Cyrix 5x86 are fun to mess with and with the right motherboard, you can run as low as around
2-4Mhz for excruciatingly slow performance.... Good for recording whole songs in game intros before any sound effects play in the intro.

I have fond memories of mine from late '95, might have been early '96. It served me well and was a lot of fun, still have it stashed. However, if I was going back to those days now, I'd try and swing a P75 instead. Because what I didn't know then is that P75s from D0 stepping upward all seem to have outrageous headroom. So instead of 50% more cash for the same performance, it was more like 50-100% more performance, depending on how far you wound it out. All of the ones I've tried seem to do 133, half of those did 150 on 2x75 and one of the little buggers could do 166 2x83. Now I probably would have only managed 133 that first year, maybe 150 the next when heatsinks got to be a decent size, not sure I'd have found 83Mhz stable in the 95-96 motherboard. Could have changed my whole computer history really, maybe I'd have waited another year and instead of K6-2, got a Duron.

You guys are always so helpful, thank you.

Actually, a p75 is *the* micro I want to play with, so a while ago I got two of them at a great value even when Idon't have a board for them, all of this is very very scarce around here and I figured I should get them while they were available.

I guess if these Cyrix are tinker friendly I should also get some (*) while they last...

(*) Just one or two, I don't think I afford all of them at their asked price.

Cheers.

The Cyrix 5x86 is definitely cool I think, but mainly because of its short lifespan. The 100GP is a few percent faster than an AMD 5x86-133 and it gives you better floating point performance.

I also think it's a curiosity and not much better than a DX2-66 if you're aiming at dos/w3.11 gaming: lots of games aimed at the DX2 and if you really need high end DOS permeance you want a Pentium 166 or MMX (which comes with faster and more stable PCI performance as well).

Any way: I love mine. Paired it with an Aquarius MB4DUV vlb board, 2MB S3 Trio32 and 32MB ram.

In my experience there's hardly any oc capability, can't raise the fsb to 40. Not even when loosening cache and ram timings. Any DX2-80 runs stable... But as I said: it's a cool thing 😀

Not sure what the reason was but back in the day I bought a lowly configured $399 AMD 5x86-133 Pc with a very good (and the time) PCI Video card

I ended up with AMD because for reasons I couldn’t explain a Cyrix 5x86 system was quite a bit more expensive even in the 100mhz version