BLockOUT wrote:

is it possible to buy a microprocessor 486 dx2 and put it in that socket7 motherboard?

No, you need a socket 2/3 motherboard for a 486 CPU.

You can try looking for your motherboard here if you wish to know it's specifications and settings http://arvutimuuseum.ee/th99/m/mpent_7.htm.

Hello and welcome.

Whatever you do, DO NOT try to use a 486 processor on a socket 7 motherboard. Even if you somehow manage to insert it, trying to turn the machine on may result in a ruined motherboard, processor or both (486 and Pentium sockets are incompatible, they use different voltages & pinouts).

If you are completely unable to get a proper 486 motherboard, you can get a low speed Pentium (such as 75 MHz) and use that in your Socket 7 board. Performance will be similar to a high-end 486 (such as the AMD 5x86-P75) for games that do not use floating point operations, and those who do (e.g. Quake) will run much better than in a 486.

You may also get 486-like performance with your current AMD processor by tweaking the L1 & L2 cache options in the BIOS, some members here on Vogons have done that with great success and can provide detailed info.

If what you really want is a "real" 486 then I'm afraid you will need an actual 486 motherboard. In addition to looking for motherboards out in the wild, you should also consider getting fully assembled old PCs that people want to get rid of, you never know what you may find. 😀

BTW, your motherboard is definitely not a Pentium II motherboard since it has a Socket 7 (Pentium II uses cartridge-based processors in Slot 1 socket). It supports the original Pentium, probably also the Pentium MMX and other processors such as Cyrix 6x86 or that AMD K6 you have.

TheMobRules wrote:

If you are completely unable to get a proper 486 motherboard, you can get a low speed Pentium (such as 75 MHz) and use that in your Socket 7 board.

Or get whatever pentium you want as most of them aren't locked and so you'll just need to configure it as a p75 and you should be good. Desactivating the L2 cache of a p75 should slow it down to "average" 486 rates I guess

BLockOUT wrote:

Hi guys im very neew to this forum. […]
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Hi guys im very neew to this forum.

as most of you i grew up next to old computers. my first pc was a panasonic 8086 with 4mhz of speed and got no HDD. Only the DOS beauty and a floppy disk and the lovely cyan and purple CGA monitor for some good old digger, test drive, california games, prince of persia and commander keen.

when i was young i was able to go for an upgraded one with better specs graphics monitor and a citrix procesor, but my dad sold it or gave it to charity long time ago.

i came here because its almost impossible to find in my country a 486 computer. i have seen only microprocessors for sale but not the motherboard itself.

so i was reading about socket 7 motherboards and im not very familiar with hardware from that time i was very little. I currently have a socket7 motherboard from a brand named SOYO. i was not able to find the model of the motherboard nor pics of it in google. it has ISA and PCI. p8 and p9 power supply connector. and the cpu it has is a AMD-K6 233anr, so it must be a pentium 2 i belive.

is it possible to buy a microprocessor 486 dx2 and put it in that socket7 motherboard? or i need a socket3 motherboard? I am just trying to build a 486, and i saw how people inserted that 486dx2 in bigger than socke3 motherboards so maybe i can finally have my 486.

i will post pictures of the motherboard tomorrow. maybe someone knows the exact model of my SoYO

please let me.know your thoughts

Welcome aboard 😀

Socket 7 does not support any 486 CPU.
The CPU you're referring to sounds to be a Cyrix.

Soyo went out of business, what's the model number of your board? And could you provide us with some pics of it?
CPU compatibility will depend on your board, but all of them will work with the Pentium 1 non-MMX and afaic all classic Pentium 1 non-MMX chips are not locked and you should be able to downclock any of them. The AMD 233ANR is a classic K6 (Pentium 1 competitor made by AMD) and should be downclockable. Do keep in mind this happens to be a particularly hot running chip (but apart from the heat dissipation it's not a bad chip or something) and running it without adequate cooling may make it overheat and fry.

Which hardware are you familiar with? There exist Socket 7 boards for ATX, but those were never very common (imo even Super Socket 7 was more common). AT Socket 7 was all over the place, but building an AT rig has other problems and other hoops to jump through.

Your AMD K6/233ANR is a totally different chip from the Pentium 2 (just google the AMD K6 and the Pentium 2 to see what I mean 😜).
Which other parts do you have available?

