These AMD 486 CPUs Are Not What They Appear!

[@PhoticSneezeOne]

A 486 CPU in a Gameboy cartridge shell = Nostalgia overload

[@pillepolle3122]

Fits perfectly

[@stevef6392]

Didn't Intel put a Pentium Pro CPU in a SNES cartridge? 😉

[@arubberroomwithrats]

i haven't lived through the 80s but i'm pretty sure they didn't put 486's in gameboy boxes back them 😭😭

[@qqken8010]

Damn dude what a throwback

[@AncapDude]

lol didn't notice before reading your comment. awesome.

[@Markworth]

It's a lot of fun to see these old CPUs just casually overclocking like crazy like this. Makes me wish there had been something like a generation of Chinese made 486 clones produced with modern fabrication. 1GHz 486 would give me a lot of joy for no particular reason.

[@tezcanaslan2877]

Doesnt CPU’s like that exist in embedded solutions?

[@Markworth]

@@tezcanaslan2877 In a round about way, Vortex86DX is effectively like that. It's effectively an i486 built on 90nm process with up to 1GHz clock that can use up to 1GB of 333MHz DDR2 RAM. On paper, that is really cool, and benchmarking it would be funny. Alas, some of the fun with building PCs in this 486/586 generation is putting together all the cards you want and stuffing it in a case. Can't really have that kind of fun with a tiny SoC thing.

[@VndNvwYvvSvv]

I remember Coppermines being popular because +80 to 100% overclock was pretty easy with basic cooling and motherboards.

[@slaapliedje]

@@VndNvwYvvSvv Celeron 300A that everyone, and I mean everyone, overclocked to 450 easily. That was the largest free bump in speed I remember there ever being. These days, people sit there and try and itch out another 100mhz or so, but it doesn't seem to actually make much difference when you're running 4-5ghz machines. But getting an extra 150mhz from a 300mhz part? That kicked some ass!

[@Jeroensgambling]

Newer nodes obviously have better tech. You might also say why not put the FX bulldozer in a now 4nm packaging and have it running at 5.5Ghz while consuming only 125W of power. The arch is still "bad"

[@pc-sound-legacy]

I didn't know AMD sold faster 486 CPUs as slower ones back in the days. I had an 5x86 133 myself, it was a great and cheap alternative to the very expensive Pentiums.

[@SirReptitious]

Yep my old room mate and I each built systems using the 5x86 and they were great. I kept that until I built my next system which was a Cyrix 166MHz.

[@omegarugal9283]

back then overclocking wasnt as easy as today, people didnt try going THAT far so no one knew what the limit was

[@OpSic66]

At the time, AMD had some very stringent testing requirements. Many of the top tier CPU's that would not meet testing criteria were throttled back and sold as slower speed units. In many cases, it was thermals testing they weren't happy with. All of us who were into overclocking, dealt with high thermals anyways, and as long as it was stable no one cared.

[@marisakirisame867]

Me burned my 5x86 right after overclockin' it

[@mstover2809]

It was fairly common for them to relable parts when they ran out of the "Correct" part.

[@donskiver]

Man this takes me back...using jumpers to set clock speeds and voltages. Kinda miss those days.

[@M0UAW_IO83]

Used to love the 386 and 486 days, lots of fun overclocks, you could reliably use 386 chips at least one speed grade higher and often two, the 486 chips were a revelation, so much fun to be had with multipliers, voltages etc and none of them were 'locked down' like they are now.

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

Great video! The best overclock I think I ever got was just the 50% Celeron 300A overclock... Boring in comparison!

[@GiovanniBardazzi333]

In my life i only managed a 30% overclock on a C2Q Q6600 from 2.4 to 3.4GHz T_T but that wasn't even comparable whit retro overclocking...

[@SobieRobie]

Some of 300A (and every 300 I believe) were stable @112MHz bus. So try again ;)

[@Nordlicht05]

​@@GiovanniBardazzi333I had a duo wich came from around two ghz to 3. The Mainboard supported an FSB of 400mhz and that's what did

[@Pasi123]

The highest overclock I have is "50%" on a X5670. 22x200 for 4.4GHz from the stock 22x133 2.93GHz, but because of turbo boost it would turbo up to 3.33GHz even at stock

[@pablopicasso6173]

@@SobieRobie At 500 MHz was able to smoothly decode divx movies. It was awesome.

