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I worked at a company back in the day where we imported components for the company's computer brand from Taiwan. We used UMC Green for the low price range. I remember it had some small issue with a certain software but made a very good computer for the price. I even visited the factory in Taiwan once.

Impressive numbers and OC capability from this little known chip! Loved the overview here. Thanks for sharing

I started with a 286 sx. Then my dad got a 486 dx 100 for work. He was mad at me for hacking his companies windows .ini files so I could install doom. The school had 186s with the old square mouse. I also remember buying an ad-lib card to get sound. 😂😂 good old days!

I have one of these that I used to install a K6-3+ 400 into a PCChips M520 VX chipset Socket 7. But that board has a receptacle for a voltage regulator, and I plan on building a Necroware regulator to use instead.

No the problem with this upgrade was the cost was almost the same as a board swap out.

I had a Evergreen 286 on my 8088.

great find, the price will only go up.

My very first build was with an AMD DX4-100 4MB ram! Cost me S$1000 (~US$740) for the cpu+mobo+ram.

I actually bought the overdrive processor when I was a kid and I got money for Christmas and wanted to make the family computer run faster lol I bought it at Walmart on clearance for $40.00

Pretty sure the Vertex86 chips are the fastest 486-class chips, they run at 1 GHz or so

Love biomenace ❤

Ugh, just spent half the video thinking what the heck is the POD that is always being mentioned. Then it dawned on my puny brain, Pentium OverDrive. 🤦‍♂️

"Don't Copy That Floppy"... In the early 90s I got a program written by some NASA engineers to bypass Copy Protection on floppies. They called it "Copy Fight protection" and that all info should be free to everyone. It was like the wild west of PCs.

When i was kid, i saw shops in Poland selling computers with 486 processors clocked 160mhz (486 DX4 160mhz). Later i learned there was no 160mhz 486 model, they had to sell computers with overclocked processors.

if you set a K-6 II or a K6 III to a multiplier of 2x it is the same as setting it to 6x (in case your socket 7 Board has no 6x multiplier) - know this one because I own a K6 III - 450 myself -on a ... nearly ... super socket 7 board: it does not run at 100MHz bus speed but at 83MHz or 75MHz...

I have a different weird Am486-100-16. When set to run at 3x it runs at 2x. And when configured to 2x it actually runs at 4x, and does so very well.

I recall booting Linux on a miniature embedded x86 motherboard, where the CPU would identify itself as UMC. Must've been during the noughties. Not sure if this could be an early VIA/SiS, rather I'm inclined to believe that this was something of the DM&P pedigree, i.e. and early Vortex86, a direct predecessor to Vortex86SX. Could it be that the modern Vortex chips inherit some history from the UMC 486 ? Perhaps by now there have been too many generations for any heritage to even matter, at the level of CPU core design... And yes the modern Vortex CPU's do feel like a very fast yet very lean 486DX+ (with CMPXCHG added). I believe around Vortex86DX the CPU was claimed to be "fully static", i.e. you could stop the clock for an indefinite time interval, and restart it and all the code would keep ticking (no data would get lost) - and it could be deeply underclocked, if you had to run stupid software that would not tolerate a CPU that's just too fast. Like down to 1/8th or even 1/16th. (A feature of the platform, accessible programmatically via some chipset registers, also available in the BIOS Setup on the motherboards by ICOP.)

Thanks for a very informative and interesting video. I just picked up 486 VLB system with a PC Chips M912 v1.7 motherboard. I purchased UMC 486 Super40 that I will be using in this system. I never used one the CPUs back in the 90s and now it is going to be a lot fun to try this out!

wonder if a 64mhz crystal could push it further.

Unrelated question: where can I purchase the plastic cases you used to store the processors?

i got some of those processors.

i remember these .. and AGP 3d video cards were just around the corner

Maybe someone else has written about this in the comments, but did you try this with 4x multiplier @ 50MHz bus speed? Impressive with the 80MHz bus speed, though!

Huh? I’m confused. Why can’t you just crank up the FSB?

Bloody Intel, their patent bs cost the PC market so much potential. As UMC probably didn't infringe on Intel's patents and did an excellent job here with the 486 architecture. Anyhow, I am glad we no longer need jumpers or to mess with bus timings etc or regedit etc to get hardware working...

it's mindblowing how very little they cared in 80s/early 90s leaving so much free performance on the table hahaha You could probably get about 300% the factory clock speeds on majority of 8/16bit chips hahha

Very nice, I recommend getting a FLIR, might reduce troubleshooting time...

