[HN Gopher] The (Almost) Definitive 486DX/50 Article
___________________________________________________________________
The (Almost) Definitive 486DX/50 Article
Author : ibobev
Score : 103 points
Date : 2023-01-05 11:12 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (brassicgamer.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (brassicgamer.blogspot.com)
| bluedino wrote:
| The 486 was such a massive improvement over the 386. And the
| DX2/66 felt like almost as big of an improvement over the
| 25/33MHz 486's.
|
| The 486 landscape was weird. You had crippled, 386-like versions
| such as the 486DLC/SLC, Intel's DX4's that hit 75 or 100MHz, and
| clones that went up to somewhere around 133MHz (by this time the
| Pentiums had hit the streets, so the 486's on steroids were for
| budget users). And they were often given similar sounding names
| to the 586, to further confuse buyers.
|
| It was amazing, and infuriating, to have your decently high-end
| system basically obsoleted in two generations. And, the DOS to
| Windows transition didn't help matters. It seems really odd in a
| time where you could still be using a 10 year old i7 and be just
| fine.
| bartread wrote:
| > It was amazing, and infuriating, to have your decently high-
| end system basically obsoleted in two generations. And, the DOS
| to Windows transition didn't help matters. It seems really odd
| in a time where you could still be using a 10 year old i7 and
| be just fine.
|
| Indeed, and this went on for a good 10 years - possibly more -
| I think. I remember being annoyed that my decently high end
| system, purchased at the beginning of 2000, could no longer run
| many of the latest games (in some cases not even coming close
| to minimum specs) by early- to mid-2002.
|
| I really stretched myself to buy that system in the first place
| and couldn't afford to replace it for years. I bought a new
| system in 2004 and then didn't buy another until 2011 when I
| moved to laptops and bought a 17" Macbook Pro (by which time it
| too felt very obsolete, whereas that 2011 MBP would still be
| fine if its GPU hadn't desoldered itself in 2017).
|
| Nowadays I run a 7 year old MBP that's still more than capable
| of handling everything I need. Biggest issue is the battery
| life is really starting to suffer.
| retrac wrote:
| > Indeed, and this went on for a good 10 years - possibly
| more - I think.
|
| Many more. An Apple II+ from 1979 was approaching obsolete in
| 1984. An IBM PC from 1985 was obsolete by 1990. A 386 machine
| from 1990 was obsolete by 1995. A Pentium machine from 1995
| was obsolete in 2000. A Pentium III from 2000 was nearly
| obsolete in 2005. This cycle started in the late 70s, and I
| guess continued until computers were "fast enough" for all
| the typical software they might run. Video was the last big
| one. Even very cheap computers are now fast enough to render
| complex documents and display video, more or less instantly
| (at least with the right software). So, for most users they
| subjectively seem "fast enough".
|
| Things do seem more stable these days, in terms of general
| compatibility. A Pentium III machine can still boot a current
| Linux distro, if rather slowly. And 20+ year old USB
| peripherals will still work on a modern machine. That's quite
| a change from the era when a new, incompatible architecture
| or peripheral bus came out every five years.
| techsupporter wrote:
| > Indeed, and this went on for a good 10 years - possibly
| more - I think. I remember being annoyed that my decently
| high end system, purchased at the beginning of 2000, could no
| longer run many of the latest games
|
| I remember this period of very rapid advancement, too. It was
| such a trope in the computer market at the time, Weird Al
| even made fun of it in his lyrics:
|
| _My new computer 's got the clocks, it rocks
|
| But it was obsolete before I opened the box
|
| You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
|
| Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique!
|
| Your laptop is a month old? Well, that's great
|
| If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight_
|
| (It's All About the Pentiums, 1999, "Running with Scissors")
| wpm wrote:
| I just gifted a 2013 MBP to my father after replacing the
| battery. It's a pain in the neck to replace, but fairly
| doable if you're even slightly inclined to hardware repair
| and can read instructions. Worst part was dissolving all the
| glue. Not sure why Apple felt the need to use seemingly
| aviation grade VHB tape to keep the batteries in, but it's a
| lot of acetone and a lot of scraping to get it all off. All
| it took was $90 for the kit and a couple hours.