[@pik33100]

In good old times I and 2 of my friends, computer geeks, bought the fresh, nevest invention - AMD 486SX25. These CPU all worked well at 40 MHz, but not without cooling, so we had to order coolers and wait for them as they were not popular yet. While waiting for the cooler, one of my friend filled the jar with water, put the lid on and placed it with the metal lid down on the CPU. A water cooled 486 :) - it worked :) The most overclocked CPU I used was a Pentium 166 overclocked to 250 MHz. A modern hardware that still can be overclocked a lot, is a Raspberry Pi Pico, 133 MHz standard clock, that can run way over 400 MHz, and Parallax Propeller 2, they said 180 MHz in the datasheet, 340 MHz possible on every chip.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for your comment! I have a few 486 SX models that I’d love to try to overclock too. Very interesting about the raspberry pi pico! I didn’t realize that 🙂

[@marisakirisame867]

Bro really into early water coolin

[@blunderingfool]

Jar-cooled processors, now there's a delightfully wild story! :D

[@Jblow-u2m]

​@@vswitchzero4x for the pico is suspect 🤔 never heard of that level of overclock.

[@bitsundbolts]

Very interesting. I guess it is time to go through my AMD 486 CPUs now. Great find!

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for watching! 🙂

[@retroboby007]

Awesome video man. That overclocked 486 at 160mhz is insane. I did checked my colection and found an 486 DX4-100SV8B with manufacturing date 36 week of 1996. It had 16kb L1 cache, so I switch the jumpers and now it detects AMD DX5 - P75 - 133. Suuper! Thanks for sharing the discovery.

[@vswitchzero]

Awesome! Thanks for sharing :)

[@KurtRichterCISSP]

I LOVED their graphics demo executables back in the day. I've never been able to track them down. As a teen programmer I emailed or wrote the author asking how they got all those different screen resolutions and they introduced me to Assembly ❤️

[@cyberpotato63]

Back in the mid-90s a friend of mine sold me a DX4-100 system for next to nothing. I soon upgraded it to an AMD-X5-133ADW that I bought used. Discovered overclocking soon after and moved the frontside bus up to 160. Ran it that way for about three years and gave it to my sister who ran it for about as long. It was a rock solid overclock.

[@SobieRobie]

5x86@160 is nothing unusual (in a fact I have a CPU with 160 marking printed on it, "not official" of course) but this DX2/66, wow, it's a beast! Congratulation on finding this rare animal! I'm starting my own hunt ;)

[@mytube9182]

My first CPU was a 80286. I didn't get a chance for upgrade till I passed the entrance exam for a famous university and my mom bought me a Pentium 100 MHz PC as celebration gift. Most of my campus friends were still using AMD 486 DX2 or DX4 which I kinda admitted that the fast ones like DX4-120 weren't so slower than mine. I was quite familiar with these uncommon 486s from AMD because I was often asked by my friend to help when their PCs got a problem with, or they wanted to upgrade to / reinstall Windows 95 which was a whole new OS at the time after DOS+Windows 3.11 for workgroup we've been with quite a long time.

[@HighwinderShow]

I absolutely loved my AMD DX4-120 computer that I built back in the 90s. Still have it, full tower, with original drives and fans. Sounds like a jet airliner starting up, it;'s GLORIOUS. :-)

[@xfragboix]

That's the one I had in my first PC as well (or rather, my older brother had). Came with Doom 2, Duke Nukem 3D and F-16 Retaliator preinstalled, fun times

[@robertopadrinopelado]

Ese DX4-120 era una muy económica solución ... yo tuve uno en una placa base Soyo. Saludos

[@GiovanniBardazzi333]

This "late 486s" rebadge thing was unknown to me...very cool! i wish i have a 486 board on hand! Great video!

[@lucasrem]

GiovanniBardazzi333 Too many Super Socket 7 build we kept here, need one ? Compaq Presario ? HP ? ASUS deluxe ? K8N ? some do BIOS clock, some jumpers only, some bad ass Presario did supported AMD too ! on any speed ! Sold as CPU in it, what was it ? Nobody knew back then, some non Pentium model but faster, LOL ! happy to send them to people that need it !

[@TTULangGenius]

Thank you for the trip down memory lane! In 1995 (when I was 14), my parents had our first family computer built. It was an AMD 486 like the ones shown in here, but it was at 120 MHz. It had Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS 6.22 on it. It also had 16MB of RAM and like, a 500MB hard drive. I also got my first taste of MS DOS gaming with the OG Doom on it! I also played master pieces like King's Quest V and Torin's Passage on it. Now I want to rebuild that PC after watching this, LOL

[@DanielGT_93]

That is an incredible fsb overclock! My max was with palermo sempron in socket 754, using jumpers in the socket to rise vcore, got from 1.6Ghz to 2.7Ghz. This with 2gb of ram and an 9600gt was my firt enthusiast pc.

