No such thing as a reasonable price for any kind of plan like that. While it would be cool just to see it exist...nah

Not worth it one bit. The CPU is going to be the limiting factor. Sure the increased RAM speed would help a bit, but not enough to ever justify a Frankenstein setup like that.

Way easier and cheaper to just get and use a faster system for stuff that needs it.

On a side note, you can generally get a decent speed increase by getting more/faster SRAM as well a tightening up the RAM timings. I used to spend/waste tons of time messing with RAM timings and benchmarking back in the 486 days to get the every last bit of performance.

You could also up the bus speed to 50Mhz and lower the multiplier to 3x. That will give you 150Mhz CPU speed, and the increase in bus speed will more than likely make up for the loss in CPU speed.

The other option is to acquire a Pentium Overdrive chip. The PODP5v83 is the fastest that was made. It runs a 2.5x multiplier, so at 33Mhz bus speed, you get 83Mhz, at 40Mhz you get 100Mhz, and at 50Mhz you get 125Mhz.

Edit: Here is a post that talks about overclocking the PODP5v83. 100Mhz may be doable.

They also mention the Cyrix 5x86-120, which is apparently faster than the AMD 5x86.
Pentium overdrive 83 MHz - overclocking options?

You can use whatever RAM you like, but you're not going to get data into or out of a 486 faster than it's base clock time bus width, divided by 8 for bytes. Which is 160MByte per sec at 40Mhz... which is what decent speed FPM RAM with no wait states should be doing anyway.

IIRC (from a past thread I believe I saw on here a few months back) there exist industrial-grade Socket 3 motherboards that use PC100 DIMMs instead of 72-pin or 30-pin SIMMs. I would imagine that PC100 throughput already exceeds what a 486-grade processor is capable of pushing, so I highly doubt there'd be any benefit going to DDR2 or even plain DDR in such a system.

Of course, not being familiar with the raw throughput capabilities of both PC100 memory and 486 processors off the top of my head means I admittedly could be wrong on this.

It's a fun idea for the ultimate tinkerer with lots of money to waste but I don't really believe you could squeeze anymore bandwidth through the 486 then you would get with your basic 72 pin FPM unless you pulled off a massive bus overclock. You could try tightening up your l2 cache, and maybe try a different GPU (you didn't mention system specs).

It's possible that a POD83 overclocked to 100mhz will improve performance but I doubt it's going to be the smoothness you're after.. I think I'd want to run this Anno 1602 on a Pentium MMX 166 or better 😎

Remember the video card can be a limiting factor too.

There are videos on Youtube of a 286 with a Diamond Speedstar 24x doing some impressive things. I think a good video card would let us see what the true limit of the 133Mhz cpu is.

R.I.P the wallet if you go through with this without being careful as some things get costly pretty quickly as some of the choice parts are hard to come by and some sellers want a pound of flesh in the current market. There is a small number of industrial boards that will get the job done but the 486 core is only so fast up to a point where anything more will be just wasted effort. If you want to cut corners and say to hell with it then consider getting a Winchip (486 core) and a increasingly harder to find ss7 board then go all out with that.

If you want a fast 486, get yourself a PC104 SBC. The only SDRAM equipped 486s I know about.
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~spl/Academic/Rob … mz104-specs.pdf

Thanks for all your answers!

cyclone3d wrote:

On a side note, you can generally get a decent speed increase by getting more/faster SRAM as well a tightening up the RAM timings. I used to spend/waste tons of time messing with RAM timings and benchmarking back in the 486 days to get the every last bit of performance.

I have now played with the RAM timmings a bit and I'm now running 2-1-1-1 on the L2 which is the lowest I can go in my BIOS and also now with 0 wait state on my EDO RAM. Speedsys reports way higher RAM and cache performance:

My “stock setup” with 40 MHz FSB and 2-2-2-2 on L2 and 2 WS on my EDO gave me:

66,19 MB/s memory throughput (I am here referring to the number given by speedsys in the top left corner right under the CPU clock)
87,99 MB/s on L1
42,24 MB/s on L2

while the new settings give me:

92,11 MB/s memory throughput
92,64 MB/s on L1
55,1 MB/s on L2

However my speedsys CPU score only went from 57,67 to 57,68 which really isn't all to impressive. This all is with 32k TAG 15 ns and 256K L2 15 ns.

cyclone3d wrote:

You could also up the bus speed to 50Mhz and lower the multiplier to 3x. That will give you 150Mhz CPU speed, and the increase in bus speed will more than likely make up for the loss in CPU speed.

I also tried this and it gave my even better memory performance, even when I had to go with 2-2-2-2 on L2 and 1 WS on the EDO:

115,61 MB/s memory throughput
99,87 MB/s on L1
56,55 MB/s on L2

However my CPU score went down to 56,02. Interestingly my score in 3DBENCH 1.0c is with 98,4 at 50 MHz FSB still higher than my 92,6 I get at 40 MHz FSB. But since this is just an increase of ~7% I don’t think it is worth the increased stress on the system, because 7% on 15 fps won't get me any tangible FPS benefits.

cyclone3d wrote:

The other option is to acquire a Pentium Overdrive chip. The PODP5v83 is the fastest that was made. It runs a 2.5x multiplier, s […]
Show full quote

The other option is to acquire a Pentium Overdrive chip. The PODP5v83 is the fastest that was made. It runs a 2.5x multiplier, so at 33Mhz bus speed, you get 83Mhz, at 40Mhz you get 100Mhz, and at 50Mhz you get 125Mhz.