| anthk wrote:
| I feel your pain. By 2005, my AMD Athlon XP with 256MB of RAM
| and GF2 was junk.
| deckard1 wrote:
| > It was amazing, and infuriating, to have your decently high-
| end system basically obsoleted in two generations.
|
| I remember this all too well. And PCs were _expensive_.
| $2,000-3,000 rigs in 1990 money. Today you can pick up a loaded
| Ryzen laptop for less than _half_ that in 2023 money. Crazy.
|
| In the early '90s I was still on an IBM XT clone from around
| 1986 with CGA graphics and monitor. Few of the new games I
| wanted to play would work on it. It was worse when the 386 came
| out. Today, with a machine built around 2017 and a GTX 1080 I
| can still play most new games just fine.
|
| I do kinda miss when AMD and Intel shared the CPU socket. I had
| a AMD 386dx40, which IIRC Intel never made a 386 that fast.
| yazantapuz wrote:
| We can finally bought a (amd) 386 PC on... 1994, so go figure
| our luck trying playing the most recent games.
| ido wrote:
| 486DLC/SLC were not really "crippled versions", they were
| completely different CPU designs that used the 486 name as
| Intel wasn't able to stop other companies from using a number
| (one of the reasons for naming the next cpu family "pentium"
| which they could trademark/copyright). The crippled versions
| were the 486SXs, which disabled the FPU.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> The crippled versions were the 486SXs, which disabled the
| FPU._
|
| Though for many use cases at the time, that wasn't a massive
| issue. Many games didn't take advantage of the FPU until far
| into the 486 era, they were only starting to when the Pentium
| and its competitors came out (a killer for Cyrix's P5-era
| chips which despite a very strong integer performance had
| terrible floating-point umph).
|
| There were 487 FPU co-processors, to upgrade 486SXs, though
| unlike the 287 and 387 before them they weren't really co-
| processors, they were actually full 486 chips and the main
| CPU was disabled when they were present.
|
| The name caused confusion because SX in 386 meant something
| completely different (there was no built-in FPU to disable):
| a 16-bit data bus instead of 32-bit and 24-bit address bus,
| along with more minor changes, so it would work on cheaper
| motherboards originally designed with 286's in mind.
| bluedino wrote:
| The 486SLC kept the 16-bit bus, but I don't remember what
| it was about the DLC but it was much slower than an Intel
| 486 of the same clockspeed even thought it was a full
| 32-bit chip. I want to say it was something like it still
| used 386 motherboard designs (in both cases).
| myself248 wrote:
| ISTR the SLC introduced SMM that allowed laptops to use
| the main CPU to do things that otherwise would've
| required an elaborate embedded controller.
|
| And thus began the trend of having entire layers of
| functionality in the CPU that were outside the view of
| the OS which thought it was running at ring 0....
| spookthesunset wrote:
| During that time the tech moved so fast it was worthless to try
| to upgrade existing hardware. By the time you wanted to upgrade
| almost everything had changed. New CPU socket, new memory,
| new/faster peripheral bus, etc.
|
| About all you could keep between builds was the case, the
| monitor, the keyboard/mouse and maybe the power supply and
| soundcard.
|
| It was almost always more cost effective to buy a new, much
| larger drive...
| thriftwy wrote:
| Mice also went from COM to PS/2 to USB, though ball mouse
| tended to break down earlier than it became obsolete.
|
| DIN keyboards probably still work, though. No Win key.
| ridgered4 wrote:
| Man ball mice sucked, it seemed like I was always cleaning
| the rollers. I generally am an early adopter of nothing but
| I rushed out to buy that first Microsoft Optical mouse. I
| was still using it on a secondary machine until a couple
| years ago when it finally died.
| hulitu wrote:
| > the 486's on steroids were for budget users
|
| As far as i remember Pentium at 100 MHz was slower than a 486
| DX/4 at 100 MHz
| rograndom wrote:
| I remember seeing one of the first Pentium's, it was either a
| 60 or 66mhz, but it was STUPIDLY fast. Way faster than any
| 486 we had at the time. We were just watching someone play
| Windows 3.11 solitaire on it and laughing when they won
| because the card "waterfall" animation took what felt like 1
| second to complete. It was probably longer, maybe 3-4
| seconds, but on our 486's it was probably 10-15 seconds.