When it comes to using a PSU for AT boards (these boards use the P8 and P9 power connectors), remember to always put the black cables in the middle, adjacent to each other. If you put the power plugs in the wrong way around, chances are good you will fry the board. And don't want to be the bringer of bad news, but hardware of this age have good chances to develop bad caps (including the PSU).

Performance-wise, that K6 is more like a high-end classic Pentium than it is like a Pentium II or Pentium Pro, if you decide to hang onto it. If you have a Super Socket 7 board (I'd need more information to know for sure, but most Super Socket 7s have AGP), you can go with a faster K6, which isn't exactly what you want, but with cache manipulation and underclocking, a high-end K6-III+ can run stuff from the 386 era all the way up to the mid-late PII era (Win98/Win2k).

Yes, I use my K6-III+ Socket 7 setup with setmul to change the multiplier and cache on the fly from a DOS prompt. Very handy for playing older games, but then you have a faster system for newer stuff too if desired. Check this video out by Phil for an explanation of why this is a good all around alternative/setup- https://youtu.be/fcAqRbFFQPU

If this doesn't suit you, I have an extra 486 board I may be willing to part with. It's an earlier board, but runs a DX2-66 chip just fine (as I had it running it myself for a while).

Don't go with Pentium. Keep it true 486. Get some vlb socket motherboard locally, preferably with VLB and some decent sis chipset.

Dx2-66 is a good setup, when running with a VLB gfx card of some sort.
Though I cant help but thinking that it need a little more, when gaming doom on a 66 chip.
I would say that you need at least a Dx2-80 or perhaps even a Dx4-120 to play doom lagfree.
Everything else, from 1990 to Doom, would probably do fine on a Dx2-66.
As it is kind of like the universal 486 compatibility sollution. Not too fast nor too slow.

Hi all, first i want to thank each one of you for all the replys and warnings about the socket7! because i was going to blow up everything.

I had contact today with a person ( ELDER PC TECHNICIAN HAAHAHHA) that has lots of hardware and he sent me a picture of an AMD 486 dx2 66, with a 486 motherboard so i will see how much money he wants for it,(because i also need an isa adapter board for IDEs if i remember correcly on 486 and an isa video card. I already own an isa soundblaster16. AMD and intel are the same for that dx2 in terms of speed.

The next option as you mentioned above was an AMD k6 III+ 400mhz and a super socket7 mobo, but the problem is that K6 III+ are like so so so weird to find in here, i saw only one K6 III (AND NOT THE PLUS VERSION) 400mhz for sale and they were asking for like 30 dolars just for that processor. The motherboard i THINK can find it very cheap a Gigabyte GA-5SMM. I will think about it, but i saw the video on youtube and the person used another model of gigabyte motherboard and they changed the multiplier even in DOS, so maybe..maybe i can do the same multiplier changes on the Gigabyte GA-5SMM , i might end up buying it because the idea of a 3 in 1 pc is kind of cool.

This is the AMD K6 233mhz motherboard i was talking on my first post,
i have NO idea of what model this motherboard is, i never saw it on google images, so im completely LOST. Anyway i might end up selling it because i dont think its much of a use for me. By the way I also have an original CPU Pentium1 socket7 133mhz on another motherboard also in my house. If i remember correctly when i was a kid i used windows95 stuff with that pentium1 133, and played lots of games like warcraft2, command and conquer1, etc. I wonder how well it performs with older games like doom or DOS gems.

this is the k6 motherboard i have no idea of the model:

As far as what you need for a 486 motherboard - it varies a lot, perhaps more than in any other generation. By the time of Socket 4/5, things like parallel, serial, floppy and IDE were pretty much always integrated into the board (and sometimes you'd get things like audio, ethernet or SCSI), and PCI slots were standard. In the 286 era, and mostly in the 386 era, IO controllers were usually needed.

In the 486 era, though - hard to tell. Get a model number and a photo. Some boards have all that stuff built in, some don't. Some boards use ISA only, some have VLB and ISA, some have PCI and ISA, and a few have all three. Some even have EISA (with or without PCI as well). VLB+PCI+EISA might even exist, though I've never seen it. Find out what the board you want has before you buy extra bits. If the board has VLB or PCI, you will want a VLB or PCI graphics card - an ISA one will work, but don't deliberately hobble your graphics performance if you don't need to. If, by some weird chance it has both, it's kind of a tossup: VLB has lower latency than PCI, so, for the same chipset, will generally be faster. However, PCI supports newer, faster chipsets, and the difference isn't all that big.