Edit: Here is a post that talks about overclocking the PODP5v83. 100Mhz may be doable.

They also mention the Cyrix 5x86-120, which is apparently faster than the AMD 5x86.
Pentium overdrive 83 MHz - overclocking options?

I don't have a POD, but I will surely pick on up just out of curiosity to see how it performs. I do own a Cyrix 100GP, which also runs at 120 MHz but I haven't tested on my current board yet. It doesn't support the CPU according to the manual, but maybe I will go ahead and just try anyway with this next time I'm in the mode for poking at the 486. Another thing holding me back is that I don't know which jumpers control the voltage and if the board can do 3,45 or 3,6.

BitWrangler wrote:

You can use whatever RAM you like, but you're not going to get data into or out of a 486 faster than it's base clock time bus width, divided by 8 for bytes. Which is 160MByte per sec at 40Mhz... which is what decent speed FPM RAM with no wait states should be doing anyway.

That's a useful information. I didn't know the 486s BUS performance is so low. If that is true I really wouldn't make much sense to go bonkers with even DDR memory.

Moogle! wrote:

Remember the video card can be a limiting factor too.

There are videos on Youtube of a 286 with a Diamond Speedstar 24x doing some impressive things. I think a good video card would let us see what the true limit of the 133Mhz cpu is.

I'm using a Matrox Mystic 220 so that shouldn't be a problem. System specs are btw:

AMD 5x86 133@160
QDI MP4-P4U885P3
32 MB EDO in on stick
Matrox Mystic 220
32k TAG 15 ns with 256k L2 15ns
and or cause floppys, soundcards and an sd card as a hardrive.

A couple of questions I do still have though:
- Will I get better performance with FPM RAM over EDO?
- Is there a reason/a way to go with 64k TAG and see benefits?
- Does anybody know of a real socket 3 board with SDRAM so I can go on a ebay hunt?

What I'm not interested in are SoC solutions like gdjacobs posted or a 486 core on a socket 7 platform like posted by nforce4max. I do own a couple of SS7 boards but my subjective definition of what a 486 is needs a socket 3 CPU.

Feel free to correct me or suggest anything else, I have given up on the DDR über 486 for now. Well maybe in 10 years when cost has been driven down significantly.

If you want a stupid fast 486, just get a Winchip.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

If you want a stupid fast 486, just get a Winchip.

Also, if you want a stupid socket 7, just get a Winchip. 😁

If you want really fast 486 then see this thread:
The World's Fastest 486

Mein 486er @ 200MHz,128MB RAM,SATA,USB 2.0
So,habe endlich schonmal geschafft ein 486er System Zusammenzubauen.
Das Problem ist,ich habe Windows ME Draufgemacht,wie kriege ich Darauf NTFS Platten mit 2TB am Laufen?

hier mal ein Paar Daten zum Sys und Bilder

Mainboard:Soyo SY-4SAW2
CPU:AMx586 160 @ 200 MHz
Speicher:4x32MB
Grafikkarte Voodoo 32MB
SystemPlatte:8.4 GB
Datenplatte 2TB über SATA..wird erkannt,kann aber unter Windows ME nicht genutzt werden,weil kein NTFS Geht
DVD Laufwerk,ATA 133 Controller und USB 2.0 Stecken ebenfalls Drin
Hier Bilder

http://www.planet3dnow.de/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=388817

Reading that through google translate because mein deutsche ist schlect, it appears that he's saying it's not actually stable at 200.

The "200 thread" is a strange amalgamation of ramblings.
German is my mother tongue and the dude is sloppy and in no way there's a clear cut expression of how it works and if he really succeeded in his efforts. It read like somebody was putting something together that he himself did not value or really like.

Eleanor1967 wrote:

Feel free to correct me or suggest anything else, I have given up on the DDR über 486 for now. Well maybe in 10 years when cost has been driven down significantly.

If you want a DDR 486, you can have it now: Certain Socket 478 boards, with a 3GHz Pentium 4, operate at fast 486 speeds when L1 cache is disabled. You can also get them with ISA slots, too.

PC100- and Cyrix 5x86-based systems do exist. You can use a ECS_P5GX-M, for example, with a Cyrix MediaGX CPU. The Cyrix MediaGX integrated the memory controller into the CPU, among other things. The FSB of the MediaGX is still 33 MHz, just as on socket 3 motherboards. Unfortunately, the performance of a Cyrix MediaGX is about the same as that of the Cyrix 5x86 at the same frequency. Refer to the Ultimate 686 Benchmark Comparison for the actual benchmark numbers. So it seems PC100 does not help.

For anyone wanting an easily obtainable super fast 486, you can use a Cyrix 5x86-120 or Am5x86-160 with 256K of double-banked cache and a Voodoo2. You can also mod a Pentium Overdrive 83 for stable operation at 100 MHz and combine it with a Voodoo2.

BitWrangler wrote:

Anonymous Coward wrote:

If you want a stupid fast 486, just get a Winchip.

Also, if you want a stupid socket 7, just get a Winchip. 😁

Well... I would like to give it some credit... At least the earliest winchip can run Windows 7 but the earliest 6x86 couldn't... 😅

Wow, surprising. I wouldn't have thought it ran on anything not PII up because of that PAE thing.