This 486 was NOT a 486
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- čas přidán 14. 12. 2023
- When I bought a computer with this Cyrix processor, I thought I would get a substantial upgrade over my 386DX-33, but it turns out it was just a little bit faster. From then onward, I would make sure to do research and also build custom computers instead of a prebuilt PC.
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in 1993 i turned 15 and got my first own PC in order to retire an aging Amiga 500. I remember my father studying the german "Revier Markt", a newspaper solely for used marked offerings, for quite a while, until he ultimately found a good price for a 486 DX-33 system. I used the Amiga for making music already, so it didn't take long until i got a Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) classic sound card, which i still lives in a Pentium 233 MMX system i still own. Everything about Computers felt like pure magic back then. This feeling lasted for the entire 90ies for me and slowly faded away whilst growing up, but also because of technology advancing in a way that it became accessible for everyone. It's like with that underground music artist which suddenly becomes so popular and commercial, that it loses his attraction and magic. I love remembering the 90ies. Thanks for this little excursion ! p.s. i was suprised to find out that you're actually from Germany? For some reason i always thought you were Australian? Cheers !
I'm from Austria, but now live in Australia.
I wanted to have an IBM PC - compatible computer (how they were called back then) so badly that I started to read all the magazines and even books about PCs a year before my parents actually gave up and bought a 486 DX/4-100. Lol By that time I was already so educated on the matter, that I actually insisted on choosing all the components myself based on the given budget. The consultant at the computer shop was smiling at a 14 year old kid acting like he knows better than him and winked to my parents to not get worried, he'd be correcting my dumb choices, but in the end he reluctantly admitted that I pretty much made all the right choices within my budget. 😂 My next PC I fully built myself.
Hehe that's awesome 😎
Pretty cool that the guy admitted that you were right as well some people can't swallow their pride or give credit where credit is due afterwards
2:04 I love boards with two different sockets.
A Phil's Computer Lab computer is the best retro computer.
maybe an idea for merchandising...PhilsComputerLab case badges!
Phil knows his stuff but LGR makes some sweet builds too. :)
@@lordterra1377LGR should collab with one of the case manufacturers for that sweet and cozy woodgrain case.
All retro computer is best retro computer
The retro computer you own is the best retro computer.
Hi Phil, thank you for turning out such great content. I was in my last year of high school in 1993/94 with a 286-12mhz and using 386's at school for programming C++. I wanted a 486dx2-66 and had already decided on most of the components. Never built it, however. Now, 30 years later, I'm finally building my childhood dream computer and I use your channel for a lot of my research. So, thank you again for being such an awesome resource for the retro community.
That is awesome!
C++ in 1993. I wonder what that thing looked like...
The 486 DX2 66 is probably the best one to get, IIRC! It had a 33 Mhz frontside bus, as the many of the other CPUs in that family had 25 Mhz frontside buses. Also it was easily the most common one from that family (486s with clock multipliers), IIRC, so hopefully cheaper to get these days than a 486 DX4 100, etc.
I want to say there was 1-2 year delay in the launch of those CPUs, although I it was so long ago, I'm not very confident in those memories. I want to say there were articles written about them in 1991, possibly 1992, where an imminent launch was expected. But overheating issues delayed it, and finally they ended up being the first PC CPUs which required active cooling (so a fan & heatsink, instead of just a passive heatsink). This complicated by the fact they needed motherboards designed and built with CPU fan headers, so Intel couldn't fix it by themselves.
While I never had the chance to use the Cyrix 486DLC chip back in the day I did have some experience using the Cyrix/IBM 486SLC CPU with some laptops. The laptop repair company I worked for in the late 90s used to do a lot of upgrades using that CPU in several models of 386 laptops. Those were the days when a laptop would cost $3000-6000 US so extending the life of a machine with a CPU upgrade that cost less than $500 was a popular upgrade for many of the corporate customers that company served. Upgrading a 386DX 20MHz laptop with a 486SLC 40MHz CPU made quite a difference at the time!
Happy Friday Phil! Thanks for covering this Cyrix CPU. My son picked one up just because he wanted a piece of history. He doesn’t even have a board to use it lol.
Hehe it's a nice part of history when we had more than just Intel and AMD 😊
When my parents spec'd out the 486DX/50 they bought in 1992, they ended up using the EGA Wonder card from our old 286 because VLB was utterly kneecapped with a 50MHz FSB. (The guy at CompUSA recommended we stick with the EGA card because they must have known the VLB cards wouldn't work... or at least that was what I hope happened.)
It was eventually replaced with an ISA Trident card of unknown-to-my-recollection for the remainder of that PC's service life and until I inherited it many years later. I fought with VLB when I was a kid tinkering with it in 1994, not knowing why it didn't work and assuming I had some jumpers set wrong. I fought with it again a decade ago as a Retro PC enthusiast, blessed with ready access to much more information than my 1994 self had, and discovered that our 486 down-clocked to 33MHz could run a VLB video card without issue. 💡
Either way, the "do your own research" bit resonates with me as lessons were definitely learned. The 50MHz was a faster machine "technically" but with only an EGA Wonder card, it was severely held back for a long time.
