this must be pretty rare. I hope you'll find a new host mainboard for that little chip, it totally deserves it. I also hope that you'll be able to introduce the IBM 458SLC2 as a new challenger in a future video.
@DKJones9610 ай бұрын
Ahh yeah the IBM. Some stuff stretches my budget and that's for sure one of them. BUT I do occasionally get very lucky as you'll see next month with an upgrade card I recently picked up.
@tigheklory10 ай бұрын
When I was in college I went to a computer fair and built a new PC to replace my AT&T PC 6300. I ended up buying a AMD 386DX 40mhz over a 486SX 20. I think I made the right decision at the time. Later I upgraded to a Socket 7 motherboard with a Pentium MMX 166Mhz.
@JapanPop10 ай бұрын
Remember Blue Lightning, the slc2-66? Those were pretty quick, despite the 16bit bus.
@atheatos10 ай бұрын
Check my 486SXLC2 video ^^ Similar motherboard, similar chipset (just older revision maybe - A4). The flush signal is mostly rooted on my board and the cache worked fine! So it is safe to say that this chipset supports the flush thing and all that. Then the question is what connection is missing there... I can maybe check for continuity and tell you were to connect the missing signal. Another interesting point, on my board I failed to enable clock doubling, So I am very curious. Maybe works there because of A5 revision? You should try the 486SXLC2 at 40/40 without doubling also, it is way faster for sure. Also I have your M396F M/B (with am386sx), also aware of the open Gerbers of this. I have not played there too much. I am planning to rebuild the schematic of the board, but no much time right now. PS: Black screen on your video 11:20? Ps2: there are 386SX M/B with cache on boards, I have one... just rare in general as there are budget M/Bs and many skipped on that. Not sure about chipset cache support also.
@turbo9team10 ай бұрын
Hi atheatos! You and K2 are pushing the limits of the 386(486DLC/SXLC) platform. More videos please I love it!
@DKJones9610 ай бұрын
I'm glad to hear this board is actually capable of 40mhz! I need to change out my clock source to get 40/40 but I'd love to compare 1kb vs 8kb L1 without a big solder job. I will also be keeping an eye out for an SX board with cache. If you could let me know where that flush pin goes to I'd love to try a bodge wire for it. I will check out your video too. Thanks for commenting! I also don't know what happened with that missing section. I'm not home for a couple weeks or I would just re-upload. That'll teach me.
@atheatos10 ай бұрын
I have so much more to test and show, just no time. however I will came back with more videos for sure. ^^
@atheatos10 ай бұрын
So... I will check my M/B and tell you I am very curios really, the problem is my M/B is buried bellow 20 more M/Bs now. I will have to dig a-lot to find it. Wait a bit and I will come back to you.
@wishusknight300910 ай бұрын
@@DKJones96 "I also don't know what happened with that missing section. " I admit that was a bit comical. Hearing how we should see just how much faster the cache is! And I was like, "i cant see a difference".
@ljrretropcs10 ай бұрын
Great video mate !
@angieandretti9 ай бұрын
I've got a 386sx-25 as an upgrade sitting on top of an IBM 5170 motherboard. Silly, I know, but I really wanted a genuine IBM 5170 experience but with the 386 instruction set for software compatibility. The little upgrade board also has 16KB of cache on it, and if you turn that cache OFF then the 386sx-25 benchmarks slower than the original 286 CPU at 10MHz.
@DKJones969 ай бұрын
Fascinating, it has cache on the upgrade board? I know IBM went with a 486SLC for those upgrade boards but had no idea there was a cached 386SX version of it!
@angieandretti9 ай бұрын
@@DKJones96 Yeah, it's called the "Intel Snap-In 386." I've got the whole retail box, including a sweet metal stick-on advertising the upgrade. They made them for certain PS/2 machines and of course my 5170. It has the 386sx chip, 16kb cache, and a 2.5x onboard multiplier - so if you run your motherboard at 10MHz you get a 25MHz 386sx.
@RetroPeKar9 ай бұрын
Have you tried Cyrix's bundled software with the Ti processor? It can control A20, FLUSH and A LOT of other stuff, you know. Other than that, a very impressive job and a really rare piece of hardware!