[@lucasrem]

DanielGT_93 Super Socket 7 was the last for both, sad ? 754 was there first socket, giant leap, but i needed it on day one. We Germans got in weeks in advance, the AMD Chips too, Taipei direct from a shipment to Germany, AMD Dresden. ASUS did test us, Was it any good ? Big WOW for ASUS back then, the sis people that did the Nvidia sound storm chips, Nforce 350. It did do Dolby and all over nForce chips, S/P TOSLINK, AGP was better then PCI in these days. And it all worked ! Magic ! We got driver released by the hour, straight from ASUS Taipei, they did all the work for AMD and Nvidia here ! ASUS did that themselves ! Helping AMD do this, showing that the socket was 100% good ! Good enough for nay gamer it was, not supported by the industry only ? It was Dual Voodoo in SLi here still, TNT was the Windows accelerator only, Nvidia was not good enough back then to run games in 3d. Not getting SLi on 754, only AGP back then ! One gen later it was !

[@clintthompson4100]

Just a few weeks ago I bought one of AMD DX-2 66Mhz with the 16KB L1 and also just bought the same AMD DX4 100Mhz. It nice to know I got something even better than I thought. Great video.

[@IronwingTechHaven]

I remember back in the day I hooked up my turbo button to a jumper on the motherboard to overclock my Pentium 133 to 150MHz and I thought it was so cool. I had no clue you could overclock these 4/586 chips so much. Super cool video.

[@ausnorman8050]

Takes me back to the 90's where my Dad would get a new SD/DX chip and i'd get the hand me down. Serial port networking Doom hahah good times!

[@CosmoRiderDE]

I have one of these "enhanced DX4" too, labeled as Am486DX4-120, does everything the regular Am5x86 does. 160Mhz at stock Voltage, no problem. 16kb L1 WB Cache.... These are gems

[@vswitchzero]

Nice! The DX4 120s are quite rare compared to other AMD 486s. I have a non-enhanced write-through version but not the enhanced one.

[@ahabwolf7580]

Fascinating! Looking forward to that in-depth overclocking video you mentioned!

[@iAPX432]

Reminds me of my Pentium-75 running at 100 Mhz or my Celeron-600 running at 800 Mhz. Great bang for the buck! You show incredible overclocking and incredible value at that time!

[@HattoriZero]

I own the AMD DX4-100 as my first PC & I did overclock it to 133Mhz back in 1995 even with the threat of crystallization and degradation of the core. When running X-COM 2 : Terror from the Deep, the game's enemy round ran so fast at every turn, saving a lot of waiting time.

[@lucasrem]

Super Socket 7 we called it ! He found it now, LOL ! he was not born then ! Run Alias Wavefront maya on it, AMD Dresden CPU's ! sneller bitte !

[@VIRAL_DNA]

Oh this brings back memories, how I miss those days, things were more exciting then they are today... The joy is gone. Thanks for keeping a little slice of the past alive in this very informative video :)

[@lucasrem]

he never used the word Super 7 here ! was not born, LOL !

[@VIRAL_DNA]

@@lucasrem The board he was using in this video was not a Super 7 board, the FSB doesn't support 100MHz.

[@the_kombinator]

I had a 5x86 in 1997 - It was quite capable. I bought a P150 that same year and still have a variant of it running at 233MMX to this day.

[@thomaslechner1622]

In 1997, I had already a K6-233!

[@ekspatriat]

A bonus with those CPUs of the era is you were not scared of handling them.

[@xBruceLee88x]

Eh just don't drop it to far

[@ronny332]

Most of the limitations of those CPUs came from the mainboards. The 486 platform was set to obsolete by Intel, so AMD and Cyrix hat to live with what was standardized by Intel before. It took a while until the mainboard manufactures upgraded the cpu multiplieres on the MoBos and changed the needed voltages. I can remember me having a "133 MHz" AMD back in the day but being unable at first to drive it at its desired clock. A MoBo swap made it happen and even higher speeds was was great to have but without a chance against even the slowest P60 with calculation errors 🙂.

[@kyorin6526]

I was under the impression that the 486 DX4/120 and upwards were very competitive with the first Pentium's.

[@Cinkodacs]

@@kyorin6526 Depending on the use-case. Some programs took advantage of the Pentium at a level that made them extremely slow on these fast 486s. This was still back when hardware level optimization was needed.

[@ronny332]

@@kyorin6526 the pentiums were cache monsters for it's time. Many of the 486 cpus only had 8kb. So most every access to data went to RAM what's until today is the slowest part for data already read from disk/net.

[@Fifury161]

I really wish I had this information back in the 1990s! The best overclock I ever achieved was the slot based Celeron 300A CPU!

[@MrMotorNerd]

Thanks for the flashback ....

[@baluba006]

The famous 300A :) it was just crazy during that period

[@philscomputerlab]

I'm curious about the CPU containers in the beginning pleaase...

