Who else made a computer with a Cyrix CPU?

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QuestionMean1943@reddit

Cyrix ran a number of our office desktops quite well. Wikipedia mentions IBM was co-owner of the foundry and marketed them under their own brand name.

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telestoat2@reddit

My family had a NEC desktop with a Cyrix CPU.

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dairyxox@reddit

I had a couple, the money I saved on CPU I could put towards Diamond 3DFX Voodoo card. Worth it.

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SpeedyBubble42@reddit

So many Cyrix computers. The first computer I built that needed a heat sync and fan was a Cyrix. I remember touching it and burning my finger. 🤣

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NetDork@reddit

I had a "Cyrix 200" that was really 150 MHz. They claimed that the bus speed of 75 MHz made it run as fast as other 200s. They lied.

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BlackKnight2000@reddit

This was the first PC my family bought when I was a kid.

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grateparm@reddit

Tiger Direct certainly did. My dad got duped when he bought a "5x86" that was just a 486 Cyrix with "some" Pentium instructions.

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Same thing happened to mine at Sam's Club, though it was an Am5x86. I posted about it here as I found the box: https://old.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/hpo2d5/early_1997_lowbudget_retail_pc_desktop_specs/

On the flip side, that system got me to where I am today, so it can be forgiven for passing itself off as a 586.

I even read a Microprocessor Report article saying that those newer Am5x86es labeled as an Am486DX5 were no accident. As the consumer desktop 486 market faded and AMD wanted to appeal to embedded engineers, making potential customers think about Pentiums made them think of heat, and became a liability. So they changed it back to Am486.

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Important-Bed-48@reddit

Funny you are from Connecticut, because I am/was as well. The price difference between a pentium cpu with motherboard and a 486 motherboard with cyrix "5x86" was for a time significant and for general purpose use the performance difference was not noticable. One thing I learned quickly was to make Windows report "5x86" this was done using a hack because for a while it would recognize the cyrix as a 486 and my customers thought I was ripping them off. This was remedied but not until the Cyrix 5x86 had become obsolete, which I'm sure was done purposely.

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kevin7eos@reddit (OP)

Do you remember what computer shows you went to? Cogan Fairs trusted since 1987 we’re the ones I went to most of the time actually got to know the owner pretty well ,Wayne. Funny thing I was in the photo industry and was a camera collector since like the white 70s and Wayne would always pick my brain. Turns out he sold the computer show and move to Florida. About 15 years ago I went to I guess is considered the largest flea market on East Coast in Florida and lo and behold. There’s Wayne selling like about 500 cameras. I told them not only do I still go to the computer show we started but I attended as a vendor also as I refurbish iMac and MacBooks.💻. Would make that funny was back in the early days. There was no Apple computers, only window computers at the show.

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Important-Bed-48@reddit

Funny for a few years I was refurbishing mac's too during the Powerpc and Intel era. Apple stores would recommend people throw away their Mac instead of getting it fixed. Not only that but I made quite a bit just buying broken Apple products or getting Apple macs from schools or literally at the junkyard they would dump mac's so I made a deal with the guy who worked the gate. One time I got a vintage Apple IIgs with hard drive and all the upgrade cards for free. I pieced it out and sold it for 2000.

I don`t remember the names of the fairs but I hit them all up and would spend hours talking to the sellers and other people. Do you remember the Bargain News which was kind of an analog Craigslist in Connecticut back then.

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kevin7eos@reddit (OP)

Yes. Remember the Bargain News well. The Guy that started it worked with my father at GE in Bridgeport. I used to advertise I buy 35mm cameras and did consignment shop on cameras at my photo lab in Shelton Connecticut.

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Important-Bed-48@reddit

Boy we have a lot in common. I was working as a professional industrial photographer back then. The Bargain news made it possible for me get computer and photo equipment when I was in ny teens and 20's. It literally opened up a whole new world to me. I still use Facebook marketplace and Craigslist to buy some things like I almost never buy laptops new and lay in wait for the "special deal" to come by. I think it's part of the fun for me. Bargain News and Computer Shopper were a big part of my life back then, and now they are both completely gone .

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Shotz718@reddit

I built quite a few with Cyrix CPUs. The 5x86 was fantastic. One of my favorite CPUs.

The 6x86 not so much. It was fine for your parents doing taxes, but gaming quickly left it in the dust with so many games relying on the much faster FPU of the Pentium.