@@philscomputerlabHow about a NexGen system? I used to have one of those but sadly I gave it away (20ys ago).
@@philscomputerlabwhat blows my mind, during this period of time, there were even more than just the three. One of the motherboards I picked up recently (that I thought had issues, but am now convinced it was the cpu I had in it) has support for an IDT Winchip, which I had never heard of before.
@@slaapliedjeA friend of mine was given a WinChip sample CPU, back when it first came out. I tested it and wrote the review... about the best I could do is damn it with faint praise. It was very much like a Cyrix, no mathco and slow for what it was supposed to be, except unlike the Cyrix it was not subject to overheating just from admiring its navel. If you were looking for, uh, budget performance that didn't run hot (because it didn't have enough performance to run hot) this was the CPU for you!
It's been 30 years but I think the WinChip used Cyrix settings, you might try that. (Might have been licensed from Cyrix, I don't recall and am too lazy to look it up.)
Even processors have DLC now! Oh wait can't joke about that, Intel actually did that for real...
😅
IBM basically already has that! They sell you a wafer with the POWER processor, and you pay them more depending on how many cores you want enabled.
In the enterprise area, this is quite normal. As @slaapliedje said, IBM does this. I think for roughly 30 years now (?) And it can make sense. Some companys need more compute power for a short amount of time. E.g. end-of-month/quarter/year calculations and they don't want to buy a machine which is idle 90% of the time. Therefore they buy "the big one" but with locked features/performance. When they need it, they unlock it for a couple of days, pay a fee to IBM (for this amount of time) and afterwards it gets locked again.
Of course, in the customer area this pratice is an abomination.
@@slaapliedje it does make more sense on (comparatively) low production parts I guess
@@dualcpufetishist7265 It doesn't make sense though, because they are selling the same hardware with the same production cost regardless, and it costs more to paywall the features.
Looks like the Cyrix is about 20% faster while running about 15% fewer MHz than the AMD 386, according to your benchmarks. Not too shabby. The 486DLC was mostly intended for inexpensive upgrades to enable the running of apps that really struggled on 386es (especially if they didn't also have an FPU installed), most notably CAD. They were also a way to use old stock of 386 boards and sell them as a 486. They worked as kind of a cheap-out for OEMs and a stop-gap solution for those who needed an upgrade but couldn't afford to replace their entire computer.
Good point about the coprocessor!
@@philscomputerlab Alas, the Cx486DLC did not have a built-in FPU, and needed to be paired with a 387DX or compatible if you wanted hardware floating-point. I don't think the motherboard you showed has a socket for one of those. The distinction with the Cx486SLC is the same as with the i386SX/DX, in the width of the memory bus.
The advantages of the Cyrix chip over a 386 were in i486 instruction set support (probably mostly for cache management) and the 1KB L1 cache, with the rest of the chip essentially being a 386. The cache would be responsible for most of the performance benefit. It would have been a good in-socket upgrade for an existing 386DX PC (a 20% performance boost at a lower clock speed, or a 37% boost at the same clock speed, are nothing to sniff at), and it allowed OEMs to offload 386 motherboards onto schmucks like yourself (the real lesson is that if the price is too good to be true, it probably is) while being able to say that it had "a 486" without technically lying.
It's not for nothing that when the CPUID registers were introduced (midway through the i486 series, I think), the manufacturer codes were GenuineIntel, AuthenticAMD, and… CyrixInstead.
I remember in early 1993 I was still rolling with a 386sx 16mhz! I desperately wanted a 486 and I remember looking at the cyrix 486 upgrade cpus but fortunately I decided against it at the time and built myself a 486sx 33 system which I then upgraded to a dx2 66 a year later
That's because this particular Cyrix was not aimed at DYI upgraders, it was aimed at system builders that had unsold 386 borads. If you wanted to get those boards out the door, you need to claim (integer) performance comparable to the 486s of the time (i.e. 25 and 33Mhz). If the PreBuilders boards supported an AMMD 386/40 you could go that route, but if not (or if the preBuilder wanted the numbers 4,8&6 in the marketing materials) , they went with the Cyrix.
I had a 80386sx-16 with monochrome vga. Friend had a 80486DX-2 40 or 66. Moved on to Dual Pentium Pro 200 overclocked to 233, had slackware linux on that and NT4 workstation.
To be honest I have zero idea why I watch your vids, but I have been subbed for ages. I did grow up with this era of PCs, but I was a console kid for a long time till my mother somehow bought a super expensive P100 with 16MB of RAM. She was so angry when I said it wasn't even as fast as my PlayStation haha, but she was even more mad when I put a Tseng Labs ET6000 in it, she was convinced I would break it. I appreciate old hardware, but the software including the games was the worst. Ill never miss simply wondering if my PC will even run a game.