[@vswitchzero]

Hi Phil! These are aftermarket gameboy cartridge cases. You can find packs of 10 for cheap on places like Amazon. Just cut a piece of anti-static foam and most CPUs fit great 👍

[@philscomputerlab]

​@@vswitchzeroAwesome 👍

[@Chris-yc3mm]

Been looking for affordable cases for years. This looks like a super good idea

[@csongor48]

These chips are still used to this day in industrial equipment running windows embedded. Particularly siemens hmi touch panels

[@misterRobbi]

I was able to overclock my 486 dx4 to 180mhz back in the day it was some serious performance gain to play games like quake

[@josephalbrecht3735]

A verying interesting and informative video. 25+ years after these chips have been produced we are stilling learning things about. That to me is the best part of vintage computing not so much the hardware, but the story behind it.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks so much 🙂

[@_derSammler]

I have an AMD 486 DX2-66 from week 38, 2000 and an AMD 486 DX5-133 from week 50, 1999. They made these for a very long time. (and yes, DX5, not DX4 - it says that on the chip)

[@soylentgreenb]

Those were almost certainly for ”single board industrial computers” used to control CNC machines and similar; not for home users.

[@TheLionAndTheLamb777]

@@soylentgreenb I've seen em before in computers here and there but rarely.

[@TheLionAndTheLamb777]

The AM5x89 line like your DX5 had twice the L1 cache 16K instead of 8K.

[@Elrinth]

holy shit, this is insane! :) Lovely video. Our first home computer was a Intel 486 DX4 100Mhz. Played lots of Doom2, Warcraft 1&2, Duke3D, Diablo 1. Where some of the games actually had some trouble (like Diablo1) and other games ran perfectly (Doom2, Duke3D, etc)

[@angieandretti]

Wow, an 80MHz FSB 486! That's wild!!

[@EternalxFrost]

I'm a big fan of 386 and 486 systems, and I overclocked a lotttttt of those back in my teenage years, as I had a computer teacher giving me those old parts mainly to get rid of them. I've seen lots of interesting results, but that DX2-66 really impressed me to no end. I never seen a 486 running stable with an 80 MHz front side bus at 160 MHz. Especially considering that it's labeled as a 66 MHz. An hidden gem right there. And considering it could reach that, there is probably a way to push the clock speed even further with a slower front side bus and a higher multiplier. I'd be curious to see if it would boot with 75 MHz x3 or 66 x4, probably at 3.6V. Insane chip, probably a die towards the center of the silicon wafer. You should make a video specifically for that chip. :) Great videos all around by the way, keep up the good work !

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks very much! :-) .. Unfortunately, this DX2/66 chip couldn't do anything beyond 160MHz. It was totally stable at 160MHz and 3.45V (2x80MHz) and 150MHz (3x50MHz) but it refused to post at 180MHz (3x60MHz) with anything less than 4.0V. Even at 4.0V it wasn't stable enough to boot into DOS. This kind of wall beyond 160MHz is very common on all late-model AMD 486s including Am5x86s in my experience. I'd definitely like to buy a few more of these to see if I get lucky and get a better sample. Thanks for your comment!

[@EternalxFrost]

@@vswitchzeroI think you could get it to post at 200 MHz with a 4x50 ratio and 3.6V. I had a really late stepping of the Am5x86 back in my early days twiggling around with those systems (it was just before the K5 was released, that stepping was labeled as 5K86 instead of 5x86) and remember being able to pull off a 198 MHz clock, with 3x66 ratio @ 3.6V. It was rock solid but ONLY and ONLY if I had horrible cache and memory timings, but it was a beast to play Doom and I even could run Win98 on it without any stability issues. So I guess maybe a 4x50 @ 3.6V could do it, sometimes you can pierce the wall with slower bus but higher multi, and looser timings. I also know that sometimes, when it's on the edge of instability, it's not really because of the chip itself, but expansion cards not supporting the higher bus. It is especially the case with graphic cards, as they tend to be more sensitive to it. The Tseng Labs cards tend to be less erratic, more stable, and with higher PCI bus frequency they can achieve INSANE memory throughputs in benchmarks. Another way you could pull this off is by using a jumper switch to trick the board after it POST'ed, and you could easily measure it with a POST analyser card on the PCI bus (as it's the one that matters for the FSB, granted you use a PCI motherboard, otherwise on a socket 2/3 full ISA or even VLB without PCI would be close to impossible). Using the POST analyser you start it at a setting that is example 3x50, and just after it booted and the PCI bus frequency is stabilized, you toggle the switch to increase it to 4x (you could pull off the same thing with the FSB, while keeping the default / lower multiplier). That's what I did back in the days to kind of " ghostwalk " the 160 MHz barrier. It's clever but it works. CPU Galaxy pulls off that trick in his 200 MHz 5x86 subzero cooling overclock video. But that 2x80 was really super impressive, I'm amazed to no end you could even get it to post at that insanely high FSB. Hope it helps ! :-)

[@D3M3NT3Dstrang3r]

Got into PC hardware after 486 so I have not seen some of these cpus, but this was a very interesting find and video. I would be one very happy person if I had one of these at the time and figured out the big free upgrade contained within!

