Intel 486SX-16MHz Benchmark and Upgrade to Kingston Turbochip at 133MHz (AMD 5x86-133)

In this Video I am showing the slowest 486 which was ever produced. The Intel 486SX at 16 MHz. We will do some intesive benchmarks on a propper board of its time, an early 486 board with just ISA bus.
The second chip which will get tested and benchmark is the Kingston Turbochip which is an upgrade chip and contains an AMD 5x86 at 133 MHz and will give our old board an exreme boost like from 0 to Hero :-)
The usual benchmark programms as speedsys, norton sysinfo and checkit as well as some games are completing here our results.
Thanks for watching.
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Used hardware in the video:
Motherboard: Chaintech 425SX
Intel CPU: A80486SX-16 SX548
Upgrade CPU: Kingston Turbochip 133
Video Adapter: Tseng ET4000AX
I/O Adapter: Tandon PCBA 190870
Drive: IDE - CF Adapter with 4GB CF Card
Link to Necroware KZbin Channel for XT-IDE Network Boot-ROM.
Actually there are 5 Vidoes:
• Boot retro PC using XT...
• Boot retro PC using XT...
• Boot retro PC using XT...
• Boot retro PC using XT...
• Boot retro PC using XT...

[@mikeall7012]

We got that exact upgrade for our packard bell legend 25mhz sx. The performance boost was huge. It was like getting a whole new computer. We upgraded from 4 to 16 mb of ram and put in a sb16 and cdrom too.

[@idadru]

I remember my first CD-ROM, I had to use the ide port that was on the sound card 😔

[@memadmax69]

The good ol days lol

[@floodo1]

Hello fellow 25mhz SX user. My grandpa gifted me what must have been the cheapest IBM at the time because it only had TWO megabytes of ram and the CPU wasn’t socketed so no dream upgrades like this haha. It let me get on local BBS tho and the rest is history!

[@floodo1]

686 was my fav btw

[@DevilbyMoonlight]

@@idadru back then there were 3x CD-Rom interfaces on sound cards, dont be fooled that they are IDE, the Sony, Mitsumi & the Panasonic - IDE CDRoms came later and didnt need the audio cable after DAE became a thing.. I preferred the Panasonic drives back then no messing around and worked without issues, the sony ones were the most problematic, they didnt even have a motorised tray lol they just spat the tray out half way under spring pressure... lol

[@alexhofstee466]

Happy to see new CPU Galaxy video's appearing since last week! I was missing them in my weekly youtube routine. ;-) Hope you are doing well.

[@CPUGalaxy]

Thank you! I am fine and will come up with much content during this winter. Thanks for watching! 😊

[@sebastian19745]

In advanced tab on BIOS setup, what the option "80486 DX2 CPU (50MHz)" does? It force the FSB to 50MHz? And if so, you can get the CPU to run at 150 MHz? What POST card do you use? I never seen one so tiny. You can populate Banks 2 and 3 (72 pin) RAM to increase the max amount of memory (4/16 M 32 pin RAM sticks are hard to find) and make a nice Win 95 machine...

[@Thomsonicus]

If someone made a change like that in 1996 I imagine it would be shocking how diffrent that computer would feel.

[@5roundsrapid263]

Seriously… It made it 4-5x faster in a few minutes. No wonder Overdrive/Turbochip upgrades sold like hotcakes. You’d save at least $1000, which is about $2000 today!

[@rsmith02]

If they're using this in 1996 I'd feel bad for them. Pentium II was out by 97.

[@soylentgreenb]

I remember pentium 2 being just stupidly expensive when released. It was much cheaper by 1998. Same with pentium; the P60 and P66 was very expensive and almost nobody had one.

[@drxym]

I upgraded my first PC from a 486 SX 25, to a DX 33, to a DX2 66 to a DX4 100. Yes it made stuff faster but it's a law of diminishing returns because the rest of the system like the bus, memory, storage etc becomes the bottle neck. I still got 4 or so years out of it, upgrading bits and pieces until I did a reset for my move to Pentium.

[@soylentgreenb]

@@drxym For games I'm not sure anything above the DX 33 helped if you had some horrid trident ISA graphics thing. If you have a really fast ISA card I think you'd still see gains from the DX-2/66 and above that you'd really want a VLB or PCI card (some very late 486 motherboards actually had this). You'd still get a higher score in FPU intensive stuff, but you can't really play those games comfortably anyway on a 486 (e.g. Quake). You'd also want L2 when you're getting up there in speeds, which many cheaper 486s didn't come with.