Back in 1993 I had a Gateway 2000 PC with a 486dx2-50Mhz CPU and 2mb or RAM. I only had 40mb of hard disk space to work with. The CRT Monitor was a 14" SVGA also from Gateway. I upgraded the sound card to a Sound Blaster Live! which was bundled with a Creative CD-ROM drive. Played many games on it: Adventure games such as Quest For Glory series and Ringworld. Flight sims: Falcon 3.0 and Tornado. RPG games: Ultima Underworld I+II, Eye of The Beholder and Wizardry VI. Many of these games came with amazing manuals which I still keep with me. 1993 was a good year for DOS gaming!
My only prebuilt was a Vobis 486-DX 33 in a Colani Design Desktop.
Machine was ok, but the mainboard died after only one year. Then I finally got a Vesa Local Bus based mainboard and could replace my extremly slow Trident Video card with a fast S3 based VLB card.
My games during that time were mostly Doom, later on duke Nukem 3D and a whole lot of 4D Sports Driving.
The last game is still in my library and occasionally used in DOS Box emulators.
Ah, Vobis. I think basically every VOBIS-PC back in the day was sold with these cheap Trident 512KB VGA-Cards (Yes, Gen Z and Gen zero, 512K, not 512MB). ET4000 was a huge upgrade back then...
@@deineroehre Yes and they called it Windows accelerator card. I don't know what this thing accelerated, but truely not Windows.... Dos neither 🙂
Hey, Phil! Regarding the crackling / popping sound with the sound blaster: I had the same issue, and in my case it was... drum roll... the SD to IDE adapter. Once I switched to a CF card adapter, all sound issues were gone.
That is interesting and I will test this the next time, thank you!
Interesting, I am using the same adapter, but didnt experience that issue. However my ESS card is extremely sensible to any voltages going around in the PC. Like the PC loading from CD you can clearly hear a "tok tok tok on one side", and you can also hear the CPU working, like if scolling over a forest in Jagged Alliance it had a different "whine" than if you just had grass. However, if you downclock the CPU that went away mostly. And it almost completely vanished when I switched from AMD k6 II to AMD k6 II+ with less voltage. For the CD Drive I tested over 20 drives and took one of the ones with least internal noise generated. But its not impossible that this was also all connected to the adapter. ^^
@@Kordanor We call these computer thinking noises 😅 Some cards aren't shielded well. Muting inputs like line, microphone, PC speaker can help...
@@philscomputerlab Yeah, tried some stuff there. Ultimately I decided to go for a dual setup like you showed in one of your videos, using a PCI card in Windows, in addition to picking a CD drive which isn't too load. But that way I have no noises with all windows games, and in DOS I only use 133Mhz instead of 600Mhz which is also less noisy, so also basically no noises in DOS unless it's CD games (which are mostly windows), but evne then it's ok. So most stuff is completely noise free, and the rest is not too bad either.
I had same problem (plus sometimes it would swap L-R channels) when an IDE hard drive was failing. Replaced the HD, problem went away. This was with a very old (1992?) SB16, and it seems more sensitive to this sort of problem than the newer SBs.
In 1992, I was still using the computer my father brought home from work, which he never actually used. It was an IBM PS/2 Model 55SX, with an Intel 386SX/25 chip. I can't recall if it had 1MB or 4MB of RAM.
In 1993, I worked over the summer after graduating high school, and spent pretty much all of what I earned on a pre-built 486 DX2/66 computer with 8MB of RAM. It was also the first and last pre-built computer for me. I've built well over 100 computers since then, for myself, my family, and my company (which includes a few dozen servers over the years).
As for games, I was also pretty into the adventure games, playing the _Monkey Island_ games and the _Indiana Jones_ games. I was still reasonably new to IBM PC's at the time, having spent more time with a Commodore 128 prior to that (and a Coleco Adam before that).
5:22 Can't wait for the liquid cooled Cyrix video.
Overclocked till it screams.
Day of the Tentacle was amongst one of my fav games back then. I also had monkey island 1,2 and 3 (i think 3 came on a CD, which seemed amazing back then!). Man, the time does fly, but funny how these retro systems just take us back like it was yesterday. Thanks Phil and to everyone posting comments here, a real nostalga hit :)
I loved those games as well! Starting with Maniac Mansion on the C64. As a kid I managed to get my walk-through published in a Dutch gaming magazine called Hoog Spel. I was so proud! Still have a copy of it somewhere.
Monkey Island 3 actually came on two CDs and is still an amazing game. Recently I was messing around with running Monkey 1 and 2 on really old hardware. Monkey 1 ran smooth on a 8088@16mhz. Monkey 2 ran smooth on a 286@25mhz. Both games would run on slower hardware. I have a video showing Monkey 1 and 2 running at various different CPU speeds. I was most surprised at what low requirements Monkey Island 3 had. I found it was totally playable on a DX4@75mhz! The official system requirements recommends a Pentium 90 but I've heard it can run on a 486dx2@66mhz but the FMVs would freeze. It is impressive what game developers were able to do with such little power back then.