Their 486 offerings were nothing special other than the budget options that could get a 386 system up to 486 levels of performance.

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alwayzz0ff@reddit

I was one of those idiots that ran the 6x86 bc of the Mission Impossible movie :-p

It was ok and fun and all, I wasn’t a huge gamer tho.

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johncate73@reddit

The Cyrix 5x86 was actually a 6x86 core adapted to run in a 486 socket. If you had a compatible motherboard, it was killer upgrade for a 486.

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on95g4d@reddit

I don't have Cyrix but an even weird CPU called WinChip. It is used to upgrade my pentium socket 5 system.

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RolandMT32@reddit

I saw Cyrix CPUs being sold at local computer part stores. You didn't have to go to computer shows to buy them. I had never used a Cyrix CPU though..

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johncate73@reddit

It was the best x87 FPU you could buy. The problem was that Cyrix never really developed it further. The FPU in an MII several years later was little more than an integrated 387.

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MWink64@reddit

Fas~~t~~Math.

I have one of those in my collection.

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sunshine-x@reddit

Bought one, instant regret playing games (quake?), returned it.

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rastyk1@reddit

It played quake, but I believe the FPU (floating point unit) was terribly slow and that game didn’t run well on it. The amazing thing was the sheer cost of all of that. Not just buying one pc but the constant upgrades…

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Gamer7928@reddit

My dad once did I think. If I remember correctly, when the first 80686 Cyrix CPU's came out in the late 1990's, my dad being a PC builder as he was built himself a powerhouse of a tower PC at the time which he installed Windows XP on. The computer still runs too I do believe.

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muse_head@reddit

At that time I was a young teenager so wasn't in the position to be buying one myself. But Cyrix seemed to have a reputation of being cheap and not very good, I don't remember thinking anything positive about those systems! Their advertising was also misleading, making their 486 CPU sound like a Pentium, misleading speed labelling etc. I'm surprised it was allowed (here in the UK!).

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MWink64@reddit

They had at least one ad that contained a flat out lie. They stated "lower is better" on the benchmark graphs, when clearly it was the opposite.

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bhmcintosh@reddit

I vaguely recall running a Cyrix for a while, no more than a few weeks. Had no end of trouble with the thing and finally junked it in favor of an AMD 5x86 oc'ed to 160MHz. Ran *that* machine for several years,.

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BidSmall186@reddit

I had one of these and skipped over Pentium all together. I never ran it at the spec’d speed…160/40 from the start.

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kfriddile@reddit

Some of the DOS compatibility cards for the PowerMac 6100 were shipped with Cyrix 486 DX2 66 CPUs and others were shipped with Intel CPUs. I have two DOS cards, one with each CPU, and the Intel CPU benchmarks just slightly faster.

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navetBruce@reddit

I built one with a Cyrix 166 if I remember right.

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moonracers@reddit

Wow! I had completely forgotten about these. Good ole days indeed!

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cipioxx@reddit

Powerspec from micro center

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GonWaki@reddit

Late ‘92 or early ‘93…mine didn’t work well with OS/2. Returned for a refund.

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rosmaniac@reddit

There was a period of time that all the budget PCs either had an AMD K6-2 or a Cyrix MII. I have a matched pair of eMachines 333MHz PC's, one an MII and the other a K6-2.

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Joe_Early_MD@reddit

ahhh the K6-2 what a repressed memory. good times.

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the_humeister@reddit

K6-2 was great. Then you can drop in a K6-III for a bit more performance

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2raysdiver@reddit

IBM's 5x86 and 6x86 CPUs were just a licensed Cyrix CPUs with the IBM logo. They put them in a few PC models, as I recall. I know there were other PCs that used them as well. I think eMachines and a few other "value" brands. I think we put a Cyrix 486 in my Dad's 386 PS/Valuepoint to give it more life. It was a good upgrade, but not quite as good as an actual 486.

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Revolutionary_Pen_65@reddit

My uncle had a cyrix. I remember it ran doom like crap, apparently they had a suuuuper weak, even for the time FPU (or maybe no FPU :/ )

I do remember I called Tigerdirect which at the time would send catalogs of PC builds and components and got Cyrix's 800 number. I then called them and requested a fact sheet for their CPU and they mailed me this like 200 page detailed readout of every part of their chip. Was fascinating and I understood absolutely none of it at the time. Would kill to dig that out and flip through it.

