AMD 486 DX4/100 with 64MB RAM & Windows 95

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Scoth42@reddit

Stick a cheap PCI USB card in it and you'll even get USB support. I did something similar with 192MB of RAM and it was kind of neat using "modern" PCI video card, audio card, and USB on a 486. Was wildly unstable though, not sure if it was she combination of parts or mobo problems

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O_MORES@reddit (OP)

I actually tried a PCI to USB card, drivers installed, but it didn’t work. Didn’t dig too deep or test other adapters yet (I think I’ve got every possible chipset lying around). I’d really love to see USB working on a 486 though.

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Kakariki73@reddit

https://www.philscomputerlab.com/windows-98-usb-storage-driver.html

Thank me later ✌🏻😎

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Kakariki73@reddit

Wait W95? Different story.

Make sure you have at least SR2 of W95, even then its hit or miss in my experience

http://lonecrusader.x10host.com/xusbsupp.html

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SaturnFive@reddit

NEC based USB has been the most solid in my experience, meanwhile my VIA cards usually work, other times they give me trouble. Good luck, that would be cool!

I recall it's possible to get digital video on a 486 using a Matrox card with some proprietary connector that breaks out to DVI. I don't recall the card or part though :(

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randylush@reddit

It still blows my mind that you can run half life on a 486. I didn’t believe people who made that claim until I saw a video for myself

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O_MORES@reddit (OP)

Hmm... I could make such a video, maybe helping this poor 486 CPU with a PCI GPU. I also tried Half-Life 2 on a Pentium III/866, and it's actually playable.

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eulynn34@reddit

64MB on a 486 would have been living pretty high on the hog in those days.

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techika@reddit

If find podp83 (pentium overdrive) will be better

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Orbitalsp3@reddit

I think in some sense we are regressing, now we have phones with like 2, 4 or even 8GB of RAM that lags, sometimes with simple tasks like opening a freaking calculator app

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thesuperbob@reddit

As an old timer this really bugs me, I got a pretty beefy laptop issued at work and yet it's so bogged down with corporate bloatware, boring office apps open slower than their equivalent on my 486 with win95. I get they got a few more features these days, they also have 1000x more ram and 8 CPU cores at their disposal, each 300x faster than the one I had 30 years ago. Yet somehow it takes upwards of a second for text to appear on screen after I start typing.

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max81122@reddit

Mine's the same. I have a Dell i9 with 32GB ram. Yet, it lags and is slow at some apps. It's bogged down with AV, firewall, and VPN stuff. MS-Teams takes forever to start. And audio gets messed up all the time. Yet, my home i5's and i7's are way more enjoyable to use, let alone the vintage gear.

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ZarK-eh@reddit

If a machine can't keep up with a Human on a Keyboard, something's wrong AF.

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RetinaJunkie@reddit

Bet its sweet watching that ram count up @ boot

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SaturnFive@reddit

RAM counting speed is kind of a fun way to gauge the total speed of a system. My 12MHz 286 has a good 1/2 second between each tick up to 1MB, even slower with turbo. But the DX4-100 is a nearly solid BZZZZZZZZZZ... beep 😄

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MWink64@reddit

Imagine how much fun it was with a 386SX-16 with 8MB of RAM.

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rasteri@reddit

2×32 MB FPM SIMMs cost around $2,000 in 1995

Wow, it's almost half that today

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MWink64@reddit

It'll probably be double by next week.

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Coupe368@reddit

Always wondered why it was the DX4 when it was a 3X multiplier.

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cityside75@reddit

I thought these 100 Mhz 486's used a 25 Mhz FSB with a 4x multiplier. If I recall, there were specific scenarios where the 100 could be slightly slower than the 66 due to this. I had an AMD 5x86 133 which I believe was a 486 running a 4x multiplier on the 33Mhz FSB. It's been a while so my recollection may be wrong.

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Coupe368@reddit

Nope, pretty much all the DX4s were 3x multipliers.

The AMD Am5x86 was 4X multiplier, but they called it a P75 or whatever to compete with pentiums.

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Scoth42@reddit

My recollection was they just liked the bigger number in the end, plus I think they considered calling the 75/83mhz parts DX3, as well as proposed 2.5x multiplier parts that were never released. In the end there's no real solid information why other than they just liked it better

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GigAHerZ64@reddit

Beautiful!

