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Overclocking My 286

N

NoReMoRsE

Platinum Member
My 286 currently runs at 12MHz and I have seen some slowdowns when playing Commander Keen 4 and using WordPerfect 2.5. Can anyone help me to overclock it?

TIA
 
quitters 😛

you should be able to find a crystal on the motherboard somewhere... its silver. it is either shaped like a resistor (not really... its long and thin, but flat on the top), or a rounded rectangle. almost always silver though. You desolder it, and solder in a faster one. I know that all modern computers use a ~14mhz crystal, so you could sacrifice a mobo for its crystal - some NICs have crystals too (I've seen 20 and 25 mhz).

My 486, which I took apart and discarded yesterday, had a socketed, removable crystal that you swap out for the cpu speed (it is a 33.333mhz crystal). there was another crystal for the busses
 
it is possible.. i had a memory refresher that got it additional 1.5mhz.

in the old days, the 8mhz went to about 9.5 - 10mhz with the refresher

for the 12, you can try to get the 16mhz crystal.. but depend on the mobo, cool the cpu and you should be able to run faster... do u want a 386 sx ?

 
Thanks for everyone's help! I think perhaps I might just leave my 286 as it is, as the loss in FPS in Commander Keen isn't worth the hassle of purchasing new components. I was hoping there were some jumper settings or something, but I don't have a manual and no one seems to know.

Thanks once again, this is a great forum!
 


<< Yeah overclocking a 286 wouldn't really help you gain performance >>

Actually, the opposite is true. Overclocking older chips (in the 486 and lower days) yielded performance increases closer to linear with the percentage that they were overclocked than they do now. This is simply because todays chips are running at very high multiples of the base clock, while older chips ran at the same speed as the bus (or at worst, no more than 3x the FSB). The cacheless chips gained even more from the overclock, as they relied on main memory for everything.
 
&quot;OC a 286 is impossible, I think it time for a upgrade. &quot;

There is no such thing as impossible. Perhaps &quot;imporobably&quot;, &quot;pointless&quot;, or &quot;as of yet undiscovered&quot;. But given time a resources and the human ability to learn nothing is impossible.

Swap the crystal.

Thorin
 
hit the turbo button 🙂

hehe. I have no turbo button 🙂

In fact my 286 was originally set to 8MHz, but I changed it to 12MHz. I don't think it can go any higher.
 
I will overclock it for $950 to an Athlon 1.33 with 256 MB RAM and all other required hardware

hehe! I think Commander Keen would run a little TOO fast on that machine.
 
NoReMoRsE,

Just turn off both L1 and L2 caches, and the thing will crawl like a good old 4.77 Mhz XT
 
A lot of the memory timings were generated by an analog delay line back in the dark ages of 286's. Therefore you may run into memory timing issues before you run out of processor capability. If you have already gone from 8Mhz to 12 Mhz you probably have very little more room to move. My PC-AT (The 8Mhz version called Skyrocket if memory serves) was overclocked to 12Mhz but I had to change the delay line to make it work. But... as Thorin already said... the work &quot;pointless&quot; comes to mind. 😀
 
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