| mschaef wrote:
| > As far as i remember Pentium at 100 MHz was slower than a
| 486 DX/4 at 100 MHz
|
| No... the Pentium had advantages in both IPC (two pipes vs
| one) and bus speed (66MHz/64 bit vs at most 50MHz/32 bit).
|
| I'd be interested to see a more info on this this, but I
| suspect you'd be hard pressed to write anything at all on the
| DX4 that ran faster than on the Pentium.
|
| (The jump from Pentium to Pentium Pro would've been
| different, due to the way the Pentium Pro deliberately
| sacrificed 16-bit performance for gains on the 32-bit
| workloads Intel thought would dominate by then.)
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Nope, the original Pentiums at 60/66 MHz were sometimes
| slower than 486 DX/4 at 100 MHz, but I don't remember the
| specifics. Pentium at 90 MHz was already faster at all times,
| the 100 MHz one had no competition from that DX/4.
| jug wrote:
| Ahh, my first PC after jumping ship from the Amiga like a
| filthy traitor, but having to accept facts that Commodore was
| dying and PC taking the market by storm. During the 386 days I
| honestly think it was still so immature for gaming that the
| Amiga still felt better, but by 486 and when I switched there
| was no longer a contest although PC was still unfriendlier for
| games with the AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS and Conventional RAM
| acrobatics. It was funny, PC at this time felt like powerhouses
| but ancient at the same time, coming from the Amiga. Ancient
| powerhouses! It's like they had recently discovered 16 bit
| sound, like... what...
|
| But anyway, I jumped on board with the 486 DX2/66 which was the
| bee's knees. After a year or two, I overclocked it to 80 MHz to
| run Duke Nukem 3D or Quake or whatever for a _very precious_ +5
| fps or so because your framerate was often in the 20 fps range.
| Made a huge difference. So 20% clock speed was big! I even
| upgraded to DX4/100 during a weekend of tinkering with my high
| school friends for another +20% and at that point FPS games of
| the time ran pretty well indeed! As well as the recent Windows
| 3.11 of course which was starting to feel like nothing special!
| Damn that computer was really fast! I topped it off with a
| Soundblaster AWE32 and MIDI music sounded amazing too with its
| software soundbanks.
|
| Following this I went to Pentium 133 MHz, and it feels like the
| world of computing changed less and less following that. Things
| got more convenient as the x86 architecture won rather than
| having a smorgasbord of viable home computing options, but also
| a little bit more boring.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| I'd say things got "boring" quite a while after the pentiums.
| All the peripherals like the cd burner got faster. Memory got
| larger and faster. Video got substantially faster. Network
| went from 10mbits to 1gb over time. Smarter power management
| started to exist. USB came online. Wi-Fi started to exist.
|
| I'd say things got "boring" after the clock wars. Now says
| the clock is basically the same as it was 5 or even 10 years
| ago (though massively more parallel, etc). Average memory
| size seems to have peaked around 16gb (though substantially
| faster and more parallel). Average disk size has remained
| about the same (though way, way, way faster thanks to SSD's).
|
| Also things have gotten much smaller and more energy
| efficient. Back in the day your motherboard had all kinds of
| discrete shit on it. The board was huge in comparison to a
| modern board.
|
| Note: it's been a good 10 or 15 years since I've built a
| desktop PC from parts... I kinda miss it.
| deckard1 wrote:
| Boring maybe. But I'll take the sheer joy of plugging in a
| random USB device and having it _just work_ over the
| absolutely pain it was dealing with serial and parallel
| ports and I /O addresses, DMA channels, IRQ conflicts, etc.
| And everything talks WiFi today. It's amazing. I have 64GB
| on my main machine. I can run (virtual) machines within
| machines! That's a goddamn miracle if you ask me. I bought
| some cheap HDMI capture stick for $10! I plug it in to USB
| and the thing _just works_. And in Linux. How?! I had
| Hauppauge WinTV PCI capture card in the late '90s and that
| thing barely worked (with their awful proprietary drivers
| and software) in Windows, never mind Linux support.