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valthonis_surion@reddit

I didn’t back in the release days, but I recently rebuilt my DOS/Win98 machine with a Via Ezra 1ghz. Handles the majority of Win98 games I want and can adjust the clock/buss/cache/etc from the command line and easily play a bunch of DOS speed sensitive games

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af_cheddarhead@reddit

All you had to do was open the pages of "Computer Shopper" and you could find dozens of ads advertising whitebox computers sporting a Cyrix CPU.

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miner_cooling_trials@reddit

Yes, I recall building a cyrix 6x86 based system. Poor man's Pentium 😆

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toocoldtothink@reddit

I definitely had a Cyrix. Got it at Frye’s, though. Mostly because it’s all I could afford. Worked pretty well for the most part, but also froze quite a bit.

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3Cogs@reddit

Mine got really hot rather than freezing. :-)

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gcc-O2@reddit

Maybe it was the Coma Bug

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LittlePooky@reddit

Good old days. Put together a computer for a friend with Cyrix CPU. I can't even remember what Windows we used. Was it Windows 2000 or Windows XP? It was for his homework and it worked fine.

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MTU9000@reddit

Dude!!! My first home built computer, I demanded the processor be a Cyrix 686!

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AndyTPM@reddit

I worked at Computer Play and Replay on the Belin turnpike for a while, we would sell those Cyrix systems.

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ailyara@reddit

Damn that was totally me picked up a cheap cyrix at dayton hamfest back in the day. 100mhz raw power lol.

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therezin@reddit

I had a system in about 1998-99 that had a 200MHz Cyrix M2 in it. Sold as a PR233 because they reckoned it would perform as well as a Pentium 2 clocked 16% faster. Maybe it would, in certain circumstances - but I was a teenager and what I cared about was games, and for those it just couldn't keep up.

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davus_maximus@reddit

Sure, I think i still have my Cyrix 586! Fond memories of computer "trade" "shows" at British community centres and leisure centres. I saw some boxed CD-R's at a junk shop at the weekend and felt the nostalgia!

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yodamastertampa@reddit

I used to sell them but never recommended them. The 5x86 was probably the best one.

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Walkera43@reddit

Fujitsu did a little notebook with a Cyrix in.

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spektro123@reddit

I’ve got Cyrix 486DX2-66 on Shuttle HOT-419 motherboard. It’s a fun nostalgia machine.

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_Arch_Stanton@reddit

I had one I think.

Either that or an IDT Winchip.

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hdhddf@reddit

several they were super good value and overclocked quite well.

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T4Abyss@reddit

Same experience, but in Manchester and Stoke (Trentham gardens) in the UK. Few yea later I would be a regular for cdr media that funded the most excellent period of life of going arrrrrr all day every day 😬

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lproven@reddit

I had several. The 6x86 was measurably faster than a Pentium, clock for clock. It didn't keep up -- it was about 10 or 20% quicker.

The Cyrix 166 part was running at 133 MHz and was quicker than a Pentium 166.

I see people taking jabs at the FPU. That's wrong too. It wasn't that it was slower. The problem was that the Pentium FPU could, with very very careful coding, run at the same time as the integer core. If the programmer manually interleaved FP instructions with integer ones, the y became almost "free" -- they ran in nearly the same cycle as the integer operations.

This was an original discovery of Doom developer John Carmack, and he used it extensively in Quake and its sequels. Nobody else and nothing else before that.

Even Intel didn't know about this, and Cyrix couldn't imitate something nobody knew about before. So the Cyrix chips couldn't do this.

One game was enough to kill the CPU family in the market.

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achbob84@reddit

Once, regretted it, got an AMD.

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setwindowtext@reddit

A friend of mine built a Cyrix 233 MHz machine. I remember it ran Doom similarly to my Pentium 100.

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NorCalFrances@reddit

I had a Cyrix 5x86 in a board with: vlb and pci, and both 30 pin and 72 pin RAM sockets.IIR in order to run the CPU at 120 mhz, the VLB bus ended up overclocked and thus flakey. Which wasn't good since that's where my video and hdd controllers were.

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JBN2337C@reddit

I did!!! Wish I could recall which one, specifically… very late 1990s. I know it served me very well!