Around 1993/1994, I had my Vobis Highscreen Tower PC with a Intel 486DX33, 4MB of RAM, 512k Trident Graphics Card, some "no name" Soundcard, Cherry Keyboard and some cheap mouse. It had both a 5.25 s a 3.5 Inch drive and a loud 100MB Seagate HD. Also included was a cheap VGA 14Inch Highscreen color Monitor which could do 640x480 at 75hz or 800x600 at 60hz. I bought this PC December 1992 at the Vobis Store in Aachen in the Viktoriastrasse. I write this, because this was the very first Vobis Computer Store ever. I lived in Maastricht 30km West from Aachen.
Amazing story! My first PC was also a Highwcreen. Desktop, 386-33.
I remember my first computer in 1995: Adax Delta 486DX4/100 AMD, Trident 9440 PCI, Genius Sound Maker, 16 Segete 500 MB, 8 MB RAM, NEC CD ROM x4 - everything worked beautifully. Those were the times...
Oh yes, Trident, I still have a 9685 2MB PCI model, which i use for diagnostics of motherboards.
This was a fun trip down memory lane. Sheesh, I am getting old. It was so much fun back then where you had to physically connect all the hardware and equipment. What a satisfying experience when you finally got to play your game!
When what CPU option should I buy didn't mean deciding between Intel and AMD...
Yeah there was a worse option lol
I mean, if you dont limit yourself to X86 then there are still various other options available in the desktop space today, such as IBM ppc64le based systems like the Talos II or blackbird, as well as Arm based ones like the ampere workstations. and with how far emulation has come, running x86 software on them isnt excactly impossible. the problem is as usual practicability and price to performance ratio. its simply more convenient and better for performance to use a native x86 cpu than it is to use a different cpu and use it to emulate x86
Cyrix CPUs were definitely a cheaper option back then, but they were also plagued with constant overheating issues.
In 1992 we didn't have a computer at home. But at school I got to use a Mac SE with a caddy loading external CD-ROM. I would play Cosmic Osmos (point and click game) for hours. So much fun. They also had some Apple IIgs computers I would play Where in the world is Carmen San Diego and some Beagle Brothers programs as well. Great memories.
I startet back then with Kings Quest 1, then over the years played almost all of them. The Kings Quest series, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Monkey Island, The Day of the Tentacle, Simon the Sorcerer, Maniac Mansion… Good old days!
I still have today my 486DLC40 + ET4000 + SBPro as a retro PC, working like a charm.
I was so proud of it 30 years ago, playing Triton's demo Crystal Dream 2 with a constant 60 FPS, while the 486DX25 + Trident (which was quite expensive) of a friend had a lot of slow downs 😀
Yea some demos took advantage of the Tseng...
My family had purchased an IBM PS/1 Consultant around 1993 which had a 486 SX 25MHz. I toyed with it until around 2005 when the PSU blew, taking most of the parts with it. A couple years ago, I found a seller on eBay with the same model and bought it. Nostalgia restored!
1:22 it sounds like the Pentium overdrive for Socket 3 systems
Brings back some old memories .Cyrix was a good optain at the time cheaper than the other brands.Cheers from Turkey mate.
Indiana Jones: Fate of Atlantis - one of the first games I had growing up. Worked great on the 386sx. There wasn't a sound card in it so it was just PC speaker for sound and music. I remember re-playing it again a two or three years later on a newer system with a proper Sound Blaster just so I could experience the sound and music!
Hi,did you hear the voices or only the background music?
@valparaisosting It was the floppy disk version, so just music and sound effects. The full voice narration was on the CD version - which is probably what you get if you get it now from GOG / Steam
My first computer in 1997 was P166MMX , Asus tx97 mother board ,Trident video, ESS1868 audio, WD 2G HDD such a classic build!
Great first computer 😁
That Highscreen one was my first PC too in 1994. 386SX16 with 1MB Ram and a 160MB HDD :D
G'day Phil,
🤔I was mainly gaming on Consoles back in the early 90s with my PC interactions being Hardware problem solving & finding faults/Testing Software my friend was writing,
but a PC game I really did like was Street Rod where you would buy, customise & tune, race (for money or pink slips) & sell cars
Around that general time we got the second family computer. Upgrading from an Apple IIc that we'd gotten back in '84. Mom bought a Magnavox 386SX20. It was something of a bare bones model. No sound card and the like. But it was good enough that I could play games like Wing Commander 1 and 2, Battletech, Mechwarrior, and all the gold box SSI AD&D games. It lasted until I bought my first computer in '95, a Pentium 75. After that one though, I had all parts built systems.
In 92 -94 I ran a Macintosh SE 30, with a custom composite video mod, so I could run my NES & SNES on my screen 😉😃 Good memories of a much more simple time. 😀
This really brings me back to my high school days, I worked after school at a friend's family's mom and pop computer store in North Quincy Massachusetts building custom 386 and 486 gaming PCs. We did sell a lot of Cyrix based PCs as a lower cost option. Another great video and as always a great way to wake up on a Friday morning.
Ah yes, the Cyrix. I had a few. And Tseng ET4000, too. Best ISA card. With a Gravis UltraSound playing Doom and TIE Fighter was amazing.
First part of the 90s was console gaming, then jumped to PC in 1996. A shame I missed this fun!