@DKJones969 ай бұрын
I have tried that. I disabled the functions not connected and it still gave me issues. I think the only way to really fix it is going to be a transplant...
Good video. I have 2 PC Chips boards . One Pentium mmx and one AMD . I picked up at computer fest back in the late 90s. I've never fired them up.
@kirknelson15610 ай бұрын
the first computer I built from scratch was a 386SX 25, with 2 meg of ram, the math co-processor and a 60 meg hard drive. I built this to upgrade from a 8088 with 764K ram and a 10 meg drive. I remember spending hours playing Dune 2 on it. From there my next build was a a 486DLC 40 with 2 VL Bus slots, which I populated with a video card upgraded to 2 meg of ram and a VL bus IDE controller. This surprisingly beat my friends 486DX2 66 in bench marks.
@GigAHerZ6410 ай бұрын
You are back! NB, I think I've seen some 386sx boards with cache. So SX should be cache capable on motherboard.
@DKJones9610 ай бұрын
I would be very interested in checking that out! I suppose there isn't a reason they couldn't. Typically these were budget systems so finding an SX motherboard with cache would be a rare find.
@fintux9 ай бұрын
I'm quite sure we had a 386SX (AMD 25 MHz) that had cache on motherboard. I cannot remember the brand or the make of the board. I do remember that what I think was the cache was on socketed chips, and there were perhaps 4+4 sockets. The motherboard was bigger than those on the video, but not full AT - maybe it was one called baby AT? I guess the earlier motherboards were just small adaptations from 286 boards, thus not having cache, and the later ones were specifically designed for 386. Our computer was not among the first, if also not among the last, of 386 ones. (Edited details for accuracy). After googling a bit more I cannot say for 100% certainty the motherboard really had cache on it, but I'm still quite confident it had.
@DKJones969 ай бұрын
@@fintux I'm going to keep looking at those and how to find one but for now all I am finding are motherboards with dram slots and not ram slots. Makes sense for those updating old 286 systems wanting to move their expensive ram over.
@fintux9 ай бұрын
@@DKJones96 I do remember for sure that there was no onboard RAM, and I'm also pretty sure those slots were occupied. But it already has been such a long time that there is a chance I remember incorrectly.
@fintux9 ай бұрын
@@DKJones96 After digging deeper into this, I did find a chipset that supports 386SX with cache. The cache controller is a VL82C325. But looks like it works by e.g. decoding instructions in parallel with the CPU, so it sounds like something the CPU does not support out-of-the-box, and also sounds quite expensive. So I was right in that you could have 386SX systems with cache, but probably wrong in whether we had one, as it seems to be very rare.
@PCUnicorn10 ай бұрын
find that board at absolute computing in Albuquerque?
@PCUnicorn10 ай бұрын
Never mind, watched more of the video and you said las cruces XD
@lilbits313610 ай бұрын
THIS IS AWESOME!!! Thank you!!!
@jrherita9 ай бұрын
Was the 486SLC fully pipelined for integer like a regular 486DX/SX? Also would be interesting to see performance differences for 16-bit software which may not be as great as Doom demonstrated here. (16-bit application performance).
@retrogamingandyou23739 ай бұрын
Just so you know I'm getting just a blank screen for Cache vs No Cache.
@DKJones969 ай бұрын
I will be posting that section when I am back middle of next week. I set this to post at the beginning of a trip and don't have the edited footage to post yet. It's a great section to have missing...
@SaltyMeatHook10 ай бұрын
I had a intel 386 40mhz, but not that one motherboard. Interesting video. I remember the fake cache stuff. It preceded RAM doublers.
@poofygoof9 ай бұрын
I didn't think Intel ever made 40MHz 386, I only recall AMD doing that?
@SaltyMeatHook9 ай бұрын
@@poofygoof It may have been AMD
@jrherita9 ай бұрын
This is a very interesting review of the various CPUs. Thanks for this!. I’m curious how high of a bus speed that 1994 board supports that came with the 20 MHz bus cpu..
@DKJones969 ай бұрын
This is only theory as of yet but these small motherboards were usually capable of 40mhz. The other board with the slc has managed 50mhz without issue. I'm probably going to wind up swapping out the SX with the sxlc2 and will end up trying an 80mhz crystal to get it going on the PC chips board at full speed.