[@TrashfordKent]

excellent thank you, like you've mentioned an 486SX 16 vs 386 DX33/40 would be very interesting.

[@Shand1982]

I love this, thank you so much for all your work and cool videos!!!

[@CPUGalaxy]

Thank you 🙏🏻

[@MRL676]

Greetings from South Africa. You have blown my mind. This must have been amazing.

[@CPUGalaxy]

Thank you!

[@SeeJayPlayGames]

is that write-back or write-through cache? I seem to remember one being faster than the other. I think WB>WT but I could be wrong.

[@Legal-104]

Thank you for this excellent video. Couldn't help but laugh out loud when you said you're going to scare the shit out of that motherboard 😆

[@CPUGalaxy]

😇

[@UCs6ktlulE5BEeb3vBBOu6DQ]

The ultimate powerpoint machine. We used to say sx was garbage but by then we'd get dx4-100 for free from people moving on to Pentium 133-166. I hate myself so much I didn't keep any of these and not even my 3dfx.

[@the_kombinator]

Hah, you'd love my retro corner - V30 to P233 MMX :D (I'm missing a 286 but I don't really care about those)

[@idadru]

When I think of all the old gear I had that I had held on to for so long but inevitably got rid of I kick myself. The foolishness of youth I suppose... My old Creative MPEG2 accelerator would be so interesting to play with again 😔

[@necro_ware]

Thank you very much for the shout out and for this video. Very exciting, as always. That Kingston CPU is very funny, not only they didn't bother to use a heat spreader, but they also glued the fan directly on the chip, so it blows only at the edges, but the die in the middle is where no air is coming to :D I'm impressed to see this CPU, since it is very rare, but I'm a little bit confused by the engineering job Kingston did on that :D

[@CPUGalaxy]

You are welcome! For me I can say your channel is the best retro channel out there! And I was also very surprised about the cooling engineering on the Kingston. 😅

[@laurdy]

An interesting comparison would be 286-16 vs 386-16 vs 486-16. It would also be interesting to see the weitek 4167 up against the 5x86-133 - especially the weitek benchmark programs.

[@nixosianarrt2419]

olden golden memories - the weitek... 5x86... Weitek equipped boards had a thing with the Xcom IIRC. I dont know, not I can imagine why. They loaded the above 640K memory loaded correctly but then froze when the XCOM started. Same with Xcom 2.

[@fungo6631]

The 486-16 is more or less on par with the 386-DX40

[@igor0242]

Спасибо! Как всегда оригинальный и качественный контент!!!

[@wskinnyodden]

PLEASE PLEASE TRY!!!! !!! !!! !!! I HAVE A REQUEST!!!! Please can you check if you can run a 486DX or above (any 486 including the FPU instead of the SX models) AND try to also install a Weitek CPU on it and see if you can run both FPUs on the system at the same time! Considering how they interface differently with the system this is likely possible and would be absolutely AWESOME. In case you did not know, Quake in particular had the performance it had on Intel CPUs because it could use the CPU's integer math at the same time as the FPU floating point calculations resulting in something akin to a dual core when it came to mathematics, this would not work on Cyrix as when the FPU math was in use the integer part was pretty much disabled/waiting for the FPU to finish therefore crippling the max performance. I would ask Quake developers directly (if I knew them) to actually extend the work they did and add support for the Weitek FPU to their code therefore resulting (hopefully) in a large performance increase by using simultaneously the CPU Integer math, FPU floating point math and the Weitek FPU math! This should if possible result in being able to run Quake properly on much lower specked 486 systems as long as they are the DX model plus the Weitek! PLEASE PLEASE TRY!!!!

[@viti95]

The ISA bus is really bottlenecking this system, Doom should really be much faster with a 133MHz 486. Try with some Doom port that uses a RAM backbuffer for render, this reduces the amount of data to be copied to the video card and thus reducing the bottleneck.

[@GMCLabs]

My 1st PC had the same CPU, only it was 25Mhz. Eventually, I upgraded to the 83Mhz pentium overdrive CPU, though I think I had to run it at 63Mhz bc that was the highest speed the board supported. It was a Packard Bell PC. It was cool because I remember using the built-in tutorials to learn DOS commands and how to copy disks,files, and stuff.

[@SeeJayPlayGames]

locked 2.5x multiplier on the Pentium OverDrive. A 33MHz (66Mhz?) crystal oscillator transplant would have gotten you to 83.