Point and click adventures were my main genre in the early 90s as well. Monkey Island, Willy Beamish, Heart of China, Police Quest, and lots of others. The other games I played around that time were Ultima titles. Ultima Underworld, Ultima Underworld 2, and Ultima 6.
I loved Gateway. Such a great story. I've been thinking about replaying that sometime soon.
We speak the same language ☺️
Thanks Phil! In 1993 I played Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis on my Slimline Gateway 2000 486 SX 33. Good memories, that game is one of my favorites, too.
In 1992 I built an AMD 486 DX40 with 8MB RAM. As with most PC builders a lot of parts were holdovers from the computer before. The previous motherboard had a Harris 286 20, and 4MB of SIPP memory. The video card was an ET-4000 till I later got a Trident VLB card that allowed for 24bit color. The sound card was a Gravis UltraSound that I had gotten not long before the upgrade. With the nature of such a process there isn't a way to buy back the same computer without receipts for all the parts, but I do have the AMD 486 DX40 CPU. That motherboard later failed, and the CPU & BIOS went into a friends computer that had both of those fried by a lightning strike. When she later wanted to get rid of it, I got the computer for free.
Those are beautiful parts, working well together to give great performance! The Tseng helps a lot...
My very first PC featured an IBM 6X86 P200+ CPU. Running Windows 95. For anything integer based it was quick for the time. But it was middling performance for anything requiring floating point calculation. I think it was top model of the IBM 6X86 CPU family at that time. Used to run some video games on it such as PGA Tour 96 and MDK. But mostly used it for reference and college work. As I remember it was a pretty decent PC.
I didn’t have a computer at home until the late 90s but I had Jones in the Fast Lane on floppy and sometimes played on the computer at my mom’s work. The 90s were not an easy era in terms of hardware and getting games to work. The 00s improves things a lot and for me personally the era I love the most is 1998-2008 but it’s still nice to learn about older stuff.
You were lucky you got to play such a great game :) I played this with a friend as a child and some years ago we played it again. We played for three hours. With most retro games, I just play for 10 minutes to get a little nostalgia fix.
I started playing in 1994 with a 486dx2 66 with the Creative multimedia kit, I remember that Cyrix was considered the cheap alternative for the CPU. Then came the Pentium and the leap was huge. Thanks for these contents, you can breathe the air of the 90s🤩
Had a very late 386-board which can run @50MHz bus speed (same chipset was used on 486-boards) and this 486DLC @50MHz was quite fast. FastDoom run quite good. 😅
BTW, Gateway is a novel by Frederik Pohl. It was groundbreaking at its time, and has grown into a series of novels known as "Heechee Saga". In my opinion the story holds up very well today, despite focusing on old fashioned space mystery themes.
I never liked Gateway with their cow logo. lol
Thank you Phil, I love those retro hardware videos with sound challenges and games from the 90s….
I did not know you can read the German PC Player! Awesome!
In 1994 we had a 486 Sx-25 with 4 MB of RAM, CD-ROM, SB16, mouse, MS-DOS 6 and Windows 3.1, and we enjoyed BBSes (2400 bps!) and King's Quest 6.
I love the thumbnail for this video. So funny. Well done.
Thanks 😆
I bought a Cirrus-Logic computer years ago. I never made that mistake again (partly because they stopped making that chip shortly thereafter) and went into doing custom-builds.
So, I just got into "computers" - got a C64 - the flat version - and around that time of the early 90s, I got a used 286, then a 386. Then a HL Markt version Pentium 1, then a custom order AMD K1 600mHz which I customized getting into PC building with Athlons, then moved to the US, build a couple more, currently an old Threadripper 1920X with 128GB RAM for Bayesian stuff with large datasets, 2x 5800X3D PCs, 1 3700X PC, a few laptops as well. That Threadripper might be slower than the other ones, but it has 4-lane memory and lots of it. So, it is very useful for that very case that I am using it for. Several years of death data? No problem. 4.5GB per year, 5 years, running Bayesian pointers on it live in RAM? Go, fetch it boy!
So, fond memories on the 286: The 2 HDD - 20MB each - were so old that when starting up, I needed to hit the case to get the motors spinning up. That may be counter indicated nowadays, but back then, these drives were beyond their 'last leg', like a crawling zombie in Project Zomboid.
Funny, I did the same mistake and did build all my PCs after 1993. It was so different back then, memory, sound card, drivers etc had to work together while nothing was plug n play like now.
Just to find memory modules that work with Your PC was a pain at times. I had tons of CDs from magazines with game demos and drivers just to make my life a bit easier.
Processor did most of the work in games, till Voodoo broke the scene. (Still love Voodoo like it was my baby).
Your videos have been just a treat for us old-timer enthusiasts! Thank You! ❤
This happened to me upgrading from a 386. I went to a local shop that speced out a "486" for me. I got it home and felt the performance wasn't what I expected. I returned it to the shop and they upgraded it to an Intel 486 Dx/66 CPU for a little bit more money. I was much happier and felt the performance was much better.