I have myself a 5x86 (basically 486 with 4x multiplier and 16kB of on-chip L1 cache instead of 8kB) running at 150MHz (3x50MHz), has 1024kB L2 cache on board, 64MB RAM as well, VLB Trio32 graphics and VLB IDE controller. (Unfortunately a simple one - no on-board cache memory for the IDE controller.)

Perfect "ultimate" Win 3.11 and Win95 machine. With suped up Pentium, you would go with Win98SE anyways.

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FritsFlits@reddit

Winamp!

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randombits0110@reddit

It really

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graywolf0026@reddit

WHIPS

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GigAHerZ64@reddit

the Llama's

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LightStruk@reddit

I see Winamp on that desktop. If I recall correctly, a 100 MHz 486 was _juuust_ enough to decode a 128 kbps MP3. You were not doing other work with music playing in the background.

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0xKaishakunin@reddit

If I recall correctly, a 100 MHz 486 was just barely fast enough to decode a 128 kbps MP3.

I encoded my first MP3s on a 486DX4/100 with 8MB of RAM. It took loong, at least a night for your average Slayer album, but it worked. And it worked well.

I stored all MP3s on one of those BigFoot HDDs with 5.25 inch width.

But I ran SuSE Linux 4 or 5.x on it.

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burritoresearch@reddit

Many llamas will be whipped

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O_MORES@reddit (OP)

Winamp has some optimizations for 486s, but aside from those you can degrade the quality even for a DX2/66 something like 11kHz and mono will do.

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c0burn@reddit

I would re-seat those cache chips

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O_MORES@reddit (OP)

Already did, because for 64MB you need 256K of cache, and the board came with 128K.

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jcr1985@reddit

My first computer in the '90s had exactly the same case. Do you happen to have any information about it?

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O_MORES@reddit (OP)

I'm pretty sure I had the same type of case too. I don't think it's a particular model... it was just something like a 'generic AT case.' Too bad this one is not in very good shape.

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Inspiron606002@reddit

I'm confused....I thought the 486 was an Intel processor, but I've seen a lot post lately like this one mentioning an "AMD 486".

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phire@reddit

AMD made a clone of the 486, called the Am486.

They weren't the only people, IBM, TI, Cyrix, UMC and ST made clones or clean room reimplementations too.

Intel tried various legal techniques to try and block them, but they all failed. And because a number can't be trademarked, there was nothing stopping the clones using "486" in their names.

This is the main reason that intel's next CPU was branded as the Pentium, not the 586.

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Inspiron606002@reddit

Interesting. I was not aware of all that.

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bigbigdummie@reddit

See if you can goose the external CPU cache, oh Speedy McSpeedster!!

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saraseitor@reddit

I used to run W95 in my Pentium with 8MB RAM. 64MB is wild, really!

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WoodyTheWorker@reddit

I had a Windows 98 (or XP?) machine with 64 MB in 2005 on work, to run Microsoft Visual Studio 5.

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ak3000android@reddit

How long were you stuck with that? I tried that for a while and it was painful. Adding even just 4 MB made it much more bearable.

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Js987@reddit

I wasn’t *that* bad at the time, as the whole experience was pretty sluggish anyway, and it was twice the minimum. Nowadays though it’s painful to sit through.

The worst system I ever ran it on long term was an IBM L40SX (yeah, 95 will run on a 386SX even though the minimum on the box says 386DX) with 10MB in the late 90s. With disc compression off it was bearable (tiny hard drive), but the install took hours as I had to use the floppy version. But I used it on plenty of customer computers with 4-8MB. The bare minimum 4 was brutal.

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ZarK-eh@reddit

Lemme guess. Ya tried Four sticks but only half worked?

... That's what I did when I pimped my Fathers leading Edge, lol only 2 of 4 sticks worked. Still fun running NT on it accessing my modern-ish servers.

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O_MORES@reddit (OP)

Also, here’s this setup in action, casually surfing the web: https://youtu.be/xAjyjOkb6M0

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a_n_d_r_e_@reddit

Wow! A dream.

I wrote my thesis on a 48/25 DX, 12Mb laptop.

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