narunetto wrote:

Any help would be very greatly appreciated, thanks!

Well, I'm not sure at the moment. Maybe some sort of throttling function is enabled (any turbo button pins on the mainboard ?)
Did you try to reset the CMOS (BIOS) settings to defaults ?

Yeah, the defaults have been reset a few times. From what I can tell with various diagrams, there's no turbo button but there's a software turbo function, but if I try to use it it beeps as if it's been turned up all the way even after pressing it multiple times. I thought that at first, honestly but nothing really changed.

I attached the BIOS config but there's not really anything there I can see.

Turbo button not pressed...?

is the CPU dead?

No, that's not how computers work. The speed will not magically decrease. The CPU can either maintain its speed or not. In the later case, the system would simply no longer work at all.

I pretty much thought that was impossible but from all of my years with this stuff, this one is puzzling me. There is no physical turbo button on this system and no place I can see on the motherboard after looking at 3 diagrams of it.

narunetto wrote:

There is no physical turbo button on this system and no place I can see on the motherboard after looking at 3 diagrams of it.

Can you tell us what mainboard is that exactly?

Since this is an OEM build, it's probably an OEM board. Could you take a few pictures of the board and available jumpers and perhaps give us a link to the manual? This does seem like a turbo or cache issue, perhaps you're missing something.

Could this be one of those situations where you added more memory than the motherboard supports? 20mb isn’t a very typical 486sx-33 oem configuration. I’d try with 8mb.

Is the CPU fan working properly ? Some systems throttle if there's no fan detected.

Unlikely, as even early Pentium mainboards did not use 3-pin fans to monitor speed. Also, the 486SX-33 doesn't even require a heatsink, let alone a fan.

http://j12345.users1.50megs.com/menu/pb430/pb430lay.asp.htm
This is the motherboard, it doesn't have any extra cache in the sockets which seems to be normal after looking up videos and stuff about similar ones. I can get some actual pictures later if needed.

BinaryDemon wrote:

Could this be one of those situations where you added more memory than the motherboard supports? 20mb isn’t a very typical 486sx-33 oem configuration. I’d try with 8mb.

I actually put more RAM in it after I figured out this problem just for a troubleshooting step, didn't change anything.

Front Panel Connector:

There's your turbo switch...

The problem with that is, its a full front panel connector that is one long connection. Maybe it's failed I guess? I didn't think about that. There's no actual buttons from that connector unless they're hidden under the front plastic.

Try removing it and power it up again to see what happens.

I was honestly hoping this was the fix but, with it unplugged it still is having a problem.

Connect pin 3 to ground and try again.

Was actually in the process of trying that out, too. Confirmed with multimeter that there is contact between the two and still no difference.

I got another screenshot from another utility. Says it's running at 15 MHz... cool... it really does seem like a turbo problem but nothing really changes when screwing with turbo options.

If I remember my PB 486 system back in the day controlled the turbo with a CTRL+ALT+ (plus) or CTRL+ALT+(minus)

You are correct, but I've tried that and it does make a sound confirming it, but it doesn't do anything to change the problem.