VOGONS


First post, by appiah4

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I've been playing around with my 486 box lately and I'm really impressed with how fast (and at the same time how thermally cool) the U5S-SUPER33 chip is.

The attachment U5S-SUPER33 Navratil Turbo.JPG is no longer available

It basically performs on par with a DX2-55 in ALU workloads (and who cares about FPU on a 486?). For an SX33, the performance I got out of it is astounding. With a VLB VGA it can actually do playable framerates in Doom (High Quality, default screen size with smallest green border) which was something my i486DX33 really struggled with back in the day.

Icing on the cake? De-Turboed, it basically performs like a 386DX33.

The attachment U5S-SUPER33 Navratil De-Turbo.JPG is no longer available

Effectively, I ended up with a 486 build that can play Wing Commander 2 and Ultima VII PERFECTLY.

I wish UMC had gone on to produce clockdoubled and clocktripled chips. A U5S-SUPER100 would have probably been mind blowing.

Reply 1 of 9, by leileilol

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Yeah, sucks that Intel legally bullied them out of the CPU market. They had some potential here.

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long live PCem

Reply 2 of 9, by BinaryDemon

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Can you overclock at all? I'd like to see how close you could come to the DX2-66 at 40mhz.

Check out DOSBox Distro:

https://sites.google.com/site/dosboxdistro/ [*]

a lightweight Linux distro (tinycore) which boots off a usb flash drive and goes straight to DOSBox.

Make your dos retrogaming experience portable!

Reply 3 of 9, by appiah4

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BinaryDemon wrote:

Can you overclock at all? I'd like to see how close you could come to the DX2-66 at 40mhz.

From what I gather pretty much all SUPER33 chips overclock to 40MHz no problem, and that should take it to within a hair of DX2-66. I will try this, but not on the POS ECS 486UL motherboard I am currently using; the ISA and VLB buses are rather flaky even at 33MHz and I doubt stressing it further with 40MHz is wise. I will soon move this build to a new chassis, and while doing that I will replace the motherboard with a higher end SiS board:

Chicony-CH-471-A.jpg

I will do the 40MHz overclock on this board in a week or so, and share.

Reply 4 of 9, by CuPid

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This is a very fast CPU, the U5S-40 performs like a i486DX-50 (and much faster than the DX2-50 because of its bus @ 40MHz).
It is really too bad that the U486DX2 was never released.

I need a vacation.

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Reply 5 of 9, by appiah4

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I downgraded my slow 486 system from a U5S to an i486DX over the weekend that allowed me to compare the performance of the chips. My experience is that Navratil NSSI benchmark scores are a very good indication of how strong the CPU is for DOS, so I will just present that data, and you can take my word - it is around 30% faster for sure. Doom for example is playable on the U5S but not at all enjoyable on the DX33.

i486-vs-U5-S-01.png

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Hats off to UMC. You guys done good.

Reply 6 of 9, by matze79

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Some even OC to 50Mhz and beat DX2 then.

https://www.retrokits.de - blog, retro projects, hdd clicker, diy soundcards etc
https://www.retroianer.de - german retro computer board

Reply 7 of 9, by pentiumspeed

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How is the FPU performance?

Cheers,

Great Northern aka Canada.

Reply 8 of 9, by amadeus777999

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Very interesting CPU.
Never saw a system having one of these though back in the day.

Reply 9 of 9, by appiah4

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pentiumspeed wrote on 2020-07-06, 19:21:

How is the FPU performance?

Cheers,

It's an SX class CPU, it has no FPU.