The fastest one of my friends had was a late low profile Desktop
Harris 286-25mhz 4mb ram (72pin expansion), local bus VGA/ide, 3.5” 1.44 fdd
and 40mb IDE hd

From what I remember I could run 0ws,
board was dated 1992 which was odd, cpu was soldered.

It came from Kwik Trip as a pos management unit, Win3.1 Word, Excel and msworks 2 all loaded.

Sadly it quit posting after they had it 5 years, I tried trading out PSU, memory, etc couldn’t get any life and trashed it during the vintage pc “malaise” era when the systems were dropping in value.

I had access to several of these systems late 90’s the cases all looked identical but internally each was a little different, wish I wasn’t forced to downsize my stash back then

Ah well

Very impressed with how fast your 286 machine seems to be.

The later 20-25mhz models on a good chipset can even give early 386s a run for their money!

Loving all this 286 talk. I'm currently keeping my eyes open for a 20mhz model to accompany my DX4-100. 😁

Yeah, I think a fast 286 at 12 or 16 Mhz is comparable to a 386SX-16, which were common back in the day. The 386SX also had a 16 bit data bus and its only advantage was the v86 and the 386 protected mode.

root42 wrote on 2020-07-10, 23:23:

Yeah, I think a fast 286 at 12 or 16 Mhz is comparable to a 386SX-16, which were common back in the day. The 386SX also had a 16 bit data bus and its only advantage was the v86 and the 386 protected mode.

Agree ! I have a very fast 286-16 that according to NSSI benches slightly faster than the average 386-16, and it can run 0 wait on ram.

For the fastest 286, see this thread - Kixs's 286 to the Max

It's shockingly fast - with >6000 Dhrystones it's faster than my 386DX-25 (well, one of those earlier ones, without cache), which only achieved 5139 Dhrystones.

It's perfectly normal that - at the same clock speed, and of course running 16-bit code - 286 is slightly faster than 386SX: both have 16-bit data bus, but the latter is slowed down by the MMU.
But it's a very curious thing to see 286 being faster than DX.

my 368sx at 16MHz keeps almost identical pace to my 286 at 15MHz

both are on nice, fast VLSI chipsets running 0WS

I also try to build a fast 286 rig. Actual config: "PC-CHIPS3" chipset (or something with this sticker on it) mobo, 25MHz Harris CPU, Cyrix 287XL+ FPU, 4MB SIMM RAM, Tseng ET4000W32i videocard, 1.2MB & 1.44MB FDD, Seagate 520MB HDD, Creative Sound Blaster Pro2.
Here is a video with some benchmarks and games:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2TBeuVWuQA

iPonRMA wrote on 2023-07-09, 06:05:

I also try to build a fast 286 rig. Actual config: "PC-CHIPS3" chipset (or something with this sticker on it) mobo, 25MHz Harris CPU, Cyrix 287XL+ FPU, 4MB SIMM RAM, Tseng ET4000W32i videocard, 1.2MB & 1.44MB FDD, Seagate 520MB HDD, Creative Sound Blaster Pro2.
Here is a video with some benchmarks and games:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2TBeuVWuQA

That is a killer 286. I wonder how they did get Lotus to render so fast... the PC has to do all in Software. Yet it looks like the screen redraws so fast.
Did you try to use 4MB SIMM modules to max out the 286? Not that it would matter under DOS. But maybe for Win 3.1 or even older OS/2 versions...