[@Shmbler]

I loved the subtle background music that you faded in with Norton Sysinfo. It really built up some tension. But then it prematurely ended ;-) No 160MHz today? 40MHz FSB really make all the difference in the world for L2 and mem throughput. And 10x the speed CPU upgrade would also be pretty unique ;-)

[@laz7354]

From 386 level performance to Pentium level! Amazing upgrade.

[@HardQare]

Impressive setup. In the old days I owned a 486SX-25 I could easily OC to 40 MHz. I also upgraded ram from 4MB to 8MB. The graphic card was a Cirrus Logic 5428 VLB. It performed so well so I played through Blizzard Diablo.

[@Zytiron]

I still play Diablo on my system, though it's an AMD-DX4 100Mhz. I unfortunately "popped" my 486-25 trying to overclock (was still learning). lol

[@jilmarit]

Wow! I would find lot more use for that computer in 16MHz configuration. Older 80’s to 90’s games problems with high speeds would run great with 386/33MHz or comparable - for example adventure games, Wing Commander series, etc. Having already i486dx4 and 5x86P75 leaves a spot at that range underneath. Also my 286 is breaking and a little slow anyways to restore.

[@McTroyd]

Love seeing epic performance boosts! In those days I was running a 12 MHz 286, and would have given anything for that kind of machine. Also, FYI, "quadrupled" (kwah-DREW-pulled) means "multiplied by four." In the context of CPU clocks, I understand this is usually clocked by a PLL (phase-locked loop) oscillator. Makes sense, given you're going from ~33 MHz to ~133 MHz. 👍

[@nixosianarrt2419]

Had a "super 286" running @ 16mhz ... fondly remember that machine , playing Falcon 1.0. Then I got a cheap 386SX which was still a better machine.

[@jrherita]

I'm really curious how high that 486SX-16 would clock. I'm fairly certain it would do at least 33 MHz, and probably 40-50 MHz. I had an old 486DX-25 that ultimately ended up at 48 MHz, though it wouldn't work at 50 MHz. (In hindsight, it was on a "33 MHz rated board", so it could have been the motherboard not the CPU limiting performance). This was around 1993 or so.. My BBS + gaming + work setup consisted of several 486's...

[@BrassicGamer]

Imagine having that 16MHz 486 back then, and spending hundreds of pounds on cache and RAM... and seeing no improvement. I was impressed by the number of tweaks on this motherboard, though. It would be amazing with VLB included. Thanks for the video!

[@britlion]

Ooh, another fun retro upgrade challenge. It's awesome to see you doing new content. Thank you!

[@christianfath7367]

Very Nice Content .... ty for detail the Cache and RAM Options. I like

[@osgrov]

Very nice, those Turbochips are quite amazing. :) Were those 16MHz chips some sort of OEM special thing, do we know? I worked at a PC-builder in the early 90s and the cheapest chips we could buy was the SX-25. Never did see a 16 and we bought our parts from a huge distributor so if it was available they would've had it. At the time our entry-level PC used AMD 386DX-40, which I'm still fond of today. It wasn't that much slower than the 486-25 as I recall, and the 486 setup cost a lot more.

[@ph0end]

Yeah, you'd surely view a 100% ISA board as low-end, but it also has a whopping 8 SIMM slots, something I only saw on more expensive boards, and one of the more configurable examples of AMI BIOS. An industrial application makes the most sense to me, somewhere expansion was important, but clock speed wasn't. At the same time though, this era produced some weird and wonderful things, and it wouldn't shock me to learn it was from a name-brand desktop offering.

[@fungo6631]

Possibly in some applications that required performance a bit better than 386 performance but lower power and some more features. I'm pretty sure that the 486SX-16 consumed less power than a 386DX-40. I could see it being used in laptops. And regarding the price, note that Intel reduced the price of the 486SX once the Cyrix 486SLC was released in 1992. To 119 USD, no less.

[@CPU-Z]

Very interesting. I totally share what you said concerning the benchs results that are strictly identical after the BIOS optimization, I've faced the exact same effects on several systems, and jut can't explain why. The 486SX-16 became a piece of collection, pretty hard to find on eBay (at a reasonnable price of course). And so does the Turbochip !

[@spladam3845]

It's interesting that a 486 @17Mhz was roughly equivalent to my 386DX40. Great video again, good of you to give a shoutout to Necroware, gave them a sub.