[@usern4metak3ns]

I always felt that some of those old chips ran better than their numbers said they should. interesting computer times back then

[@stevesloan6775]

I can remember using a 386 to produce my first ever digital graphics using “Paint” from memory… must of been 1994 from memory. I now have a duel xeon with 16 dimm slots.😊😂🇦🇺🤜🏼🤛🏼😎☮️

[@bjwoodruff]

I had that DX4 when i was growing up. Great CPU.

[@TheXev]

I'd love to see some Cyrix content. From my experience as a kid tinkering with mine and friends computers, Cyrix used to be really common (I'd never even seen an AMD CPU until the K6-2) . My first 486 was a AST Cryix DX4 66Mhz.... then my first custom build PC was using the Cyrix PR133+ (at 100Mhz). There are some interesting bits of history regarding those CPUs and Quake as well.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for the comment! I did an upgrade CPU showdown video a while back and looked at the Cyrix 5x86 but would love to look more into some Cyrix 486s and the 6x86 one of these days 👍

[@bigdawg1353]

Cyrix processors were unstable in my experience - windows 98 kept locking up !!

[@pixelpiet4211]

Back then, my father bought a PC from Compaq for 7,000 DM. It was a 486 dx 100. I don't know the graphics card because it was a compact device, similar to a Mac. But was able to play Duke Nukem 3D with SVGA. My first contact with a PC.

[@Phantomwiz1985]

I loved how good things were back in the day. It’s so much different now. I loved my little cyrix 133mhz chip. Was a beast. Over clocking was so good and returned decent results. I had a 1.4ghz thunderbird that would run stable at 1.7ghz and it took hardly any effort to get it there. Now days it’s hard to squeeze that much without some serious time and cooling. Again a great video and i look forward to the next one. Love it

[@EdDale44135]

I swear I had a 100mhz 486 DX, so no multiplier, back in the day.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks so much! :-)

[@bigdawg1353]

Cyrix processors in my experience were very unreliable and Windows 98 kept locking up!

[@Zerbey]

Ahh the venerable X5-133. What a great CPU, I loved mine.

[@Arti9m]

Notice the number 25544 in the lower left corner. It is the only marking that's really important, denoting the CPU core inside. They are all pretty much the same, except the -66 part has its die wired for 2x/3x instead of 4x/3x multipliers.

[@vswitchzero]

Interesting! Will look more into this 👍

[@l3lue7hunder12]

CPUs at that time and up until the socket A used to be re-labeled or / and binary coded to specific models a lot in order to reduce production costs through reducing the number of production lines.

[@cpu_duke]

Very neat! I will immediately check my collection....continue the great work!

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks so much! 🙂

[@ace2ersatzhandy383]

Man, your channel is a trip down memory lane. And the crazy thing is, even though I haven't touched a 486 chip in well over two decades, it's all fresh in my mind.

[@max_uaminecraft1827]

And here i am thinking my 50% overclock on a 6 core xeon x5675 is good. There was a lot more headroom available to the old chips compared to the auto overclocoing that happens these days with intel turbo boost etc.

[@maliggno4198]

Really cool! Now I'm searching for any of these gems in my collection 🤣🤣🤣. Grats for the video!

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks! 😁

[@JapanPop]

I always overclocked my AMD DX4s to 120. I pushed my AM5x86-133s to 150 as well. Good old days. Those Baby AT towers and their thermals, though, would lead to some crashing. But hey, you could avoid getting a P-100!

[@KitsuneVoss]

Never overclocked it but had an AM5x86 chip. At the time I really loved that CPU.

[@Bob-of-Zoid]

Oh the memories of my 486 times. so after my 8086, 286, and 386 times! You could overclock those way more than you can the newer processors. At the much smaller architecture sizes these days, and the fact they are already closer to whats physically possible, you just can't get that much more out of them even if unlocked, and you are much more likely to cause damage if you push it. The most mind blowing speed increase for me was not a processor, but my first SSD! I was like:😯😮🤯🥳🥳🥳 I was always an AMD guy. I liked how that little company competed with intel and at a great price. To this day I run AMD processors on my own builds, and they have served me very well. Of course now I can transfer 1TB of data faster than it took my 486 to boot!😂Don't even get me started on 12kb modems!!!🤭

[@jrherita]

That’s really cool about the 5x86’s declocked to 66 MHz. I used a 5x86-133 @ 160 for my primary PC for a few years. The only ‘insane’ overclocks I was aware of back in the day were the 16 and 20 MHz 486SX’s. I also had a 486DX-25 that ended up at 48 MHz. (Either it or the board I had would not work at 50 - but a 48 MHz oscillator.. no problem)

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for your comment! I'm looking forward to trying out some low-clock SX CPUs to see how far they go :-)

[@carlpeters8690]

I miss the days of easy overclocks. I had P166 that ran @ 200 with just a simple jumper change. An easy 20% and I probably could have got more but never even tried. Now everything is binned at max speed and overclocks are rare and tiny.