|
| > The board was huge in comparison to a modern board.
|
| The ATX form factor is still the most popular. Mini ITX is
| around today, but based on the fact that vendors only make
| a few models compared to their ATX selection tells me most
| builders still use ATX. I guess the AT form factor was
| larger, but ATX has been around since '95 or so.
| ogurechny wrote:
| Period-correct soundtrack to this comment in the form of
| someone's tracker file I've accidentally discovered some time
| ago:
|
| http://modarchive.org/module.php?153383
| gadders wrote:
| Don't forget the maths co-processor you could add as well...
| [deleted]
| xenon2 wrote:
| Very interesting article.
|
| On side note, I've had Am486Dx4VT8 (8 kb internal cache in WT
| mode). I was able to run it in 2x50MHz mode with Trident VLB card
| - it was my first "overclock" to have somewhat playable Quake
| experience (but not really).
| Veliladon wrote:
| The biggest problem with the DX/50 was the bus. AMD was already
| struggling to run the VLB at 40MHz with their DX-40 parts. A lot
| of video cards couldn't handle it and running certain hard drives
| controllers on that speed sometimes ran the risk of corrupting
| disks. I can imagine that the DX/50 was a hellscape of I/O trying
| to find cards that could run at the 50MHz bus clock or being
| stuck at EISA's 33MB/sec.
| danbruc wrote:
| My first PC was a 486DX/50 and until today I was totally
| unaware of the potential bus timing issues but I can not
| remember ever having had issues. But this might finally explain
| why it came with a turbo button - even though it should
| probably be called an anti-turbo button - that allowed changing
| the clock to 10 MHz. But now I wonder why they would have made
| it that slow instead of say 25 MHz or 33 MHz? I vaguely
| remember using the slower clock to make games playable that
| were running way to fast, so maybe that also factored into it.
| elzbardico wrote:
| If I am recalling correctly the turbo button was a workaround
| for software that had problems running at the high speeds.
| But I may be mistaken.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| The Turbo button did exist on processors that ran over 4.77
| MHz of the original 8086. I had a Turbo button on the 9.54
| MHz 8088, also on the 386 DX/40 (lowering the frequency to 8
| MHz IIRC), it was not specific to 486. Actually the 486 was
| the last CPU that had that button, I think.
| myself248 wrote:
| I had one of those AMD 486DX40's and it was a screamer.
|
| Yes, very picky about VLB card choice and even placement; we
| had a big multi-IO card (possibly made by DFI?) and a Trident
| SVGA card, and it took a few days of shuffling and benchmarking
| and stability testing to find the optimum arrangement. ISTR
| that if the IO card was closest to the CPU, it simply wouldn't
| boot about half the time, and it was unstable if it did.
| Putting the IO in the third VLB slot and the video card in the
| second, leaving the first empty, seemed to be the best
| arrangement. And it left the IDE cables reasonably close to the
| drives, so that was a win.
|
| But once we got all the drivers loaded for that IO card and
| stuff, it absolutely flew. Ran rings around a lot of Pentium/90
| systems because their 33MHz bus just couldn't keep up, and in
| the days before GPUs, pushing pixels into video RAM was a
| contest of raw bus bandwidth and very little else. We
| eventually had quite a lot of drives on that machine, so
| UDMA/33 moved a lot of bytes while still leaving spare bus
| cycles for overhead.
|
| I tried overclocking it to 50MHz a few times, and the IO and
| VGA cards were both capable, it was the RAM that shat itself.
| The upper 3MB of RAM would just vanish, leaving only 1MB, which
| was honestly a fair tradeoff for some things -- I'd boot in
| that config if I had a lot of PKZIP to do, or for rendering
| fractal graphics, which didn't use a lot of RAM but really
| appreciated the extra clock speed. Then clock it back down and
| reboot to use the results of those operations.