[@skyhawk21]

Thanks great video brings back memories of the good all days I had a 386 and upgraded to a 486 so I could play .mp3 files smoothly and multi task in windows.. then a 586 and Cyrix 686 for gaming.. Today I have an awesome 13900k system with ddr5 and it blows my mind what technology can do today. I can’t even max out the system for productivity or leisure… back during the golden era of computers, playing a single .mp3 file with Winamp, would max out cpu!!!!

[@Damien.D]

Pretty fun to have both lowest end and then upmost end of processors of this socket running on the same board.

[@motorb1tch]

would the 486 run at 33mhz with heat sink? back in the days some cpu could be overclocked by crazy ammounts because the only difference between the different modells where the engravings. of course it did vary a lot by modell. sometimes faster clock rates required faster caches, so there where some hard walls (like, all p133 ran perfectly at 166mhz, but only the p200 could run 200mhz because only it had the faster cache required for this speed)

[@ionstorm66]

You can see the memory speed dropping off after 256K. That is your L2 cache working somewhat.

[@Pdor_figlio_di_Kmer]

386 at 40Mhz? Nah! A 486SX at 16Mhz struggles at finding comparison to a 386 at 33Mhz, performance-wise. The 386 at 40Mhz is faster. As a rule of thumb we used back then, under the point of view of pure calculus a 386 has more or less the speed of a 486 clocked at half its frequency (386 40Mhz == 486 20Mhz) but the 386 has the advantage of a faster memory bus (its clock being double).

[@techsalesandmore3649]

Have you tired using the sx16, with No motherboard cache or cache tags? The ram read is measuring slower than even the RAM writes. This looks to me, like, without the cache in the middle, the read would be where the purple ram write speed currently is... With your excellent 60ns Simms, 16Mhz is a do-able speed at 0Ws. It might be interesting to try it on the cache less 486sx-20 Motherboard you did a while back. Obviously 60ns cannot do 20Mhz, so a wait-state was introduced. Giving a 12.5Mhz memory speed (80ns), even though you inserted 60ns. But, just for fun, it would be interesting to see if when set to just 16Mhz, if that wait state either disappeared, or could be set in bios. Or, if necessary, using that excellent bios-options-editor, can a 0WS for RAM option be enabled in the bios. As at the moment, the board isn't taking advantage of the 60ns ram during all the reads due to cache slowing everything down(on this video). And, on the previous 20Mhz 486Sx, a wait-state was being added from necessity as no one had 50ns Simms in the 1990s. I remember throttling back a 486slc-25 to 16Mhz, just so I could set everything to 0WS. Looking at your videos, it looks to me like you're also a tinkerer, tormenting hardware to go faster and faster etc :) . In the case of the 486slc-16, 0WS did improve performance. But, not by much though :( The board was defo faster at 25Mhz with 1Ws than it was 16Mhz with 0WS. But it was a fun experiment at the time (1993 I think). What do you think, can the board work without any cache? Loving your channel BTW. Particularly love it when something improves big time, like in this video with the Kingston. Your voice gets all excited still, even though by todays standards everything from the 1990s was rubbish. Well, except for the soundcards anyways. Somewhere I've kept my Yamaha 60W (ISA) soundcard, and my Yamaha SW1000XG(PCI) cards. As nothing ever came along to beat their wavetable synthesis. I can't give them you, they're too important to me, plus I still use the SW1000XG, but if you'd ever like to lend then for a review or anything, let me know. Martin

[@SianaGearz]

Funny thing, while Duke doesn't care about FPU performance, if you don't have an FPU you're not going to have a good time in some very specific spots of some of the maps. That's because slope rendering code does an integer FPU load and then store back as a float to then do some further integer magic on that, looks like approximate 1/z calculation, and it does this once per pixel. That's the only FPU instruction used and it's basically non-arithmetic. This function that does this is also called to generate random numbers or something like that but not enough to matter for performance. There's also no alternative implementation for any of this, so if you don't have an FPU, you get it emulated by the Watcom runtime, handling the NM exception, which is predictably slow.

[@ProDigit80]

I wished someone would make a 486 cpu with a 12 or 14nm node, running 1 core at 2Ghz complete with extended ram, Isa bus, emmc and usb controller, svga compatible graphics chip, and sound blaster pro compatible card, 640kb of cache, and 32MB of extended memory all built in into the chip. Such a chip should be about the size of an SD card, require hardly any cooling, can run most DOS, and windows 3.x games at full resolution and quality, and be potent enough to play most basic win 95/98 games. Then load up the unit with MSDOS, Windows 98se, or older Apple os or something; mass produce them, and sell em.