Nice!
You can also create the Ultimate Talkie version with a script. It's the original version with the voice from the Special Edition.
Thx for this video, this is awesome and really brings back memories! Especially the Wing Commander part :) Spent more time than i care to admit playing and modding Wing Commander games, and these definitely have a special place in my heart. My retro machines can't live without WC1 and WC2 at the very least
I had purchased a IBM PS/2 model 70 in 1992 for work related applications and it was fine but in 1995 I found a Cyrix 486DLC-50 at Computer City so gave it a try and it worked. Made my Windows 3.11 and MS Office install very pleasant to use and kept the machine viable.
I was behind the curve in PCs in 1992. I think by then a family member gave me an IBM PS/2 Model 25 that he wasn't using anymore. With only an 8086 and 512k of RAM. I was still able to find games for it in the bargain bins of some stores. It's how I discovered classic RPGs like Bard's Tale, Might & Magic, and Phantasie. My family did still have an Amiga 1000 at this time, but finding games for it was getting harder and harder, at least in the US.
Very nice!
We had a ton of Cyrix CPU's when I was a kid. My dad knew someone with Cyrix.
I had a 386 DX25 and got one of those Cyrix 486 DLC2 upgrades for my birthday in 1995 as it was within my budget. At the time it was a little speed boost for Windows 95 but I still ended up saving to build a whole new 486 DX2 system anyway because my 386 motherboard was maxed at 4 MB using hard to find SIPPs (not SIMMs).
I actually had a system with a 486DLC-40 processor in the early '90s, although mine was I believe specimen from TI. While it was definitely not a speed monster, it did get me through quite a few DOS games, including Monkey Island, Legend of Kyrandia, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Doom, etc. And of course games such as Simcity 2000.
It even ran Windows 95 decently, although at that time I preferred either DOS or Windows 3.11. In it was a Soundblaster 16, which eventually also made it into my next PC, which was a Pentium based system.
From what I remember, the 486DLC-40 actually was a 486 class CPU designed by Cyrix, but with a 386-style external bus and the 1kB of L1 cache you mentioned.
Welcome to the club: With me it was a Soyo motherboard with an AMD DX4-100 processor after a 486-SX 25 slow-poke nonsense system, and from Highscreen as well. 😅
After that came an AMD K5-PR133, which I liked a lot and kind of feel sorry about for being forgotten by most, after the AMD K6 series totally stole the show.
I had a 486DX4/100 with an ET4000 PCI and in the end, 32MiB of RAM, that thing even ran Quake 1 and GTA 1 in the low-res DOS version decently playable. It could even handle Roller Coaster Tycoon 1, until about 500 guests in the park.
Nice! People forget about the VLB and PCI Tseng cards. Amazing for DOS.
The extra cache is like an AMD X3D CPU today. Cache always increases performance.
amazing vid thumbnail phil! hhaaha!!
I remember playing games at this time on my Amiga in 1280x1024 4096 colors with full stereo spund
The Cyrix 486Dlc 33, was the first computer I built. Yeah, comparatively it was slow by Intel standards, but I managed to build a computer with a whopping 8M of RAM (I'll never need any more than that, I was told), a Trident 8900D, and a super fast double speed CD ROM drive for about £450. No hard disk though. I had to wait a few months before I could afford the massive 400Mb HDD (which cost about £400).
Thing would play Wolfenstein and then Doom perfectly well!
0:16 - Austrian-Australian! What a combo!
😁
Cyrix 6x86 system i build, IBM branded CPU, ASUS board, 1995.
Was in use till 2016, never any issues. Last OS was Win 98 SE
I did not exist back in 1993, but the '90s PC gaming stuff is one of the most enjoyable things
I remember having a Cyrix chip 25 years ago and it was terrible, but it got me on the PC gaming road.
Your take on this topic is amazing Phil! First time someone comes up with a good explanation to why my first 486 PC felt like it underperforming so much. It was a pre-made one of course... I was reading a lot of PC magazines back then but I wouldn't even dare to open the computer myself. Don't think my parents would let my try to assembly my own considering the prices back then. It was until much later with socket 7 and 3D acceleration I was forced to try. But now that you mention it might have been the graphics card that was holding everything down. I wish I remembered what the bios was showing during startup. Shame we gave away that PC, I would love to be able to check the specs and components after all these years!
Yes looking back, I knew so little. I plan on using more personal stories for the videos. I find it enjoyable to structure them this way 😁
I can relate to this story. My first PC was a 20 MHz 486SX which I had saved to buy after selling my Amiga 500 and working a summer job in 1993, I was desperate to play Doom on it. While performance in Doom was decent, it was really struggling with Quake in later years so I upgraded it using the Intel Pentium Overdrive kit, which was my lesson to do research instead of believing the marketing hype. It was a small speed bump yes, but nowhere near as fast as having a real Pentium board and chip. From then on, I too started building my PCs from component parts rather than buying pre-made boxes from OEMs.
How does adding a FPU in Quake only bump speed up a little?