|
| Underclocking was also nice, and something I did frequently, so
| I could unplug the CPU fan and enjoy some quietude during a
| long BBS file transfer, which certainly didn't need much CPU
| grunt. The mobo clock generator didn't mind being re-jumpered
| while the system was on, and going from 40MHz to 16MHz (I
| think) was a simple matter of adding or removing one jumper
| cap, as I recall. I could reach through the floppy-drive
| opening in the front of the case and do this after a download
| started. Then switch off the monitor, and listen to the quiet
| tick-hiss of interference on my FM radio, which picked up just
| enough of WHYT 96.3 in the basement that I could listen to some
| alt-rock while also being aware of the UART ISR being hit. When
| the ticking stopped, the modem was idle, turn the monitor back
| on, jumper the CPU back up to speed and plug the CPU fan back
| in while the CRT warmed up, and get on with unpacking the file.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| My first PC was an AMD 386DX40 with a OAK SVGA 1MiB , a SB 2
| clone card, a 200MiB hd and X2 Sony CDROM drive... I remember
| that worked very nice and stable. And that I could play Doom
| 2 and Sim City 2000 without issues.
| saltcured wrote:
| I remember having a 486DX4/100 (a clock-tripled 33 MHz bus and
| 99 MHz core). I downloaded the reference manuals from Intel and
| found the pins I could jumper to change the clock multipler
| from x3 to x2, and then I increased the bus speed to 50 MHz to
| effectively have a 486 DX2/100.
|
| I don't remember all the hardware details anymore, but I think
| I tested system stability by recompiling XFree86 on Linux. This
| was something I already knew how to do as a beta tester for 2D
| accelerator drivers, and it took many hours and so seemed like
| a good test...
| xenospn wrote:
| First thing I would do when I got a new CPU was FreeBSD make
| world or re-compiling wine from source.
| [deleted]
| newfie_bullet wrote:
| My first computer was an IBM EduQuest 486 SX/50
| (https://www.ardent-tool.com/EduQuest/EduQuest_55.jpg) - great
| memories of taking that apart and learning about how things
| worked (glad my parents didn't know what was going on after
| spending $2000 on a computer for 'school work')
| fsagx wrote:
| My first PC was a 486DX50 from the bargain bin (with no box or
| accessories) at Best Buy. I never had a fully new system again,
| as each newer configuration still had many parts of the old ones.
| Very Ship of Theseus.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| This takes me back, although my first computer was a 486SX 25
| MHz. At some point I inadvertently over locked it (long before I
| heard that word) because there was a jumper to change the bus
| from 25 to 33. I couldn't believe it just... worked!
| marttt wrote:
| Are there any moderately priced 486 SBCs available these days?
| The ones I've encountered (forgotten the links) were in the
| $200-or-so range. Surprisingly expensive, or not?
|
| I would love to have a dirt cheap fanless 486 minicomputer for
| FreeDOS (SvarDOS). Not for gaming, mostly for writing and some
| hobbyist coding. (I'm an ultra-slow thinker, so a single-tasking
| system is very probably plenty for most things. :)
|
| Currently thinking about this one, with Vortex86 -- but it is
| still, well, fairly expensive as compared to something like a
| RasPi: https://icop-shop.com/product/ebox-3100/
|
| As for fanless and low spec, there is, of course, this wonderful
| table of thin clients:
| https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hware/hardware.shtml
| johnklos wrote:
| It was a very interesting time in computing history. The changes
| from the i80286 to the i80386 were extreme - the i386 gave us a
| fundamentally different instruction set that common 32 bit
| systems still use in 2023.
|
| On the other hand, the changes in the i80486 were purely about
| speed: relatively large built-in caches, integrated FPU,
| significantly better pipelining and so on.
|
| It was the last time Motorola really competed with Intel. The
| m68040 was all about performance, too, and Motorola's chip was
| faster in integer, floating point, synthetic and real world uses,
| clock for clock. (The m68060 was somewhat competitive with the
| Pentium, but people weren't choosing between x86 and m68k by
| then.) The x86 world really owes some thanks to Motorola for the
| competition.
|
| However, the fact that Intel was selling '486s like hotcakes
| meant they spent the time and money to continue to improve the
| '486, so the clocks went way up. The m68040 never had any clock
| improvements over 40 MHz.