[@bdhale34]

The lack of any improvements with tweaking is indeed a side effect of the SX 16 being such a bad chip, it was basically a 386sx with some 486 instructions glued on the base architecture is still 386 though so it gets zero advantages from anything the faster full fat 486 chips could take advantage of. The bios doesn't "detect" the CPU per se on most mainboards from 8086 up until Pentium mmx chips , these were configured via jumpers or dip switches on the board whatever those toggles told the bios it put next to the vendor id from the chip and displayed that. Setting the jumpers to use the 50mhz FSB should also improve performance noticeably over the 16mhz setting. Also quadrupled is roughly pronounced Kwa-Droop-Ld btw.

[@legiran9564]

Ah the 90s. The golden age of PC. Had the best variety of games and the best hardware upgrades. There's no way we could perform a similar jump in upgrades in 2022. It was the decade where PC games went from text based adventures in 1990 to Quake 3 Arena in 1999. We'll never have this jump in gaming visuals again.

[@Ziplock9000]

Quite misleading, because there were graphical and even 3D games in the preceding decade.

[@legiran9564]

@@Ziplock9000 There were. But how many could have afforded the high end computers to run those games. School yourself properly with history first and in the mean time get yourself lost.

[@CandyGramForMongo_]

Qua-Drew-Pulled. And while we’re talking about it, cache is pronounced just like cash. Actually, I prefer your pronunciation. Love!

[@patrickbateman3490]

The final result is very sexy :)

[@CrassSpektakel]

In the age of 486 the Weitek FPUs usually weren't faster anymore but they were often required for expensive software because they used incompatible Opcodes. Think of them as dongles which actually do something useful.

[@magnum333]

What do you think about Norton Sysinfo values? I don't know what calculations it does to determine CPU speed but they seem to be quite limited. FPU is probably not being taken into account. I can't think of an example right now but I remember them not being very reliable.

[@wskinnyodden]

By the way, from my own experience the cache being configured as Write Back instead of Through is faster usually.

[@jamesjan]

With a 486 16mhz, shouldn’t the isa divider be set at 1/2 bus clock instead of 1/4 bus clock?

[@dustinhipskind7665]

I wonder if that chip would post with a 40mhz clock (160mhz final frequency)

[@magnum333]

Another interesting adventure in retro. Did you notice the strange looking "L" in the BIOS info and menus? Why do you think it is?

[@Zerbey]

Really interesting upgrade, but yeah the ISA bus is definitely causing the CPU some bottlenecks! I would have loved an upgrade like this in the early 1990s when I had a 486-33. By 1996 I was using an AMD 5x86-133 (OC to 160Mhz) in a motherboard with a proper PCI bus and it performed extremely well.

[@32KOFDATA]

I was expecting it to run even faster after the installation of the Kingston Turbochip. I run it on a microchannel IBM PS2 77s with an onboard S3 of 1MB and Doom runs extremely smooth. 3D Bench reports a score of 76 frames per second.

[@petertorda5487]

Oh, these memories, I remember, that one friend had similar board with 25Mhz 486SX, and after his brother borrowed him 16MB, he was playing with Adobe Photoshop 2.5 on Windows 3.1. I would be curious, if that 16Mhz version can handle 25Mhz, or 33Mhz, personally till today I even didn't know that 16Mhz version of 486 exist, it must be extremely bad batch, so they clocked it such as slow. Anyway isn't it Write back faster option, then write thought? I know that write thought has been more prefered in servers, as it was safer.

[@Geomanb]

Changing the CMOS battery is recommended due to leakage risk.

[@draggonhedd]

"Clock kwa-DROO-pulled" Its a silly looking word for sure.

[@gordonfreeman320]

Chaintech boards are quite nice, they remind me of similar features present on DFI mainboards. Great video!

[@YarmouthHoops]

Hahahaha - "And to scare the sh&^ out of this motherboard" - laughed for 5 minutes!

[@xidarian]

I used to have this exact chip. I upgraded a 25mhz 486 with this and it was a huge upgrade.

[@oscarcharliezulu]

What’s amazing is how far we’ve come since, but great to see these CPUs such a nice reminder of how fast I remembered as I went from 286 to 386-16 to 486-33 then Pentium-100. Greta times.

[@dalecomer5951]

That mainboard is a great find. The earliest iteration of 486DX board, not much different than a late 386DX. And a very respectable brand, too.