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt the FPU helps, but the system's still bottlenecked by the slow system bus and lack of Memory-Type Range Registers to enable caching of frame buffer reads and writes. Using an ISA graphics card with its limited data transfer speed didn't help, either. Once I upgraded to a real Pentium Pro motherboard with a PCI graphics card, Quake software rendering performance went off the charts.
Without FPU all the emulator instructions have to go over the system bus. So FPU also helps here. ET4000 showed what the ISA bus is capable of and Doom does not even read from the frame buffer. The ISA bus is no "VESA local bus", instead there is a bridge. I think that this bridge is allowed to queue writes. The first generation of SVGA used all resources to satisfy the bandwidth of video out and cut corners elsewhere. Legacy VGA was not given much thought ( Voodoo cant even). The trick with Doom is that it only writes to the frame buffer in vBlank, where the buggy two-port memory logic did not interfere. I think that Quake does the same.@@little_fluffy_clouds
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt yes, hindsight is 20/20, but I didn’t have an ET4000 card back then, just whatever cheap VGA controller was thrown into my OEM PC that I had bought second hand since I was an intern on a very modest income back then.
My Quake software rendering FPS almost doubled a few years later when I had a proper job and built my first high end PC, going from a 486 board with a Pentium Overdrive CPU to a full-blown PPro motherboard with a Matrox PCI graphics card.
A lot of factors go into this. PPro had a faster clock speed, more cache, faster access to RAM and the graphics card, and so on.
I don’t regret buying the Overdrive since the FPU came in handy when playing Quake as well as my favourite flight sims and for learning Autocad and 3D Studio on DOS at university; but it led me to start doing more careful research into PC components before buying upgrades.
Back then we had a 286-12. Mostly just playing Dune 2, Sim City, Sim Farm, TMNT and some others. Good fun. Now I have tons of hardware from 286 and beyond. Fun going back and putting a machine together playing the old games.
I nearly forgot about Gateway! I tried playing it as a child on our 486DX/33 machine, but I never really understood what I was supposed to do. I should revisit it again. Thanks for the upload, Phil, high quality work as always.
Thank you!
I used to have a 286 12mhz Olivetti, 1MB of ram, greyscale monitor, running both dos and Win 3.1. Having a greyscale monitor was really sad, some colors mixed with others becoming the same shade of grey, Red was directly converted to black.
In 1994 in Greece, my grandma got me a 286 12Mhz (turbo), 1 MB of RAM, 20MB HDD (MFM), 5.25" 1.2 MB floppy, PC speaker sound, with a monochrome monitor. It had onboard graphics, set by dipswitches. MDA/CGA/EGA. The EGA 16 colour modes wouldn't translate well on mono on that onboard card, so I mostly used CGA mono. That poor HDD went "magic smoke" on me in 1998, and by that time I had gotten a 3.5" floppy drive too. That was my first PC that got me till the very end of 2000 (!) when I finally built myself a Pentium III 800Mhz with 192MB of RAM, a Geforce2MX 32 MB, 20GB HDD 7200, and a SouldBlaster Live! 1024 (a Value variant). What a huge upgrade then :D
In 1995 I assembled a machine based on a Cyrix 5x86 133 that had the same confusing nomenclature, however I knew it was a 486-type CPU. Its motherboard American Megatrends BIOS used a GUI, which was very uncommon.
For old PCs that don't require large HDD storage I recommend to use a CF/IDE interface : Compact Flash cards architecture is quite close to IDE, therefore more compatible and reliable, the interface is cheaper than a SD/IDE one and you can find double CF/IDE interfaces with slave/master jumpers. In addition, CF cards have become more easily available than SD cards (using a MicroSD/SD adapter can be another source of issues) because CF cards are still commonly used by professional systems, for instance Cisco routers.
I'm guessing you're using a separate midi ISA card for the Roland CM32-L because you still want to be able to use a game gontroller with the Sounc Blaster.
If you want to use a mixer of the same era than your computer, you can find an Expelec Mix 002 for less than 30€.
I played around with a few Cyrix computers when they were all the rage and they were not bad at all.
We love you Phil! Great video as always! Have a great weekend and enjoy your Saturdays coffee :)
Thanks! You too!
I am kind of surprised that X-Wing is never mentioned from this era. That was the game I fell in love with using a 386SX-33 (being still at primary school). I had to spend the summer holiday at my grandparents, and I forced my parents to carry my configuration to their village. I remember them thinking a computer was a huge calculator... :-) Later when I upgraded to an AMD 486DX4-100 I could switch full details on. What a joy that was... :-)
Well I was into Wing commander 😉
I bought a prebuilt 486 DLC computer back in the early 1990s. It worked fine with Windows 3.1 but was a real dog with Windows 95 first edition. Ran real slowly.
The wing commander games were what I played, I had 1,2 and 3, had an intel 486-DX2 that I overclocked and maxed the ram amount and it still struggled to play wing commander 3 without a custom boot to allocate more memory, lol
I had a Cyrix “P133” I think. It caused me significant grief because, as it turns out, it was causing my CD burner to fail because UDMA wasn’t supported, or properly implemented. It was an expensive problem because it would only fail sometimes and I wasted a lot of CD-Rs.
