LGR 486 Update! The Pentium Overdrive

Aww man, I remember having to set jumpers for your CPU. I was very glad when you could start doing that in the BIOS instead. Now if they could just standardize the LED light and power/reset button headers so you don't have to plug 10 of those in...

Chris Rogers

One of my favorite weird al songs, which is still relevant today, in ways :P

Dani Leath

As the owner of a Packard Bell 486DX2...I remember drooling over these overdrive chips back in the day. This video really brought me back and scratched a mental "itch" that I've had for....24 years?? Thanks Clint!

Yep, the test is shown in the video! It's part of the diagnostics disk Intel included.

LGR

LGR did you test that chip for the FDIV flaw? That shrinkwrapped box may have skipped the recall. That would make it even more unique.

GadgetBlues

Nooo. The woodgrain 486 is no longer a 486. My ocd is kicking in. How will I sleep now?

Deckard Games

I had a DX4 100.Somehow was able to play Quake.

Frederick G.

Poor upgrade a proper upgrade as you know is new motherboard , CPU and memory

Yeah! Compared to Starfox or NHL '96 on my SNES this would have felt like a big jump.

JennaKay

You have inspired myself as well as many others to explore the systems that we once used in the past (my wife hates you for this inspiration, lol). I got an IBM Thinkpad 600 running with Office 97 for law school in the fall. I was planning to invest in an XP system until I remembered I have an old Dell desktop from 2006. Being old and a pack rat has its advantages.

Man, when you tried Descent II and said "I would play it like this as a kid!", it's so true - back in the day we used to bear terrible framerates just to play those cool games. I had a flashback of my brother and I playing NHL '96 on our 486 66Mhz in high resolution 640x480 on a 14" monitor - downsized to 7" to keep up the framerate (and of course, no details at all). We upgraded to a Pentium 90Mhz (overclocked to 100) the next summer, six months later. But those were fun times, playing with your nose just a couple inches away from the screen.

Rico da Rooster

I worked as a computer tech when this came out and we had it in stock but sold a new motherboard and a 75 MHz CPU instead. Performance was better for just a bit more money and you could upgrade to 133 later. Main issue was with people having 8 30 pin SIMMs. No Pentium motherboards had 8 slots for 30 pin if I recall.

Ryan Yoder

Those graphical guides though. So nice. Reminiscent of the ones that came with the Amiga.

Richard Shears

I remember looking to "Upgrade" using one of those. I had the intel DX4100 at the time which turned out to be a really good chip. So much so that this would have been a downgrade.

Richard Shears

I was interested in it at the time, but decided to save up and got a pentium 90 instead.

Bryndal Dwyre

"I don't know.. I just wanna play Duke Nukem 3D and Descent and stuff!" <3 <3 <3

Anders Enger Jensen

I remeber my dad having one of these and I too was completely underwhelmed by the "upgrade" now moving to a PII that was an upgrade :D

Mat Cooper

I remember those but never had one. I was too young and it was too expensive. If I'm not wrong i think I also remember some kind of upgrade where you put the upgrade in the socket and the old cpu on top. Maybe that's just be remember wrong.

PhotoSvein

I do miss the era of "the more megahertz, the better."

Steve Lovelace

I hated these overdrive chips when I worked at the service department of the computer store. When computers would come in for repair that had these chips installed, after a few years the fans would have seized up or were spinning very slowly and making a lot of noise. There wasn't really any readily available replacement for them. Which usually meant replacing the whole CPU.

The 8-Bit Guy

I remember when Intel went out of their way advertising the Pentium Overdrive in late 1995 and early 1996. Not many in my neck of the woods fell for the hype though, all because of the efforts of a local computer shop owner - he said the Overdrive was too expensive for what it could really do and instead offered Evergreen and PowerLeap 586 Upgrades at more reasonable prices ($130.00 and $110.00 respectively); he also said that you should buy a new Pentium-based PC if that's what you really wanted. Now that you've tested one Clint I can see what this guy was right all along.

Your disk sounds wonderful.

Brian Brown

Yeah I recall you mentioning that, either in a video or a comment or something! I gotta try it.

LGR

I forget if I mentioned this or not before, but you can squeeze surprisingly more FPS from Duke3D by messing with the DUKE3D.CFG file, specifically the "ScreenMode" setting as the setup program doesn't let you activate Mode-X, referred to as "Chained" mode in the config file. Simply changing the ScreenMode setting from 2 to 0 (or to 1 if you have VESA 2.0 support) can make for a BIG difference in FPS! (Also going from 2 to 0 lets you set more interesting resolutions like 320x400, which is a good one for Duke3D on a system that's powerful but lacking VESA 2.0 capabilities.)

Kris Asick

The Pentium Overdrive era is fascinating for its... er... fascination of making CPUs work in sockets they have no business running in! Pentium 2 in a Socket 8? We gotchu fam. Overdrives are cool, but I've always been more interested in the other platform upgrades, like the "Make-it-xyz" solutions. Stuff like shoehorning a 486SX into your 286 dinosaur. I've even seen Sega Teradrives upgraded using those suckers! Still an awesome video, and makes me happy seeing the old Overdrives getting some airtime. <3

RetroSwim

You say you've had your desktop for a week? Throw that junk away man, it's an antique!

LGR

My computer's got the clocks. It rocks. But it was obsolete before I opened the box.

Steve Lovelace

I hope it comes to fruition! These kinds projects are tons of fun, just so many little variables that can altar performance in unknown ways

LGR

🎵 I gots gator belts and patty melts 🎶

LGR

I always wanted to do with with my own 486 DX2/66 back in the day but never got around to it. Instead I ended up getting a Pentium III 450 around 1999, which was a lot better obviously. I still want to give a go though and I've made myself a long-term project to build my own 'Retro Pentium SX' system with the best 486 motherboard and components I can get my hands on to see how far I can push things.

Also, I like how you pointed out it was so fresh, and also, so clean.... so now Outkast is stuck in my head

John Covil

I wanted one of these for our 486SX 33 soooo bad back then.

John Covil

It runs Crisis in the Kremlin, close enough 😁

LGR

Ah man, I wanted that sweet little thing when I had my IBM PS/1 486SX back in the days... But it looks like it would have just been an overpriced piece of hardware that wouldn't have made much of a difference... The question is : does it run Crysis now?

Frederic St-Georges

Ha, "Microsoft wallpaper" is the new After Dark screensaver it seems. Still a fun shout-out, hehe. Linus actually invited me personally to LTX this year. Sadly I cannot make it, but perhaps in the future. Once they learn the difference between screensavers and wallpapers :P

LGR

Looking forward to the video! By the way you probably know this but Linus of Linus Tech Tips shouted out your wallpaper video :) That made me really happy to see