[@theposguy1435]

Could you still add the wy-tec 4167 co-chip as well to setup? Or does the 486/133 include or cover it already? Thanks great video!

[@matesomogyi6545]

Thank you for the XT-IDE video links!

[@Choralone422]

Upgrading my 486 DX2 66mhz to a AMD 5x86 133 running at 120mhz (due to a strange board issue that would only apply a 3x multiplier instead of 4x) was a good upgrade for my 1st PC. I also use a 5volt to 3.3 volt socket adapter in my setup and bought all the parts individually before Kingston started selling the Turbochip upgrades in the US. I still miss that 486 machine. I used it for a little over 5 years in all!

[@5roundsrapid263]

You could have gotten 150 MHz out of it easily, if your board supported a 50 MHz bus. I’ve heard that was common.

[@Choralone422]

@@5roundsrapid263 40mhz was the max bus speed on that board. It was a strange gimped PC but I made the most I could out of it.

[@5roundsrapid263]

@@Choralone422 You definitely did!

[@hetismewat]

I remember Topless memory to be the cheapest and most unreliable memory being sold in the computer store I worked.. might be the EDO RAM variant that was rubbish

[@CPUGalaxy]

exactly, the EDO ones were the ones.

[@colinkraus7139]

Your voice is great. Great videos. Thank you.

[@titotech]

Why you stopped the channel?

[@callumbush1]

Quad-Roo-Pulled is how you pronounce it!

[@thegenxgamerguy6562]

I guess Intel simply didn't want to throw too many dies away.

[@tomiluukkonen4035]

Glad you're back! Unsubscribed just maybe 3-4 weeks ago when I finally assumed that Channel was done :( So happy to see you again, keep up the good work :) btw; your 486SX/16 was most likely SO heavily CPU-limited that no amount of tuning won't help. Tuned a lot of early PC's since 1987 and seen a lot of quirks in 1990's and some chipsets behaved very strangely. 11MHz AT-bus _should_ help a lot but with 486SX/16... apparently not.

[@tomiluukkonen4035]

Is there any software to tune that 5x86 Kingston you tested? You can only go so far with AT-bus overclocking until MB goes unstable. Sadly Overdrive-Pentiums were pricey even then. I later had Cyrix CPU's quite a while and those had a lot of tuning-sw available.

[@techdistractions]

Great video thank you Those 486 overdrive chips were very useful and kept users from “needing” a pentium for a while… or until quake of course :-)

[@dr_jaymz]

That works a lot better than I thought it would. I wonder how affordable that would have been at the time? I'm not sure of the exact timing but I imagine at that point many would be using early pentiums and the cost of upgrading was plummeting which if I remember made these types of upgrades disproportionately expensive. But, it does work very well.

[@ruben_balea]

You have to test that 486@16 with the Weitek FPU and then the TurboChip with its internal FPU and even finding what speed of 486DX would be equivalent in FPU power to the poor 486@16 with a Weitek. Or maybe you just have to upload the video where you've already done all that ;-)

[@CPUGalaxy]

hahaha, it seems you know me very well. of course I tried 😅😉

[@MKlol2]

16 MHz! From It can turn on the LED, to it can run Doom!

[@UpLateGeek]

That's just about the biggest upgrade possible without changing the motherboard! The first PC upgrade I bought was an AMD 5x86-133 for my family's old 486. I also replaced the motherboard since the new one had PCI slots, which also allowed me to upgrade the video card. And I also played a lot of Doom, Doom II, and Duke 3D on that machine! I do like the look of those memory modules you used. The blobs over the chips are a little ugly, but the look of the PCB makes up for it, and it does mean they're very low-profile, which is also nice. I recently soldered up some new modules based on some NOS Toshiba chips I bought from the US America last year and some other NOS Mitsubishi chips I bought from eBay in 2020 for the parity bit, using an updated version of my 4MB memory module design. While the modules failed testing in my SIMCheck, it was just the parity bit, and the Toshiba memory tested fine at 40ns despite being rated at 60ns. These would be very good for overclocking if I can figure out why the parity bits failed (or just use them without the parity bit chips). It's possible I just happened to get a couple of bad chips in a row, so I designed some modules that took SOJ test sockets which would allow me to test all the chips before soldering them onto the modules. I also ordered them from the US America, but they sent me sockets that took 0.35" wide chips instead of 0.3", so they don't work. I think I might have to order the sockets from a genuine reseller in Europe or the UK, rather than some random dodgy website in the US America. But such is the trials and tribblations of designing electronics for vintage computers.