Oh man what a frustration 😞
I remember the 486 DX/4-100 was so much faster than anything else out there. It blew anything else away at the time and for a couple of years after it's release. Amazing at the time!
1991 - As a 12 year old in California I enjoyed Indy 500 for a 286 PC and Accolade Heatwave
1992 - 8086 CGA Sierra Space Quest 3
1993 - Back in the UK, 386 and US Navy Fighters comes to mind
I loved the 286-486 era. I was an Amigan really but the PC space was exciting back then too.
I had a "486 that wasn't a 486". VIA Samuels cpu, CentaurHauls technology. Cheap mobo, cpu soldered on, not socketed. Found secondhand. Despite ID'ing as a 486, it lacked several cpu features, first and foremost the CMOV tag, Conditional Move instruction set. This caused a frustrating number of Linux LiveCD's, including ones meant for "legacy" machines, to be not bootable...if ISOLINUX preboot loader had been compiled with CMOV. If ISOLINUX was CMOV agnostic, the distro itself had about a 50% chance of booting.
1992? Frogger on a Apple II. I wasn't really old enough to figure out how to get games from magazines yet. Played a lot of edutainment stuff. Around 1995 though, I got a 486 and started getting a bunch of freeware stuff. DOOM and the like. By then my parents got me a few things. Lots of the older Star Wars games cause I loved it back then and with that I got the LucasArts point and clicks. Mechwarrior 2(Dad loved it), Daggerfall, Descent II, and Duke3D when it came out.
Awesome
I too used to have a Cyrix CPU many many years ago. If I recall, it was a Cyrix 386DX-40. Amazing processors at the time!
I started with Pentium 166, so 486 and equivalents are prehistory for me. Glad you decided to expand into this period, since it's not what I'm usually interested in. But now I'm ready to learn.
I think we all can agree that we could use third player between Intel and AMD.
Thanks!
After CRTs, next we'll convert you to old school hard drive ;) The whine is part of the experience
Oh no Phil! Don't turn your nose up at the Aztech soundcards! They have OPL chips and sound great. Even the soundcard/modem combo boards have Yamaha OPL chips. And for now, reasonably priced compared to other sound cards.
Thanks for that little Review, Phil! Some feedback on the SB16 "popping": That may also happen with certain SB16 versions being run in SB 2.0 mode, like many old games do. It's a hardware issue, and some later SB16 versions don't have that problem.
Love this kind of content, born 85 and my first games were MI, wolf, leisure suit larry!!! later doom etc
My dad upgraded to a Pentium system in 1993, so my brother and I got his old system. An AMD 386DX-40 with 4MB ram, 40MB HDD, Trident 8900 and for Christmas we asked for a Creative SB with speakers. I remember a lot of back and forth with diskettes in those days (I went to school with a ten pack to trade games). We played Doom (in a really tiny window), Depth Dwellers, Lemmings, Stunts, Testdrive, Monster Bash, Hocus Pocus, ...
The high school years! I had a ZX Sinclair Spectrum 48K, and I was upgrading it to a 128K model! What a leap forward! In the early 90 in Eastern Europe, the Spectrum clones costed as much as a car!!! The PC came later on, after 1995. My first PC was an AMD 486 DX4 at 120MHz. I've upgraded a year later to an AMD K5 at 100MHz, so I can play Diablo. Today I have every ZX Spectrum model produced and several modern ones like Spectrum NEXT, N-GO, JustSpeccy128, SiZif 512. Still play on them. For the retro PC gaming, I prefer the GOG releases on a recent computer but with CRT monitor. To have CRT effect on a modern HD/4K display, you can use the RetroTINK 4K.
Fun Phil Friday!
I had the Cyrix with it's co processor and quite liked it. It was actually plugged into a 486 board, and you could see the extra row of pins around the socket which weren't used. Also, unbeknown to me, I had it set to 66mHz without a problem. I did an "upgrade" to a 486DX/66 but didn't notice a massive difference. Where it was better was with Wing Commander 2. Memories... haha... good video! For sound cards... try the Pro Audio Spectrum 16. I used that and it was awesome! Take care.
486DLC! I remember years ago a NZ company, PC Direct sold a few of these as a value oriented 486 computer, I knew people who had them. Later on when i had very little $$ I built up a 486DLC-40 with a matching 4c87 math coprocessor. The game Pitfall for windows actually ran, was playable full screen - It refused to run on a 386DX-40 so was enough to fool at least one program into thinking it was running on a 486 ;)
Back then, Intel wasn't like ARM. I mean share license to make CPU. Intel was limited while ARM maybe a lot
Thanks!
Thank you!
I started out with P75, in those days Cyrix was infamous for overstating its speed, and weird compatibility issues were abound, and it often had stability issues as well. I've stayed away from its 586 incarnations.
Yeah, I think in the Pentium era Cyrix increased the ratio of integer cycles to floating point cycles on their CPUs. So logic and integer math went faster, but more complex math ran slower.