|
| An i80486 system can still run NetBSD decently in 2023, which is
| a testament to the generally good performance of the CPU :)
| mschaef wrote:
| > The changes from the i80286 to the i80386 were extreme
|
| It was the 386 that really put the platform's strategy squarely
| in the realm of general purpose computing.
|
| The 8088 and 8086 were intended as short term backfills for the
| gap left by the dismal performance and high cost of i432. The
| 8018x chips were targeted at the embedded space and the 80286
| was targeted at phone switches. It was really something of an
| accident that the 286 worked in the PC AT class machines as
| well as it did.
|
| The 80386 was Intel's realization that they were successful in
| general purpose desktop computing and needed a product targeted
| specifically at that space, and with backward compatibility in
| mind.
| chungy wrote:
| Intel pushed the 486 up to 100 MHz via the iDX4 chip (which
| lost the i486 branding, but it's still what it is). Initially
| intended for embedded systems, it was sold directly also to
| consumers with the "OverDrive" brand attached. (Maybe it was
| unsold stock from the embedded attempt?)
|
| AMD would further push its own 486 chips to 150 MHz, and I
| recall the raw clockspeed allowed it to stay competitive
| against the lower-end Pentiums (60-75 MHz), but architectural
| changes in the Pentium (branch prediction and out of order
| execution) really let the Pentium fly away from the 486 at
| fewer necessary cycles.
| mschaef wrote:
| > Initially intended for embedded systems, it was sold
| directly also to consumers with the "OverDrive" brand
| attached.
|
| They also spent some effort marketing the DX4 as a low end
| alternative to the Pentium. It was possible to buy/build DX4
| machines. Trouble there is the same as any other low end
| offering of the time - it got steamrolled by better
| technology coming down in price as quickly as it did. The
| window of opportunity for anything low end was not that
| large.
| tedunangst wrote:
| > It's possible that some operations, particularly those that
| involve memory- or disk-intensive access, may actually be slower
| with the DX2/66 than with the DX/33.
|
| Some things never change. The mechanical translation of "not
| faster than" to "slower than" is ever prevalent.
| alberth wrote:
| This bring back fond memories.
|
| I had a 486DX2/66
| mschaef wrote:
| I went 8088->386SX->486DX/33->P5/100->...
|
| The 386SX transition was nice, because it also brought Windows
| (with its standard printer drivers) and enough memory and video
| capability to start to do interesting work with graphics. It
| brought most of what I'd call the baseline capabilities of a
| modern computer, with the subsequent generations mainly just
| adding capacity.
|
| It was interesting at the time, though, that the 486 I had was
| mainly heavily constrained by expansion bandwidth. It had an
| accelerator for the video, but the connection from the CPU into
| the video card was just 16-bit ISA. Anything that had to
| transit the bus was glacial - so it couldn't really do more
| than 8bpp graphics. It was a great argument in support of local
| bus (and a source of some amount of envy when VLB DX2/66's
| started showing up... computationally only about double speed,
| but so much more capability to drive the screen).
| prmoustache wrote:
| Our Family went straight from the 8088 + cga graphics to the
| pentium 100mhz (really an overclockerd 90mhz model) + sound
| blaster card + matrox something and a decent Sony screen .
|
| Quite a big jump :)
| deckard1 wrote:
| same here. We had an 8088 with AdLib, which only had FM
| synthesis. We stepped up to a Pentium 75Mhz with
| SoundBlaster AWE32 and 16-bit 44.1kHz audio. And CD-ROM
| drive! Those were amazing times. Shortly after that the
| internet hit mainstream and MP3s became a thing, and the
| world changed forever.
| mschaef wrote:
| > straight from the 8088 + cga graphics to the pentium
| 100mhz (really an overclockerd 90mhz model)
|
| Now there's a jump... that must have been around two orders
| of magnitude more compute performance (not to mention all
| the rest of the new capabilities.)
|
| > + matrox something and a decent Sony screen .
|
| One of the things I did with that 486 machine was upgrade
| to a Sony-17SE1 monitor. This is when 14 or 15 inch CRT's
| were normal, so the 17 was special, expensive, and a very
| significant financial stretch. Still worth it for all the
| reasons you'd expect.
