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386 DX 40

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First post, by 2Mourty

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I won a 386 DX 40 processor from a seller in England.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem … em=200268039297

How does this chip perform compared to a 486 dx33 or dx2/66? I would of course need to find a motherboard for it, but I was wondering how good this chip is for games circa Wing Commander 1 to Quest for Glory 4. Thank you for any information.

Reply 1 of 6, by dh4rm4

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It's a little too fast for Wing Commander 1 but perfect for WCII with the speech pack installed. Sierra SCIV games scale well on anything from a 286 to a 486 DX4-100, past that they all get a little sketchy (some things need to be slowed to make sense like scene wipes and dialogue).

Reply 2 of 6, by Amigaz

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If the DX40 is used on a motherboard with let's say 128kb cache it can be very speedy and too fast for games like Wing Commander 1 for example like the previous poster stated.
If you want to build a machine which can handle for example that game at the right speed a 33mhz 386DX is the sweet sport with a motherboard which ghas cache.
You might get away with that 386DX 40mhz if you can disable the cache in the BIOS

My retro computer stuff: https://lychee.jjserver.net/#16136303902327

Reply 3 of 6, by Cloudschatze

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A 486DX2/66, with its internal cache disabled (ICE/ICD.exe, cacheoff.com, etc.), will run Wing Commander at "386-like" speed.

Likewise, several Intel (and other, I'm sure) P5 motherboards are able to emulate a 25MHz AT through use of a de-turbo keystroke combination.

With more versatile choices available, why bother with a 386? 😀

Reply 4 of 6, by Amigaz

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Of course a 486 can run the game as you say but there's some games than ca reguse to run properly on a 486 so having a 386 to cover those old games is wise imho.
But there's games that can have problems on a 386 in the slowest operating mode too 😵

My retro computer stuff: https://lychee.jjserver.net/#16136303902327

Reply 5 of 6, by 2Mourty

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Thank you for the information. Does anybody know anything about 386 motherboards? What would be a good one for an AMD 386 DX/40? I know quite a bit about 486 motherboards, but 386 is a bit older than my knowledge goes. 😅

Reply 6 of 6, by Amigaz

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I can only recommend what I'm using now which is rock solid and easy to work with:

http://artofhacking.com/th99/m/A-B/30218.htm
http://artofhacking.com/th99/m/M-O/32107.htm

As usual it's best to find a "name brand" motherboard which you can easily find documentation for since most of these boards are as usual without any jumper/pin layouts silkscreened on them.
Find a board with cache...otherwise the board can give terrible performance

My retro computer stuff: https://lychee.jjserver.net/#16136303902327