[@clintthompson4100]

Loved the video. I would of loved to have one of the Kingston or PNY upgrades(have both now) when I still had my Tandy 3200 Machine. I wonder what performance gain it would have got. I also Ordered a Weitek 2265-060-GCD ALU to add to my collection. Got to say Thank You Peter for this channel and your channel has really pushed my love of vintage computers and components and I have been collecting more and more vintage parts and especially old CPUs. Thanks again and have a good one.

[@ProjektSUN]

I think an interesting test would be how far can you push (overclock) that 486 16MHz CPU!?

[@CPUGalaxy]

There is definitely more to try with that setup. you are right. 😊

[@ProjektSUN]

@@CPUGalaxy Maybe time to bust out the peltier cooler again?

[@joefish6091]

It's a broken DX, it's already been binned ie testef for speed and found lacking.

[@Mindrax]

Great video. Blast from the past :)

[@5roundsrapid263]

3:38 The second “u” in “Quadruple” is pronounced less like “couple” and more like “strudel”. It is an odd word for a German speaker! Great video. 👍

[@EgoShredder]

As a native English speaker we pronounce it Qwod-roo-pel. The Google Translate page says it correctly with the audio 'Listen' function.

[@ghydda]

Lovely video, congrats. However I think the slow graphics performance on the original CPU was partly due to the clock divider was set to run the ISA bus at a 1/3 of the system memory clock, and once the system got switched to 33MHz, the ISA bus got a very needed boost as well.

[@Aruneh]

That beep had me laughing. Great video!

[@CrassSpektakel]

Overclocking a 5x86 to 160Mhz is actually really easy and stable. I have used 5x86@160Mhz a lot and still have one in my basement. So you could also call it a 1000% upgrade.

[@homerotl]

That mod at the end. I love that music. It is from Epic Pinball?

[@CPUGalaxy]

The music at the end is from pinball dreams 2. 😊

[@HighTreason610]

Mid-1992, which seems to be when the board was made, sure makes it rather late for a 16MHz machine. While it won't catch a PCI or VLB system with the Turbo Chip installed, I do often think ISA only boards are more capable than maybe some people give them credit for.

[@Mr_Meowingtons]

@2:34 i legit laughed out loud

[@RetroKomodo]

Really interesting to watch! I'm currently getting an Apricot FT//e machine back up and running, and it has the same Turbochip. I'll be using Phil's DOS benchmark (like you) to see how well mine does!

[@erichkohl9317]

Wow, I had a 486DX/33 in 1993, but this is in a whole other league!

[@AiOinc1]

Please remember to remove that Varta barrel battery before it eats that board! The 16MHz CPU is not fast enough to make a difference with your BIOS settings. Something faster like a DX2 might benefit, though. Interesting that despite nearly 10x clock speed you gain just over 2x memory bandwidth over the 16MHz chip with less L1 cache and the original slower RAM + small L2 cache. Useless!

[@Skungalunga]

*Quadrooopled* Yes English is a horrible language.

[@CPUGalaxy]

😵‍💫

[@TzOk]

Why are you using this old v2.00 beta 3 version of the XT-IDE Universal BIOS? There are much more recent builds.

[@javi30nkp]

whe we see a 486 master race pc ? , best 486 , best video card VLC or PCI, best fast ram , gbest motherboard ? and a good soun blaster card :) , of course 486 with a stable OC greattttttttttttttt !!!!!!!!! thx for back again

[@memadmax69]

Its pronounced: quad-drew-pled (quadrupled)

[@CPUGalaxy]

thx 😅

[@amedvedev]

you have 16 mhz cpu bus speed and memory linkled to it works fast enought byself so cache not much faster - set 33 or 40 or 50 bus and cache will play more significant role. also you should enable WRITE BACK caching (its disabled) - cache will be more noticeable and probably you can set even lower timings on isa etc. also you 133 chip internal chache also working as WT (probably) may be it can be enabled in WB mode?

[@CPUGalaxy]

with the Kingston Chip the bus was clocked at 33 MHz. and all timings are already at the maximum/minimum. WB is not supported and the board freezes when I turn this on in the Bios.

[@amedvedev]

@@CPUGalaxy oh ok i understand. btw wb absense makes cache role not so sharp and also internal 133 cache can be wb or wt switched probably but may be chipset support or jumper needed for that? 486 was always jumper mess =))) especialy when you try to run latest chips or pentium overdrive on early / middle motherboards

[@RetroTinkerer]

That Kingston upgrade, it had to be really something to make such a performance jump back then, from zero to hero!