|
| I carried the monitor over to the Pentium, which was its
| own learning experience. The Pentium machine was built to
| be a dedicated Linux machine, so I had to be fairly careful
| about the hardware I used. When I ordered it from Micron, I
| bought it with the cheapest possible video option the
| offered, and upgraded it myself to a Number Nine 771 (which
| had a discrete IBM RAMDAC and was much better supported on
| Linux.)
|
| The reason I mention this is that I got to see the same
| monitor driven by two different outputs. Even at the same
| resolution/etc, the quality of the image was much, much
| better on the 771, for reasons that I am sure were related
| to the discrete RAMDAC and a better analog section. It's
| the sort of thing that's totally a non issue these days
| (digital link ftw), but mattered a lot back then.
| elzbardico wrote:
| One thing I recall from that time, which seems absurd
| nowadays, is how I was able to actually run photoshop 2.0 in
| a 486 after upgrading it from 4 to 8 MB. Jesus, 8MB nowadays
| probably is not even enough to start booting.
| isolli wrote:
| Lucky you! I could only afford a 486 DX/33, but at least I
| splurged for 230 MB of hard drive.
| antx wrote:
| Heck yeah, I went from a C64 to a 386SX (which youngin me
| eventually broke by trying to upgrade memory), to a 486DX2/66
| which allowed me to FINALLY play doom.
|
| Then followed a Cyrix 5x86 100GP in somewhere around 1996,
| which was a bit of an upgrade, since I could not afford
| Pentiums just yet with my own money. In 1997, I bought a
| Diamond Stealth II S220 as an alternative to a Voodoo, for the
| same "poverty" reasons. You have to know my parents were ...
| very much against computers.
|
| As we started to get access to the internet in high school, I
| learned about overclocking, and oh my! was my system the best
| candidate for it! I could push the CPU to 120Mhz without
| additional cooling! The graphics cards, which bore a rendition
| verite v2100 chip, could also be overclocked quite heavily, but
| since the chips where bare, without any form of cooling, it
| became too hot, so I had to "MacGyver" my way around the
| problem.
|
| I also have very fond memories of the socket 3 era... for me it
| started with the classics from id software, to Warcraft 2,
| Duke3D, LAN matches, Carmageddon, Quake, etc.. and all the
| early mods such as paintball, skin modding, what fun!
| bluedino wrote:
| > I bought a Diamond Stealth II S220 as an alternative to a
| Voodoo
|
| I did the same thing, it was a great budget card. _vquake_
| was awesome, plus you were able to use Direct3D inside of
| Windows which the first 3Dfx cards didn 't do. It also came
| with a _Descent_ clone called _Forsaken_ on the demo CD,
| which was the first colored lighting I had ever seen in a
| game, and was pretty amazing.
|
| Ironically, the Verite chips didn't handle certain VGA modes
| that well, so DOS games like Doom were pretty choppy.
| manual89 wrote:
| Acclaim, publisher of forsaken, was scrutinized for a
| rather risque marketing campaign for the game. Never played
| the game myself so I don't know if the ads had anything to
| do with the content.
| antx wrote:
| Oh yeah, tomb raider was fun, but vquake was the bomb.
|
| Although, eventually, when the miniGL port was released, it
| was clear that the V2x00s were sub-par, even with 24 bit
| support and hardware z-buffer. Eventually the voodoo2 just
| put the nail in the coffin. But for a time, little geek me
| had fun pushing the hardware limits, even though I knew
| nothing of thermal management at the time.
|
| Indeed, I remember some DOS games having some... stutters?
| For lack of a better term. But at that point I was hooked
| on 3D and Windows 9x, so it didn't matter too too much.
| alberth wrote:
| Did you buy a sound card?
|
| It's funny to think these days how you use to have to buy
| sound cards (and hardware DVD decoders, but this came
| later)
| bluedino wrote:
| I think at that point (Socket 7 motherboards) they were
| starting to do integrated sound cards, but they weren't
| standard. I may have had some kind of SoundBlaster clone.
|
| I think I used a discrete sound card even later on into
| the Pentium III days because of either driver issues or
| quality of the on-board ones.
| balls187 wrote:
| Bought a Reveal multimedia kit, which came with a
| soundcard, speakers, a CDROM drive and a few discs (Kings
| Quest 6, and an encyclopedia (Worldbook?))
