I would say it's only good for DOS and Win3x / Win NT351

If you want to run Win95 then get a AMD 5x86 -133mhz.
And use 64mb ram and a CF card as a hard-drive.

Very cool. I was surprised to see your youtube channel has soo much Retro content.

Back in the day I had an Intel DX4-100. Trying to remember where I got it from, possibly CompUSA or Microcenter or maybe a computer show, but I don't remember even price comparing against AMD. I probably considered AMD too big a risk at the time.

I would post here: Vogons Video Announcement Thread and have your Video Channel added.

Was wondering about the windows 95 performance when given sufficient ram (was thinking 16mb or 32mb).I assumed during that time period, especially late 1995 when these CPUs were still around a lot of PCs starting to get shipped with windows 95, probably with something like 8mb of ram)

BinaryDemon wrote:

Very cool. I was surprised to see your youtube channel has soo much Retro content.

Back in the day I had an Intel DX4-100. Trying to remember where I got it from, possibly CompUSA or Microcenter or maybe a computer show, but I don't remember even price comparing against AMD. I probably considered AMD too big a risk at the time.

I would post here: Vogons Video Announcement Thread and have your Video Channel added.

Thanks for the tip. Posted it there...

think many opted for Intel as being the safe and more stable bet .... Pricing was definitely pretty aggressive and they were able to undercut Intel on most CPU offerings during that time. The Intel DX4 100 had 16kb of L1 cache.... most AMD DX4 100 only had 8kb of L1 cache so it should be a tad slower.

But other then that these 2 CPUs were pretty much identical (clones).

Our first PC used a pre-lawsuit revision of the AMD 486 DX4-100. We got it in late 1995, and it had 16MB RAM and ran Win95 RTM. Yes, it was slow, but I'd still call it "usable", as it was the computer that got our house online for the first time. We used it for about four years, and over that time I upgraded it to 64MB RAM, 4GB hard drive and Win98 FE (really not recommended, but it was still usable). Aside from one time my brother tried to run Sim City 3000 on it (which ran at an utter crawl until ultimately crashing), it was never really used much for gaming, and what little gaming was done was fairly lightweight (Sim City 2000 and maybe a few instances of the Win95 version of Doom/Doom II, but beyond that primarily just the built-in Windows games). It was for the most part used for getting on the internet and doing occasional schoolwork.

Granted, it's entirely possible the inherent slowness of that particular system could have been worsened by the low-tier components that were used to build it, especially the Conner hard drive and Trident VLB video card, both brands not really known for being fast. 😜

torindkflt wrote:

Our first PC used a pre-lawsuit revision of the AMD 486 DX4-100. We got it in late 1995, and it had 16MB RAM and ran Win95 RTM. Yes, it was slow, but I'd still call it "usable", as it was the computer that got our house online for the first time. We used it for about four years, and over that time I upgraded it to 64MB RAM, 4GB hard drive and Win98 FE (really not recommended, but it was still usable).

I've seen a couple of PCs like that advertised during that time period ... during that time I think a lot of hard drives started reaching or breaking the 1gb storage barrier. and 8MB / 16MB started to get common I guess.

torindkflt wrote:

Granted, it's entirely possible the inherent slowness of that particular system could have been worsened by the low-tier components that were used to build it, especially the Conner hard drive and Trident VLB video card, both brands not really known for being fast. 😜

Mine has a Western Digital Caviar 425mb hard drive (really like those drives and the way they sound). Also have a Trident VLB card in it. Would need to check my spares to see if I got anything snappier (Tseng perhaps)

Reading the reddit thread reminded me of how I had to do enable mono playback in Winamp to be able to play MP3s on my Am486-DX4 oc'ed to 120MHz, otherwise playback would skip every now and then. That also meant it was listening to music and nothing else. Now, if I reeeally felt like pumping up the jam on stereo, I had to use a pure DOS player, which unfortunately I no longer remember the name.

I was working on a PC RPG game with some friends back then (you really have to use the term "working" very loosely here - it was mostly daydreaming.) I was one of two people writing music for it. Every time I composed something with my AWE32, I would record it as a wave file and encode to MP3 with the Fraunhofer tools so I could send it via DCC file transfer over IRC to my buddies. I think this was still on my DX2/66. Encoding MP3s back then was a real chore. About 1/5 real-time or something like that, I think. But I seem to remember Winplay3 could play them in realtime, 44kHz stereo.

Intel486dx33 wrote:

I would say it's only good for DOS and Win3x / Win NT351

If you want to run Win95 then get a AMD 5x86 -133mhz.
And use 64mb ram and a CF card as a hard-drive.