[@railsrust]

While somewhat impractical, I could actually see a lot of businesses justifying an upgrade like this to get more life out of the overpriced office computer. Pretty cool!

[@Alcochaser]

Ohh man, that BIOS by default really hobbles that poor 486SX-16, it gets no respect. The ISA bus is set by default to 1/4 the CPU clock speed. (The setting with the value 1/4 ACLK) 4MHZ!, you were running those ISA cards at slower then even a 4.77mhz XT would! I would re-run that benchmark with it set to 1/2 at least. 1/4 is fine for 33mhz chips, but your just nuking yourself with that on a 16mhz.

[@abzzeus]

Usage? Industrial / speciaiised? That'd be my guess like how you can still buy motherboards with ISA slots in 2024. When the cost of the PC

[@SidneyCritic]

I guess the memory wasn't the bottleneck at 16MHz- lol -.

[@tytusromek9267]

Interesting what you could get out of old platforms / sockets in the past. No longer possible, always "buy a new mainboard". The socket games from Intel1150,1151,1156,1155.... Socket change from 1156 to 1155 was unnecessary :/ To the CPU since it is a low voltage CPU, this has possibly really good OC potential, if maybe mount there a heat sink and fan.

[@gaborszucs8935]

!!!! HELP needed from clever fellow retro nerds !!!! Anybody knows what could cause cache related issues on my 486 system? Speedsys hardlocks straight after the ide test but before the ram test both with and without F5 before dos loads. If i turn the cache off and remove the chips its okay. Also norton sysinfo freezes and if i open system info in norton commander as well. Tried 2 different motherboards, many different cpu-s (33sx, 66dx, 100overdrive, 133amd), both writeback and writethrough mode, and 4 sets of cache chips 2 sets each motherboard. All the same error...... everything else seems working fine. Doom timedemo, windows, games. Cache chk run through and found no problems... im at my wits end and the only thing i can think of is perhaps BIOS (?).... the two motherboards are an intel r/r+ and a siemens nixdorf d819 with same set of 2x16mb 60ns fpm ram (but tried different ones too).

[@LouisWaweru]

I didn’t realize the Overdrive brand went back to the 80s, and that the 486 was already so old. I can still remember them in the mid 90s when I first became aware of Intel. My father got us a Tandy 1000 RL in the early 90s. So it’s extra shocking that the 8088 or 8086 that was in it was still being sold for quite a lot of money at the time (especially for poor us!) when these rather advanced technologies had already matured to mass production and enhancement iterations by third parties even. Man, I loved that computer, but I almost feel ripped off for my family. Quadruple: qua-droop-le

[@wishusknight3009]

The lack of difference at 16mhz may be attributed to auto timings already being as aggressive as allowed. Also AT clock of 4mhz for default? no, no chance. I think it may actually be 1/2 already.. 1/3 would still only be 5.6mhz.

[@sandmanxo]

I had a friend that had a 486sx20, never ran across a 16mhz chip in the wild though. The 20Mhz chip was terribad, i cant imagine slowing it down by 20% more. I eventually gave him my 5x86 build once i got my Pentium 120 system until he finally upgraded to a Pentium 200 a year later or so.

[@Radek__]

5:53 Such memories... I had this bios in my first pc in 1993 (386 dx 40mhz). It is funny feeling, when you're messing with settings there, which I still remember.

[@StrangelyIronic]

I built a couple 386 and 486 machines using parts salvaged from the computer/storage room at my dad's office back in the late 90s, but at home I learned programming and computers in general on already an old but still fun Apple IIGS and Mac IIci, both loaded with the best upgrades you could get because they were gifted from my uncle that saved them from the design and printing place he managed the computers for. I missed out a lot on DOS and Win 3.1/95 and when we did build a computer for be at home I went straight to a Pentium and 98SE. That said, I still use the IIGS and IIci for fun programming but haven't really gone back to older PC stuff (love videos on it though). I never played a ton of games, I just read books on Assembly and C, the two options I had the tools for on both, so I don't have the same nostalgia a lot of people do. I focused more on writing graphics/music programs, my own games, and IIGS demos.

[@Radek__]

12:57 you pluged 8MB ram in, and on the screen is 008064KB. For what are those two zeros on the beginning? 486 16MHz, is able to support 16MB or 32MB? That sounds insane