[@lucasrem]

carlpeters8690 We called it Super Socket 7, 220 was the max we ever did, on AMD Dresden CPU in 1996. some over voltage only, getting very hot, water block only on it. Stable build it was, we kept that 20 years. Unable to install Windows 8 on it killed it.

[@Ts6451]

Arguably, sharing silicon across multiple products is currently AMD's main strategy seeing as they have been using the same core complex dies for their desktop Ryzen, Threadripper and Epyc lines of CPUs for a few generations now, and with their latest Zen 4 series, they have even started using them for laptops. As for the low overclocking headroom of modern CPUs, I expect that this is partly because the manufacturers have developed more advanced binning tests, so they can find the chips that will work optimally with specific products in their lineup, and partly that modern CPUs have features that allow them to automatically regulate stuff so they run closer to the limit out of the box. And, of course, the progression of clock speeds have slowed way down, if those limits hadn't existed, we probably would have seen high single digit GHz clocks by the end of the 2000s, over the 2010s we would have seen clocks going into the 10s of GHz, and by now we would be looking at 100s of GHz.

[@silicon212]

This reminds me of the AMD "Applebred" CPU, the Thoroughbred sold as a Duron CPU -1400, 1600 and 1800 clock speeds ... you could use a pencil to 'recreate' the traces on the top of the CPU that set the features and have a fully functioning Thoroughbred Athlon with the full 256mb L1 cache.

[@Anubisviech]

I remember my dad overclocking his dx-2 to 160 Mhz, i just don't remember which one he had. I know that i had mine, which was 40 Mhz passive cooled, overclocked to stable 80 by adding a fan. This was a very common thing to do. It just looks surprising from todays point of view, where you rarely get a few % more. The last thing that i overclocked at least nearly as much was a Phenom X6 1100T which ran stable at 4.2 Ghz with the protective film on the 240 AIO, that i forgot to remove. The trick was to use a far newer motherboard that could actually deliver enough power to this monster.

[@brulsmurf]

the amd486 dx4 100 mhz was my first cpu. paired up with a wopping 4mb of ram and a 800mb harddisk.

[@tomking6006]

Oh man, I had that very keyboard and mouse once! I still reckon that was one of the best mice I've ever used.

[@vswitchzero]

Agreed! Those old optical intellimouse models were awesome :)

[@BrassicGamer]

Holy crap, Mike! 🤣 It does make me wonder how many 'special' chips are sitting there in people's collections, underused and undiscovered. I initially got quite excited because I've got an SV8B from my original 486 system back then, but it's dated 1994 and I strongly doubt it's am X5. Obviously I'll have to check. Socket 3 remains my favourite platform in the history of PCs.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for the comment! Socket 3 and 486s will always have a special place in my heart. My family's first PC was an old IBM 286 clone of some sort, but it wasn't until I got a 486 DX2/66 that I really got into computers and PC gaming. I have so many fond memories from that time :)

[@BAB520AZ]

Seeing the picture of the 2 486 chips brought back some old memories 😊 i remember playing around with my dads old intel 386 sx and intel 486 dx back when i musta been like 5-8 years old back in the mid to late 80s. I remember when i upgraded from 25MHz (haha yeah Megahertz not Gigahertz for all the kids out there) a blazing 50MHz. i was most likely kicking some ass in some Doom or playing old school G. T. A. With the birds eye view rather than first person. i had some good times gaming back then playing over dial up against friends in things like duke nukem 3d, war craft, command and conquer, postal. Road rash, red neck rampage.... And so many other pillars of gaming history haha

[@66mhzbrain]

Cool, like you say it's like what they did with gpu hobbling etc. But almost like they couldnt be bothered to do it , with the exception of the multiplier on the 66. 🤔

[@FrankHarwald]

Here's a thing: one of my first PCs I owned was a 233MHz Pentium II. I overclocked it to 400MHz & successfully continued to use it for years for actual afterwards without any issues.

[@lucasrem]

FrankHarwald over voltage was the issue, old Socket 7 systems in 1995. In 2000, they kept releasing board for it, mad ? these newer board let these old DX2 and DX 4 chips was faster on higher clock speeds, faster DDR chips on the market too ! Why keep using them in 2006, Socket 775 was the next Sup[er Socket 7 ! same we did on them, fast DDR 3 in it, install Windows 10 x64 ! 1700 is the next super Socket 7, Absolut in 2024 ! Keep the Xeons that support it ! High Watt, is better colling only !

[@kir0nz]

Knew a guy who had one of the AMD 120Mhz 486s. He had a spare mobo and changed one of the crystals on it and got 200Mhz out of it. It was only stable for around 7 minutes in a benchmark(not sure what he was using, long time ago). He submitted it to Tom's hardware and they did a write-up on it. Actually never heard of a DX5 until this video. Don't actuallly know if it was or not. Fairly sure it had DX4 on it.