Why dosent the bottom one seek?

Reminds me of my AMD 386/40 that got married to an Intel 387/33(now 40) I found in the trash 20 years ago.

I did ye olde evergreen

The king of kings sild out $$$$$$$$$ Must be franc. Desendants

I had a crazy off-brand IBM 486slc2 66MHz CPU in the early 1990's and it was such good value for money. A little faster than a 486sx-33 and much cheaper. Odd architecture though, it used a 386sx-style 16-bit bus with high clock rates and extra cache to make up the data transfer speed loss. No FPU of course.

I had a Number Nine Ticket To Ride video card alongside a pair of Diamond Monster II cards in my first PC gaming rig. It was really fun. The Number Nine was very capable on its own, but not well supported by games. It had that same IBM DAC chip too.

I never grew up with these parts, but seeing someone overclocking 486 and Pentium-class CPUs brings me such a joy for its simplicity.

Four years ago i buy locally my first 486 machine, that was Optimus with UMC 40-SUPER processor and no L2 Cache, it running on 25MHz, with 8MB ram and was install Windows 95. I almost shure that this processor run on this 25MHz frequency since production, i try to use 33 or 40 MHz, but system does not boot :/ So you should be very happy that your unit can be overclocked, my 40-Super can only be underclocked

Superb video! Great overview on this CPU.

Nothing since has been as versatile as Socket 7. Really was a golden age of compatibility and experimentation. I hope some kind of RISC-V version can take off and do the same at some point.

Here I was building my own systems during this era and I have NEVER heard of this thing. This must be how those Mandela Effect people feel.

Using those GameBoy cartridge cases for CPUs is genius :o

Thats nuts. Only thing I ever got to overclock decent was a AMD K6-2 500, Had it up to 650 with a 90mm fan on the heatsink. Used it that way until the motherboard died.

Glad you didn't use the Cyrix chip - back in the day, my boss was using one of those, it wasn't 100% compatible with Intel / AMD - got weird results.....certain programs wouldn't load

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.

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

How does the DX4 100 MHz chip compare?

Me and my brother had a Cyrix 486 DX2-66 and my uncle got a Pentium 100 which blew us away, we got a 3DFX card to put in our machine a little later and it was like living in a completely different dimension.

He sounds a bit like the 8 bit guy, they have a similar flow & sound of narrative.

PODs were not all that expensive a few years on from release, at least not used. I had 3 of them in around 96/97, all pulled from upgraded ex-business systems I picked up for cheap. CPUs really didn't hold value back then, you paid a fortune for a new CPU today and by the end of the year you couldn't give it away. Where I lived back then the POD was actually quite popular, in many cases businesses would have only just spent a fortune on new systems only to have them be superseded less than a year later, after the huge expense of kitting out an entire office building it made sense to buy an upgrade CPU for a select few users (the boss, secretary etc) and leave the rest as is for another few years, particularly because most of these systems were still under warranty. I think my favorite part of being in IT back then was the fact everyone thought you were some kind of magician/genius. On more than one occasion I had clients refer to their PCs as "the magic box". When I first started in IT we were selling 386 systems, the 486 had only just come out and was still a few years away from popular adoption, at least where I lived. 2 of my 3 PODs overclocked easily to 100mhz and that is how I used them, I gave the one that wouldn't OC to a friend. Carrying your entire PC to friends houses for LAN parties was still a thing, a lot harder with CRTs than it would be today with LCD panels 😂

On the thumbnail i thought this is a micro ITX mainboard with a gaint CPU Cooler

The Am486 DX4-100 was my first upgrade from a 386 SX-33. The performance jump was so huge it blew my puny 16 year old mind. Spent the entire inheritance money I received from an aunt on a motherboard, cpu, 8mb ram and a S3 Virge DX.

PCs back then were also much more overpriced when prebuilt. By 1995-1996 you could build your own 133 MHz 486 PC with 16 MB of RAM for around 650 USD. A basic Pentium PC would cost you around 800 USD. For 1.2k USD you could build a Pentium 120 PC with 32 MB of RAM. Quake would run quite well. Name branded prebuilts especially were marked up to high hell, often by 100%. And always cheaped out on the RAM.