firage wrote:

Yeah, as the 386 before, they had the 486 as a special high end market segment CPU for quite a long time, since consumer applications were so few. 486DX2's became mainstream as they brought out the early Pentiums in '93, and then as Pentiums became mainstream they brought out the Pentium Pro. Barely a gap anymore at that point.

This was a case of intel abusing its monopoly, as they cockblocked AMD to the x86 license, they just sold the 486 as exorbitant prices until AMD could come up with their own design (reverse engineer the i80486) and get the Am486 to the market. Intel has been Intel ever since. This is basically the same thing they've been doing with Xeons for half a decade, and behold, all of a sudden Xeons are in the mainstream now that AMD have Ryzen and Threadripper in the market.

Fuck you Intel.

I had an Intel DX2 486 33mhz with 4mb ram and 120mb HD, VGA card, 14,4 modem, and 2x Sony CDROM, Sound blaster compatible sound card.
Running Win 3.11 FWG.

Some old laser printer that would print out 1 page every minute.

14" SVGA display.

Cheap desktop speakers.

And it cost me about $2500 which was cheap for that time.

I would say the Intel 33mhz and 50mhz where very popular back at that time.

Was good for basic office apps, games, watching cdrom videos, internet browser Netscape, and BBS bulletin boards.

but ran rather slow. I would get at least 8-16mb of ram and a good HD. and 2mb SVGA card. SB Vibra 16 is easy to find and setup.

looked like this.

A 386 would be more period correct but otherwise your p130 is perfect for playing games from the period, it’s more speed flexible than a 486.

dionb wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

How about the UMC U5S-SUPER33?

Apparently it's awfully slow.
I'm currently building a system around one (all UMC, so also UMC motherboard chipset, I/O chip, VGA and NIC). ..

It just so happens that I benchmarked a UMC U5SX-40 yesterday and compared it with the i486SX and Cx486DX at 40 MHz in DOOM.

Cx486DX-40 = 5278 realtics = 14.15 fps
i486SX-40 = 4805 realtics = 15.54 fps
U5SX-40 = 4464 realtics = 16.73 fps

There wasn't really an i486SX-40, but my 33 MHz chip ran fine at 40 MHz. I was looking for a clock-for-clock comparison.

The U5SX gain is moderate. It is unfortunate I couldn't get the Cx487S FPU adapter to work with the UMC chip. The lack of FPU might be a turn-off for some.

I think a 486DX33 is the one you need to go for. Just get a decent GFX card, like ET4000 or something like that. 4 to 8 mb of Ram and you have a good basic machine for this era.

I think using the UMC U5S or U5SX makes the machine a lot more unique. Weren't they banned for sale in N. America? That adds some prestige.

alvaro84 wrote:

Anonymous Coward wrote:

The UMC U5S is supposed to be faster than an intel 486 by a considerable margin, at least that's what I've heard from several others.

I have the same experience. The only socketed UMC U5S I have was faster in a proper mobo. The PQFP one I tried, which was soldered to a tiny motherboard (late 386 size) was as slow as dionb wrote. I don't know what its problem was. But the CPU itself should be a decent performer.

Those boards typically do not have any L2 cache, so that would explain the difference.