[@JanusCycle]

Your videos are interesting and fun, thanks! I have a Libretto 50CT that has a Pentium 75. I was hoping it had a Pentium 120 before opening it up, as some 50CTs had this CPU. But downclocked to 75Mhz. At first I was disappointed to only get the 75. But then I realized it would still be fun to overclock. And found the 75 can go well above 120Mhz. It seems quite stable. I still need to do thermal tests though. Why are these CPUs do darn overclockable?

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks so much! It really is amazing how much headroom some of these old chips have 😁

[@jaeger8882]

Those are basically just a 5x86 133 in disguise (the number on the bottom left of the chip is 25544, so they have identical cores) with a 2x/3x multi instead of a 4x/3x. I have a few. If you find a good one, the DX2/66 marked one can do 180mhz (60x3) which is almost a 300% overclock from the marked speed :D :D :D

[@Varangian_af_Scaniae]

I had a 486SX, 25-MHz and IIRC I run it at 66MHz. Those were the days when we could OC 100% or more. My current 3700X only manages 20-ish percent OC.

[@mstover2809]

Thanks, brings back memories from when I was building systems using these types of CPUs. One thing that we had to be aware of was that MOST of the PCI cards at that time didn't seem to like the 50MHz FSB. 40MHz was ok.

[@timc3600]

Ahh, the 486 DX2/66, a great processor for the day. I only ever had one problem overclocking and that was with an AMD Athlon that was rock solid up to the day when it physically went pop about 18 months after install and at a point where I was winning a game. I classed this as the computer cheating, but on the flip side, it created the situation for the next upgrade.

[@Thorsten369]

Did repair a lot of mainboard of that time (Abit / Asus / Aopen / MSI) and those CPU's gives me a lot of flashbacks. Funny part is that you see on the CPU is: Heatsink and Fan reqd which is so standard for many years. Great video, many memories ;)

[@MartinPiper6502]

Oh I remember the Superscape benchmark from many years ago :)

[@TechAmbr]

That's incredible! What a great collection of hidden gems!

[@rickyrico80]

I remember way way back in the mid 90s there were AMDs you could "mod" with a stroke of a pencil. You could enable parts of CPU that didnt pass the quality tests. Sometimes you got a lucky, others were unstable af, or wasn't disabled for the heck of it. It was wild 🤣

[@CptJistuce]

Ahhhh, good ol' thundeerbird Athlons.

[@mstover2809]

@@CptJistuce I found several of the Semperons were actually Athlons that were relabled.

[@CptJistuce]

@@mstover2809 Very nice.

[@xBruceLee88x]

I had a 133mhz adz or something like that amd 486. I overclocked it to 150mhz (or was it 160). I had a total of 56mb 72pin memory. A 512kb opti video card on a VLB board. Had other things with it to but I forget what. Ran 98se well. Handled mpeg video playback, played starcraft well, gameboy and nes emulators.

[@Miasmark]

Already planning on over clocking the bananas out of a 66v16bgc. I already wanted to increase the fsb but the inability to reduce the cpu multiplier on the 5x86 below 3x was making it impossible.

[@LaLaLand.Germany]

Man, I am steaming over the fact that these were thrown away not so long ago and I wasn´t interested to learn what they were about to collect and save some of the old PC hardware. I still have a Pentium II and some AMD chips from the 2000´s and my actual gaming rig is a maxed out 15y old Intel board with the Q9650 and as much Vram as ram (weird, huh?) and I am happily oc´ing it from 3 to 3.2 Ghz. I admire You nerds who have the space and security to save these old rigs.

[@jasonknight1085]

With the "P75" pull the jumper so it's a 3x modifier, then set the FSB to 50mhz (if supported). Trust me, it works, and it actually can give a Pentium 90 a run for its money thanks to the faster BUS. Laugh is even if you don't have 50mhz FSB, the 40mhz for the AMD "40's" at 4x -- only 120mhz -- was often faster than the 133mhz config just because memory speed was more of a bottleneck. VLB and PCI also tended to get a bit of a leg up there. (though not EISA which I always found odd...) Assuming your RAM can keep up. It's technically not even an overclock as it's a valid spec in the pamphlet they originally came with. They just didn't advertise it out load because 50mhz FSB mobo's were far far less common -- just like the DX-50 chips (true 50, not DX/2) they were designed for. My "middling" machine for writing 360k floppies whilst still connecting to my LAN in Windows is that very config... with 128 megs of EDO RAM. Runs Win98 off a CF card shockingly well.

[@dimfre4kske67]

Ow where's the day.... my dx2 66 ran at 200 after changing a couple of jumpers and it was stable.