@jrherita9 ай бұрын
@@DKJones96 awesome. Would love to see this. I built a ton of 286 through 486dx2 rigs back in the day to run a multi node BBS. I didn't get to play with these other cpus much so it's cool to see them tested.
@jrherita9 ай бұрын
Hmm no video at 11:17 oddly
@idahofur10 ай бұрын
Those was the upgrade or build cheep systems motherboards. Personal fave and I found one. Nice old AT clone case with the original power supply. Probably was a 286 or old 386 that was upgraded or probably died. So you use new motherboard, io card and sometimes vga card. Now you are back in action . Even for windows 3.1 This one had a newer multi i/o card with ide hard drive.
@DKJones9610 ай бұрын
It would be a slick upgrade from an SX or a 286 for sure. The IBM 286 upgrade that uses one of these probably seemed like magic at the time.
@AndrewTubbiolo10 ай бұрын
Do you have a link to that project where someone did a modern layout of this class motherboard?
@DKJones9610 ай бұрын
github.com/Marco-Both/M396F-Replika There you go. It looks great in purple and I just might get one, transplant the SX to it, and put the sxlc2 in the motherboard that I know works well.
@Nelson68k2 ай бұрын
@@DKJones96 Thank you. Purple is my favourite PCB colour. That's why I reproduced it in purple. Sergey has since made a few modifications to it on his github page.
@JohnVance10 ай бұрын
Had no idea that TI ever made x86 procs!
@matthewday756510 ай бұрын
Maybe try changing the cache mode with some of the utilities. Also, do 386sx boards use page interleave, the RAM performance would be better with 4 banks than with 2. And yes, there is a bit missing in the video
@DKJones9610 ай бұрын
I did mess with the cache utilities a bit. For example I disabled the ken and flush input pins using the utility but it had to affect on usability. As for RAM interleave, these SX ASICs don't likely have that ability but I would have to look further. They might but I also had ram maxxed out and all matching simms so if it could use it it would. Kinda shocking lack of bios options in the bios config utility so I might have to go in and use a bios editor to unlock options to see what is there. If interleave is an option I know I haven't seen it on any of these boards.
@wishusknight300910 ай бұрын
These boards wont have interleave. By this point the idea was to have things as cheap as possible. And interleave actually takes a bit of effort to implement, even on an SX. For example it will never appear on a 2 layer board, as it would be impossible to rout the extra signals needed. Some of the earlier SX boards did indeed have interleaving, and some even had external cache! But those were put to the wayside pretty fast as the DX became more affordable at its lower end.
@AntonyTCurtis10 ай бұрын
The Intel RapidCAD 386 CPU is a 386DX CPU with an integrated FPU. It's almost a 486DX but with a significantly smaller cache and doesn't have all the new instructions/
@DKJones9610 ай бұрын
The RapidCAD is a full 486DX with a dummy FPU that had to be added for compatibility with FPU signaling. At least that's what I find for it. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RapidCAD
@wishusknight300910 ай бұрын
RapidCAD actually has _no_ cache what soever. Other than what register buffering the 486 supported, 16 or 20 bytes or something like that.
@TSteffi10 ай бұрын
My first PC was a 386SX-16 that I managed to overclock to 20 MHz
@wishusknight300910 ай бұрын
386 SX does support external cache. I have one!
@DKJones9610 ай бұрын
Love learning something new! I can't believe I've never seen one but it makes sense that budget boards would exclude it. I look forward to finding one!
@wishusknight300910 ай бұрын
@@DKJones96 Mine is a Vantage 386sx, it will come up on stason.
@wishusknight300910 ай бұрын
@@DKJones96 The thing that Stason gets wrong though, is this board actually _requires_ simms in groups of 4. I honestly don't understand why. It will not post with only 2 simms installed like my other SX boards. Even the other one i have with 8 slots. It threw me off when I first built it back in 1991 as I only had 2 1mb simms and thought the board was dead. And i needed to cough up more money for 2 more simms.
@wishusknight300910 ай бұрын
@@DKJones96 Mine is a Vantage 386sx, it will come up on stason.
@wishusknight300910 ай бұрын
Also trying to keep comments from being hidden by yt's AI which for some reason just randomly does.