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ctt956@reddit

I have a Compaq Presario 5304 with a Cyrix MII

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ccagan@reddit

Anyone remember the “overdrive” CPUs Cyrix sold? Higher clocked 486’s you could buy at Walmart of all places.

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canthearu_ack@reddit

I built an 6x86 based system back in the day.

It was an IBM 6x86 PR233 machine that I paired with a S3 Virge DX. The gaming results were .... predictably mediocre.

After a few months, I had a small windfall which let me buy a completely new Celeron 333 system with Intel i740 graphics card, that was a fair bit better.

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gnntech@reddit

Growing up, I pretty much used Cyrix chips exclusively in my personal PC builds. I fell for the "better than Pentium performance at a lower cost" line. To be honest, the performance wasn't bad at all with them.

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pmodizzle@reddit

Not back in the day, but with my IBM PS/2 P70 now I dropped in a cyrix 486 in place of the 20mhz 386dx. Won’t run at a higher clock speed (IBM made it very difficult to overclock) but gave still gives it a fair performance boost in other ways

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RUKiddingMeReddit@reddit

My first build when I was in middle school was a Cyrix 486 DX2 80. Man, that machine ran great.

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virtualadept@reddit

Yep. Sophmore year of college I had a Pentium-150 with the F00F bug. I didn't realize it at the time but the cooling fan had seized up. About a week before midterms I came back to full panic at the dorms because the Pentium failed completely, overheated such that the epoxy in the mainboard smelted and began to smolder, and then began to char. My roommate woke up to a room full of magic smoke and pulled the fire alarm. I had a comp.sci project due before midterms so I had to hike out to the edge of campus to the computer shop/bookstore/pawnshop and scrounge up a new CPU (Cyrix 6x86, rated at 166 MHz but ran like a 150), mainboard, and enough RAM to finish my project. Thankfully the hard drive in my box wasn't damaged so once I got the new guts in place that CPU lasted me until 2000.

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threadedBridge@reddit

I played many hours of Fallout on a Cyrix 5x86. First computer I built with proceeds from my first job. Great memories!

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SourChipmunk@reddit

The shop I worked in steered clear of Cyrix. We had SO many customers bring in their "less-expensive" systems, and every time we ran diagnostics on them we found the CPU had overheated and caused a system shutdown. Years later we would call this behaviour "overclocking", which required additional cooling.

Our alternative was the AMD 486 DX4-133, which benchmarked on par with a Pentium 75 at the time. The math coprocessor wasn't as strong, but at 1/3 the cost it took care of business for most people.

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Cautious-Opposite-10@reddit

I had a cyrix CPU 180mhz with a Compaq presario 2280 system which looked sick back then with ok the beige cases around

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n1ghtbringer@reddit

Not intentionally. They had a horrible reputation from the Pentium era on.

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Karren_H@reddit

I had one. I remember it clearly because it was green. Still have it in my CPU collection.

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Visible-Disaster@reddit

Had a 6x86 based machine for a little bit that I had bought thru Computer Shopper. One of those no name brands. Unfortunately one of the software packages I had to run in college was not very compatible. Maybe Matlab or pSpice, can’t remember anymore. Ended up returning it and “upgrading” to a Pentium 133.

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shift1186@reddit

Absolutely! At that time era, I had hand me down stuff from my dad - Intel 386dx2, cyrix 166+, (dual) Pentium pro 200. Wasn't until I bought my own first PC with amd k6-2 233 if I recall....

Loved my cyrix for the most part. Vaguely remember having issues with W98 and using (my dad's) MSDN W2k instead.

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MrWhippyT@reddit

Upgraded from a 286 to a Cyrix 486dx2 66. Couldn't believe how powerful it was 🤣

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droid_mike@reddit

They were decent, and cheap. I had a few back in the day...

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StrictFinance2177@reddit

All the time. At a certain point it just made more sense to split up a 4 year computer budget into 2-3 builds. Especially when I used to build computers for friends on a budget. I took pride in hacking the heck out of Windows to overcome the fact that everything was compiled for intel. I built and ran everything, so I never did the fanboy thing. Some builds made better sense for some people and budgets. Especially workstations.

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gcc-O2@reddit

I remember computer shows too, but I wasn't old and/or wealthy enough to be buying a complete system there while Cyrix was still current. While you were buying a cheap system, I was probably digging through those bulk motherboard bins on the floor they sometimes had!