LGR - The Turbo Button

This video made me remember the good old days! I too always thought turbo buttons sped up my PC and complained when they didn't :D Loved this video BTW, keep em coming!

Max Vogel

At 4:48 a 386 DX with a designed for Windows 95 sticker. WTF???!!!

My first PC was an IBM Aptiva S (c1994-5) but I never had a PC with a turbo button. Always wondered what the details behind them were. Decades old mystery solved. Thanks Clint.

my first time playing doom it whas on a win95 or some thing and i had to use the turbo button to get games running nice :D

StigDesign1

Oh hell yes I have a rig with a turbo button, cd rom drive, 3 1/2" and 5 1/4" disk slots. And now I want to put a turbo button on my current gaming rig to change the clock speed on demand and win the Internet!

Captaincrazyhat

By the time I saw your tweet calling for photos, it was too late! I've got a PC/AT clone case, and an Osborne case bearing sexy turbo button-ness. :P Anyhoo, if anyone is interested, there was a short discussion on VOGONS a few years back about how the turbo button actually achieved what it did. <a href="http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=28695" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=28695</a> Interestingly, different motherboards do it differently. Some do seemingly affect the clockrate of the CPU, while some do other tricks, like introducing wait states. To quote one post: "I do have a 12MHz 286 board here, and when the turbo button is disabled Norton Sysinfo reports that its clockspeed changes from 12MHz to 8MHz and back again when the turbo is enabled. None of my other 386/486boards do this; the CPU score changes but the clockspeed stays constant on screen."

RetroSwim

All these years, and I finally find out what the turbo button was all about. I remember hearing a secretary mention it back in 86 when she was using a 286 PC and said it was slow, so they should add a turbo button. Though i was no stranger to computer, it was the first time I heard the term and my mind had images of belt driven devices that would speed things up.. and at the same time dismissed it as not probably. I always wondered what the point was. Now I know. Thanks.

Gary Leigh

I won't be surprised when your videos end up in elementary and middle schools as required learning material. New generations have no idea what a 80286 is, or floppy disks, or even dial-up modems. You seriously bring history alive and have a great way of communicating it in a way that makes sense. Kudos to you LGR!!! (shoot I've watched all of your videos and I can't remember your name, sorry - all I remember is PhreakIndee, lol)

Mark Whitbeck

So...whats with the key locks on those old PC's? Great video by the way.

They could have just made the turbo button with a build in negation. So if you boot up your pc, turbo would be on from the start.

Glauflügel

Love these technical videos! Can you do a video about the history and demise of video game manuals? Man, I miss those things!

Mr. Horseshoe

I always associated the button with PCs that were so slow that the mere existence of the button seemed like a joke. My 486 could run Descent just fine without any "turbo" mode, but my friends 386 with turbo button just produced a slide show. I think I realized what the button does, I just found it useless until years later.

Well that was unexpected. I saw this and kept of thinking of the turbo button you used to see on third-party game controllers that would press a button really, really fast or whatever it was that it did. This was interesting because I was aware of software relying on a certain CPU clock speed to run correctly because I have used DOS-Box but I always wondered how the problem was solved on the actual hardware of the day. This kind of reminds me of the switch that my old Sony Vaio lap top had. The lap top had an actual dedicated gpu as well as integrated graphics on the motherboard. The idea was that it would save power using the integrated graphics for basic things. But I found that older games like Starcraft would run correctly on the integrated graphics but when I wanted to run Skyrim I would toggle the switch back to use the AMD card. I actually miss that switch sometimes, because now I use a hardcore gaming rig with a Titan X and windows 10. The first Starcraft will always hold a special place in my heart and I would love to play it from time to time but I have yet to find a working solution to get it working on a modern system.

Kevin

Never understood what that turbo button did until know!

Christian Meneses

I still have to repair, configure and plug in my turbo button and led display on my 486 box. Your video reminded me that I still havent done it yet lol.

The only Turbo button I knew about was for the NES Turbo Controller... I learned that from an AVGN video or something. I never knew they were a feature on computers! But alas, I think I was born a little too late to really remember when the Turbo button was a common feature :)

Lindsay Michelle

No problem. Agreed, it did!

LGR

Sounds like the Bond 386 I showed in the video! There's a place in the BIOS to switch the turbo button on or off by default on boot-up :) Interesting about the numerical display being funky, I never had one of those to test out

LGR

3:10 Oh... My... God... I had one like that! Don't remember though, if it was my very first or second PC Case. Anyway, I also believed that this turbo button makes PC go faster, but because I could never tell the difference I stopped using it and (because I didn't have internet or tech-savy friends at that time) after a while forgot to even care for it's existence.

Michal -milczyciel- Holdynski

The Turbo button on Mom's 486DX/2 was inversed so that on was fast and off was slow, though instead of switching between 66 MHz and 4 MHz it switched down to 8 MHz. Or the display could've just been configured that way. Once the thing was updated to a P120, it still read 66 on and 8 off but the button no longer actually affected anything, just the numerical display and the turbo light. Oh well. :P

Kris Asick

Thanks for this video buddy, it needed to be made.

The good old Turbo Button. Wonderful video, brought back a lot of memories indeed :) I remember that on my first machine, it wasn't even wired up - so it was always at that blistering 66mhz of 486 goodness. Then when I tried to play a few oldies, remember that it had no effect. That was eventually rectified, but still, something I'll always remember…

Rob Caporetto

When I saw these buttons on computers and not having any idea how they actually worked I always imagined the scene from the Road warrior where Max turns the blower on.

Michael Lamartina

Great video! The turbo button, especially coupled with a CPU clock display, was at the time so cool and funky even though we were kids and had no idea what those numbers meant.

Hamid

So it slows things down, or sometimes speeds things up. That's probably why it confused me back in the day. ;-) Sadly the last turbo button I saw was on a Cyrix CPU-based PC box, and that got trashed long ago, so I dont't have any photo to share, only memories. Never used turbo buttons anyway, as I didn't need things to slow down (actually at the time we needed to speed things up and that's why too PCs - with Pentium IIIs and Voodoo 3 cards - for my too big brothers eventually replaced the Cyrix box). At that time, I had no PC of my own, but I didn't care (when I wasn't blown away by Duke 3D or Glide games, anyway, ...), because I had an Amiga 600. :)

Maximilien Noal

My first job out of college back in 1998 had me working at a computer with a turbo button and a case display. Like others, I never really knew what it for. Thanks for this!

DH

I always wondered what that was for. I was one of the ones that never studied it, but noticed it always made my PC slower, so I figured something wasn't configured right and left it alone.

Zem Hysong

My god I forgot about these!

Rerez

Awesome! Thanks! :)

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