First post, by Legno74
Hello everyone!
First of all, a brief introduction...
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...
Eehm no, that's another story; P
As we said, in the past I worked for many years in computer science, and being a great fan of PCs and video games since I was a child I have accumulated several PCs and spare parts.
A couple of years ago I decided to put some order and doing research I accidentally discovered this wonderful forum and also Phil's videos!!!
All this made me want to rebuild the computers I owned!!! Obviously not all but certainly the most iconic ones!! Among which the PC1 by Olivetti, the Pentium 1 133, the legendary celeron 300A, the various K6-2, the Duron 650 @ 950 etc.
The P133 was one of those I cared about most because with it I discovered overclocking (@187Mhz) and especially 3D graphics thanks to the legendary Voodoo 1
Unfortunately of my P133 I had almost nothing, only the P133, the 3dfx Voodoo 1, the ram and a generic yamaha ymf-719 sound card.
One afternoon while throwing scrap in landfill I saw a small AT case in a corner of the e-waste area. I immediately decided to take it home!!!
To my amazement it turned out to be a pentium 1 166 (not MMX) with 96mb of ram, vga CL-5446 2MB a sound card isa clone crystal and a 4gb disk. The mainboard is an Abit PH5.
So I said to myself "this is definitely a sign of destiny! Bring your mythical P1 133 back to life!!"
I changed the configuration to look like this:
P1 166 (NOT MMX)
Mainboard ABIT PH5
64MB EDO RAM (2 x 32MB)
SEAGATE HDD 20GB
DVD-RW PHILIPS DVDR 1640 (for convenience, I had a 2X NEC CD-R)
VGA S3 DX/GX 4MB (best resolution options in windows)
3DFX VOODOO 4MB (ORCHID)
YAMAHA YMF-719E
Windows 98 SE (my original)
I present my pc "time Machine" (IMG_1 & IMG_2 )
But you may wonder "why TIME MACHINE?"
Well while I fiddled with the jumpers of the multiplier and frequency of this ABIT PH5 I
I realized that some positions were not documented and I decided to experiment!
To my surprise I discovered that the mainboard frequency can drop to 25MHz !!!
I found the following frequencies : 25, 40, 50, 60, 66, 80MHz. Chipping on the cake the turbo button attaches correctly and allows further reduction of performance!
These FSB values combined with the fact that the P166 supports the multiplier of 1.5X allow me to have a pc with cpu that starts from Pentium 1 to 37.5MHZ ! ! !
You can understand that I immediately thought that I could go down to 286 levels by playing with FSB, L1 and L2 caches, turbo slowdown and bios!!!
In fact, after several tests and changes also of the bios settings I managed to get to 1.41 in speedsys 4.78 and 1.8 in the sysinfo of PC-Tools 8.0 !!!
Keep in mind that my Olivetti Prodest PC1 based on NEC V40 with 512K of ram arrives in the PC-Tools at a score of 1.7!!!!
I then checked the stability of the P166 at 200MHz and it is perfect, it even remains functional for a while even at 240MHz (80x3) but I still have them to work even if I think the FSB may be too high.
So allowing me to range in the various "eras" from Turbo-XT to 286, 386, 486 and P1 up to 200MHz
I found the nickname "TIME MACHINE" appropriate.
I then proceeded to create a simple system of switches to modify the FSB and the multiplier without opening the cabinet (obviously with the PC off) of the computer.
I attach some photographs of the switches and tests at various speeds.
I hope I have not bored you with this post and indeed if you have curiosity or suggestions or criticisms do not have problems talking about it!
sorry for the grammar mistakes in my English
Hello
Stefano