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| I worked in a computer store while attending college during
| this time. We were the only "Computer store" in town, but the
| local BigBox "furniture store" also sold computers too. None
| of the staff there knew anything about computers. We
| would often have people come into our shop asking questions and
| then going to the BigChain to buy the PC's. Well,
| one day a couple came into the store carrying the flyer for the
| other place. The couple then asked several questions about the
| computers, "What does this mean, What does that do, Is this
| part important... etc" I tried several times during the
| discussion to steer them towards the products that we sold. It
| was obvious that they were only using my time to educate
| themselves so they could 'smartly shop' at the other location.
| So we get to the part of the listing where the choice was DX vs
| DX2 (33Mhz vs 66MHz IIRC).
|
| Them: "What does the 2 mean?"
|
| Me: "That's needed if you want to use two floppy drives, both a
| 5.25" and a 3.5" or just one."
|
| fun times..... =)
|
| *Edit/Note: the 2 in DX2 means that it was clock-doubled. I
| lied to the customer because they were wasting my time.
| alberth wrote:
| That's a great story. Had no idea about that either.
|
| In my case, I had a Packard Bell - which had 1 floppy & 1 CD-
| ROM.
|
| https://www.weavweb.net/2020/09/22/packard-
| bell-486-dx2-66mh...
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Those PackardBell CD-ROM games and encyclopedias were very
| innovative. I have several of those PCs and still have all
| their CDs. Check out 3D Body Adventure predicting the
| pandemic:
|
| https://youtu.be/VlxyjOLBKbg?t=980
| alberth wrote:
| Yes!!!
|
| I totally remember that and loved it. Thanks for finding
| the video link. Brings back great memories.
| navjack27 wrote:
| You had no idea about it because it's false
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| Correct.
|
| I lied to somebody that was wasting my time.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Had an AST 486DX2/50 as my first PC in ~93 or so--I have a lot of
| good memories poking around DOS, playing Doom, tons of shareware,
| dialing BBSes (on a 2400 baud modem!) and more. It was a great
| machine.
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| Gorgeous article.
|
| - Topic close to my heart. - Loads of references at the bottom. -
| Oh my god, it even features the publication date at the top.
| mobilio wrote:
| I had DX/33 DX/50 and then DX2/66 plus DX4/120
|
| I remember that before DX2/66 i wasn't seen on chip labels about
| "heatsinks". On DX2/66 there was label "heatsink required".
|
| But on DX4 label was "heatsink and fan required".
| hulitu wrote:
| I had an AST Cyrix 486 DX/2 66 without heatsink.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yeah people have forgotten this but when the Pentium came out
| and all Pentium PCs required a CPU fan, this was criticized by
| many reviewers.
|
| Now I have an Intel CPU with a motorcycle-sized radiator and a
| coolant pump :-|
| mmcgaha wrote:
| I had a pentium 66 with just a huge heat sink. My pentium 133
| had a fan but when I upgraded to a k6-2 I under clocked it so
| I could just use a heatsink. It was 2015 before I finally got
| another fanless computer.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Such a silly criticism too since hard drives of the era were
| so obnoxiously loud.
| tecleandor wrote:
| And also "Peel this label before putting the heatsink". I know
| people left the sticker there... with consequences.
| balls187 wrote:
| Our first PC was an AST Advantage 486dx/33
|
| Purchased from the McChord AFB computer shop.
|
| Originally my dad wanted to "upgrade" our Amiga1000 to be PC
| compatible, but learned such a thing was not possible.
| velmu wrote:
| An amazing article.
| antx wrote:
| Amazing indeed!
|
| I'd also wish for a pentium pro article on the same vibe. Many
| people don't realize that it paved the way to even the current
| "core" series! In some ways, like the DX50, it was even better
| than its successors, although it was plagued by issues.
| myself248 wrote:
| You may appreciate the Red Hill hardware pages:
|
| https://www.redhill.net.au/iu.php
| antx wrote:
| ahhhh, yes, thank you!
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