64MB for Windows 95 ?! That's a lot !
My (intel) DX4 runs 95RTM rather well with 16MB of ram and a 1994 400MB maxtor. Sure you won't be able to play all the fancy ""'new"" 3d games, but neither the 5x86 can actually. Make sure your system runs on 32 bit use/video controllers so you don't loose too much performance and you should be good.

32mb should be enough for everything this CPU can run at least on barely playable level, like Blood, Starcraft and Diablo.

Re the Windows 95 vs Windows discussion, when I started my second attempt at getting a degree in autumn 1997 the 'old' computer labs at the university had 486DX-33 with 4MB and somebody had installed Windows 95 on them. That was painful, really painful, but it ran. In another lab they had 486DX2-66 with 8MB, which was undoubtedly slow but perfectly usable. In the 'new' lab the Pentium 90 systems with 16MB really flew, with the jury out on whether it was the Pentium CPU or the 16MB RAM that made the difference. My money's on the latter...

Of course all the real geeks (which I wasn't really at the time) used the physics lab Sun SparcStation 5 systems running Solaris (slowly...) 😉

I don't think I'll put more than 16mb in this system, and I think Windows 95 will run pretty well.(perhaps even with 8MB il will be do-able, but it will benefit from an additional 8mb).

I also have the impression back in the day we were a lot more tolerant to low FPS in games, and the fact that we sometimes had to wait a while for something to happen in windows 😀

In the gaming department, I just installed Microprose F1GP 2, with a minimum requirement of a 486 66mhz it kinda ran, albeit pretty slow, even on low graphic settings. But I can imagine myself in 1995 struggling my way through it and just accepting the fact that it was slow, but play it anyways 😀

Don't know to what extent trying a different graphics card (Tseng VS Trident) would make a big difference here. It will probably even run slow on a pentium 90.

Yes, the difference between 8 and 16 MB of RAM in Windows 95 is pretty much night and day. But having even more doesn't hurt. There is a limit to how much is really useful though.

I never got to try a DX4 back in the 90's, but one of my best friends had the chance to, and he said it was dead slow compared to his Pentium 60, so unless it was poorly configured (slow (isa?) graphics card, not much ram etc) I would wager that the difference between the DX4 and any Pentium model is generally bigger than a lot of people like to think. My friend's P60 could play mp3s under Windows at least, something which my current DX4 can't do. At least not without turning down the quality a lot.

LunarG wrote:

My friend's P60 could play mp3s under Windows at least, something which my current DX4 can't do. At least not without turning down the quality a lot.

Turning down the quality (and ditching stereo) might have the advantage of making a whole song fit on a floppy disk 😉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jj97NXgHw4

Too bad I just uninstalled 95 from my DX4, I could have showed you the speed of 95 on it ^^

The Serpent Rider wrote:

32mb should be enough for everything this CPU can run at least on barely playable level, like Blood, Starcraft and Diablo.

Agreed, 16 or 32 MB at most. I'm quite particular about the physical RAM amounts in my own builds - too much of it feels anachronistic and does nothing but become a liability due to memory management bugs. And overclockers will know as a rule that maxing out memory slots in a motherboard hurts system stability.

bregolin wrote:

Reading the reddit thread reminded me of how I had to do enable mono playback in Winamp to be able to play MP3s on my Am486-DX4 oc'ed to 120MHz, otherwise playback would skip every now and then. That also meant it was listening to music and nothing else. Now, if I reeeally felt like pumping up the jam on stereo, I had to use a pure DOS player, which unfortunately I no longer remember the name.

I haven’t tried on vintage hardware but mpxplay (dos) claims it only needs a dx4-100 for mp3 playback, and I have tested in dosbox at 486 speeds and found compatibility and performance to be excellent. I didn’t really deal with mp3s during that era. In the mid to late 90s, I was converting all my music to WAV.

BinaryDemon wrote:

bregolin wrote:

Reading the reddit thread reminded me of how I had to do enable mono playback in Winamp to be able to play MP3s on my Am486-DX4 oc'ed to 120MHz, otherwise playback would skip every now and then. That also meant it was listening to music and nothing else. Now, if I reeeally felt like pumping up the jam on stereo, I had to use a pure DOS player, which unfortunately I no longer remember the name.

I haven’t tried on vintage hardware but mpxplay (dos) claims it only needs a dx4-100 for mp3 playback, and I have tested in dosbox at 486 speeds and found compatibility and performance to be excellent. I didn’t really deal with mp3s during that era. In the mid to late 90s, I was converting all my music to WAV.

MPXPlay, that's it, thank you! Wish I had abundant storage to rip directly to wav files back then 😀

I have to buy an AMD DX4(SV8B) and retest it against the 16kb version and the iDX4.
I remember it being pretty underwhelming.