Anyone Remember The "Old 486DX"?

[WTAP]

If you can go back that far, the question was, what was the better , the DX 2 50, or the DX4 100. Now that's a long long way back!!!!

 

[jinsonxu]

DX4100Mhz!

I think the DX250 was a doubled 25Mhz one was it?

 

[jinsonxu]

The DX4100Mhz was a clock tripled 33Mhz chip, internal speed at 100Mhz but external speed (bus communication etc at 33Mhz)

So the DX4 is faster.

But i'm wondering though, the chips nowadays, don't they also use these techniques?

 

[Moonbender]

They do, only with higher numbers. There are some important differences, for instance the cache of all modern CPUs is on-die, and accessed at full CPU clock speed, which makes quite a difference.
But of course there is still a bus clock (FSB, mainly 66-133 Mhz) and a multiplier which sets the CPU speed.

 

[Vegito]

I have 2 sx25 for free, a dx2/80 and dx4/100 - runs 50x2 or 33x3.

Still have them... even my AMD 386 DX40

 

[BA]

Now the DX50, that was the hoss. Not real common, but that 50mhz, oh my!

 

[Rigoletto]

I'm curious, what speed did the memory back in those days run at again?

 

[oneeighty]

The 60-70ns 30-pin SIMMS were quite common until EDO SIMMS came along. Seems likely that they ran at 33MHz considering the FSB was 33MHz at the time.

 

[Zenmervolt]

Yes, the DX/4 was faster and a neat little interim chip while the original Pentium ramped up (I believe a P-90 could easily handle a DX/4-100 though). DX/4's were somewhat rare given that they came out very close to the time the Pentium was released. Nice little chip though. As for memory, 70ns 33Mz 72pin Parity was pretty common on 80486DX/2 machines even until 1992. Anyone else remember "banking" two EDO SIMM's so they would work in your new 66MHz bus Pentium board? (The old Pentium boards could use old SIMM's but only in even numbers and each pair had to be of identical SIMM's.)

Aaron Meyer

 

[Rebels7]

I still have a DX100 @ 120 on my home network running Windows 98. No speed deamon, but a very stable system. We still do word processing and access the internet on it!!!

 

[Compellor]

Yeah, I had a 486 DX2/66 (more popular than the DX2/50) that was quite the machine. Remember Packard "Hell" anyone? The sound card that came with it was about as a bad as it gets: Sound Blaster Pro "compatible"; yeah, right. Trying to get a DOS game to work on it was a nightmare. Oh, remember those memory prices? $200 (or more) for a 4 MB stick! It was crazy... It was a fun machine to work with, as I learned a lot about DOS and making the glorious "boot disk"! Does anyone ever miss making those boot disks for all the different games you had?

 

[Daehawk]

heck my old 486 SX 33 played everything smooth all the way to Wing Commander 4 and it's ground missions..thats when I found it was time to upgrade...I was very surprised at how powerful and fast it was for an sx..very happy too

 

[DaddyG]

Actually, the DX4 was very popular, I know I sold lots of em. Remember the Pentium debut was 60mhz, the DX4 was a pretty good competitor. AMD shipped lots of DX2 80s that did the dance at DX4100 really well.

 

[Bartman39]

Hey Compellor... Yea I remember the old boot disk days, ya remember an old program (dos) that allowed you to use a dir to put multiple autoexec bat`s & config sys`s??? Was that direct access 5.0??? I know it was for dos games to allow you to just have a menu to pick from once you set all the parameters... How bout "Extree Gold 3.0 for dos (saw and add for Xtree Gold 8.0 for Win9X a while back). I remember all the oohs and aahs over my bad to da bone Pent 90 with 16megs of ram and 2 meg ATI Turbo video card plus the 4X Teac (POS) Cdrom drive but I still have after all these years my old AWE32 soundblaster card and the driver disk and it still works too!!!

 

[chemwiz]

The Intel DX4-100 would let you run at 50MHz x 2, reallyscreamed back then! ButAMD was sooo much cheaper, I always bought their chips. Wow, flashback...

 

[thermite88]

I had a 486SX-25 then, running stable at 50 MHz. The best oc chip that I ever had at 100% overclocking. In those days, Amptron was one of the top MB brand because they were made in the US and had much better documentation than the average made in the Far East boards.

 

[WetSprocket]

I had the 5x86-133 that I overclocked to 160mhz. Thats an old Skoole overclock.

 

[Defector]

I still remember my Z80 with a built in audio tape recorder for storage.....

followed by a 6502 at 1.2 MHz (the fastest machine for under $2500 at the time - real color pixel graphics too and 4 voice sound).... I saved and saved my part time job $$ to buy a 100k floppy disk (5.25", single sided, single density 40 track/inch - only $300) It was awesome.

 

[Donuts]

Had a Evergreen 133 and a promise card with a 8 gig hard drive. Boy that 486 was smokin!

 

[savoyl]

We still use a 286 at work and it has Windows 3.0 installed on it. Still waiting for it to break. Slow but very dependable.

 

[moolman]

Hey,
I ship anyone a 486DX-33 with motherboard with 8MB single simms for $10. Hey I paid $300 for the chip amd MB and $600 for the memory, so I'd be giving you a deal.

Alex

 

[Gatsby]

Bah!!! Bah I say!..

You people with your math coprocessors.
BAH!
I had the luxury of dealing with a 486 Sx25 and a 486 SX2 50.
Like I said.. BAH!
you and your math coprocessors. (I later upgraded to a PII 266)

Gatsby

 

[hans007]

i had the king of processors for a while. my dad got a 486dx50 as a sample at work. Not a dx2, this was before the clock multiplied chips. It was 50mhz clock, 50 mhz bus. It was awesome

 

[savoyl]

The Company I worked for sold a bunch of those 486's off to the employees for $25 Canadian. My wife thought I was nuts for buying one till I sold it for $90 in our garage sale this summer although I think it was the 10 year old NEC Multisync that came with it that closed the deal.

 

[The Wildcard]

haha i had a CYRIX 486 DLC-33 chip, haha. I think somebody said it was in between an sx 33 and a dx 33.