[@christopherstaples6758]

pretty sure my best decision ever was swapping out p100 for a AMD k6 500 , then their were also socket adapters and multiply switches you could buy to sandwich between mainboard / cpu to do what ever you wanted

[@mikoyangurevic8634]

Four years ago I bought from China two Am486DX4-100V16BGI and two Am486DX2-66V16BGI. Brand new. All of them were built in 2002. They overclocking very easily.

[@quittessa1409]

Best I ever managed in overclocking was a Xeon X5650. 2.66GHz stock I got it to 4.6GHz on the daily with vcore 1.45 and a 200MHz FSB

[@dertechie]

I can see it on a golden sample. Those were basically well binned die shrunk Nehalem, so they would share similar overclocking headroom with the i7-9X0s.

[@ewelmo3921]

Now you did it..... Ill have to dig out a 486 or four.... tech from olden times, with a junk pile to match. Had a contest between a bunch of old geeks... What crazy old gear can we find.... I found a Tandy Color computer with cassette deck! I lost! One of the guys found a Cray 1.... Damn!

[@serpentdarkness8844]

Amazing! Simply amazing! I've had Am486 DX4-120 back in 1996!

[@CyFr]

Damn, i had one of these dx100 chips back in the day. Wish i still had the PC, but I'm pretty sure i sent that to the e-waste.

[@WXSTANG]

I had a Cyrix 486 33 way back in the day and for fun I set the jumpers to DX4 100mhz and it ran. I really never thought anything of it, and had no idea I was overclocking, but I did notice it seemed to run faster and left it that way. lol

[@Connection-Lost]

What I remember is that a cheap HD was more of a bottleneck than a cheap CPU in the 90s. That damn crunching of my ancient 70 MB drive as my 50 mhz 486 waited and waited.... Nowadays the NvME drives leave CPUs in the dust without a top notch 13900 or something.

[@attilavs2]

Even if it was enormous, that's way better than my best OC ever - a +130% on my FX-CG50 calculator xD Although it was bottlenecked by RAM and sucked the batteries dry in a month vs. 5-6 on normal clock

[@Lalasoth]

I had a 5x86 dx4/133 I ran for years at 160mhz People always swore I was lying. I worked at CompUSA at that time. I had a Cyrix 486dcl40 chip which was basically a 486#40mhz that ran on a 386 motherboard before that.

[@MrMotorNerd]

The ol DX4 100 was a killer in the day

[@HyperMAX9001]

There was DX4 120, that was wild. It stomped early pentiums.

[@molochi]

IMO Probably the most amazing goat overclocker was the AMD Duron 600. Cheapest New cpu you could buy at the time and overclocked 67% to over 1GH matching intels flagship p3 performance. #2 was the Celeron 300a that did the same with a 50% oc to equal the p3 450

[@vswitchzero]

Indeed! Both are legendary CPUs. I haven't used many Durons but would love to try to overclock a few. I have a 1GHz mobile low voltage Duron around here somewhere.

[@whoevertf]

Fantastic video as always!

[@vswitchzero]

Thank you! :-)

[@PiDsPagePrototypes]

You need to put those chips in a M/Board with Vesa Local Bus boards for graphics and peripherals. PCI and AGP really only ran at 33Mhz, where VLB ran at the base clock speed, so if you had a 50MHz FSB clock, the graphics ran a lot faster. Wish I'd known this CPU relabling back in the 90's - had 5x-133 based PC used primarialy for an early version of POV-Ray to do animations. I could have rendered larger frames, or more frames, in the same amount of time - usually overnight runs for 320*240 frames, maybe a hundred frame each night.

[@atheatos]

I have a video on this topic. My max bus was 70MHz. Looks like I have to test more M/Bs.... "Binning / Testing 14 Am5x86 CPUs. The 190% Overclock on Am486-DX2-66 and the Unreal 70MHz 486 Bus!"

[@vswitchzero]

Hi Atheatos! Wow that’s awesome, will definitely check out your video 👍 .. I wish I had some better binned 5x86s. My best one boots but is very flaky at 180MHz. This 66MHz chip refuses to post at 180MHz regardless of voltage but is totally solid at 160 and 3.45V. I may pick up a few more to try out 🙂 .. thanks for watching and for the comment.

[@atheatos]

Actually I am still missing a a golden sample one that can do 200Mhz even after binning 15pcs. :/ High speed ones are rare for sure.

[@MSM5500]

3:34 - there is Kyocera logo in the right lower corner that means the chip carrier or package of the processor is provided by Kyoto Ceramic Company.

[@youngbloodk]

Back in the mid 90s I had a 40 MHz Cyrix 486 DX that I ran at 50 MHz with no issues.

[@johng.1703]

back in the day I had one of these running 3x50mhz for a clock of 150 I also remember playing about with a 2x75mhz FSB but I had issues with the ram running at the speed.

[@techdistractions]

Very cool , nice find! 🎉