Hi everyone, I'm Mike, a RU-vidr and blogger from Canada. I have a channel and blog called vswitchzero, which focuses on retro PC hardware and gaming from the 1990s. I love to showcase all sorts of interesting retro technology and repair/restore old and neglected hardware. In addition, I occasionally create content in other technology areas including VMware products, Linux and more!
I remember that once I had convinced my parents to buy a quite expensive 486 DX2 66 in 1993, I soon started seeing the Pentium 60 and 66 hit the shelves. Then AFTER that, I started seeing DX3-75s, DX4-100s, and a dozen other permutations.
I was at school in 1995 when my dad bought a 486dx2. Pretty quickly, I found that there was no real difficulty swapping CPUs, upgrading RAM, installing sound cards, etc. So I started to do these things for friends and school colleagues in exchange for their old parts. Then these people would refer me to their friends and family, and so on.... you get the picture! As a result of doing this, I had the dx2 80, the dx2 100, the pentium 100 (socket 7), several cirix, amd and intel systems followed, and I would still put my old systems together enough with used parts to sell them cheap. I don't recall all my computers during that era, but let's just say they were changing every couple of weeks or so.
FYI about the Cyrix 5x86-133Mhz: I remember reading an article back in the 90's stating that all Cyrix 5x86s at 133Mhz were sold to Evergreen (or another upgrade company?) to make upgrade chips out of them. So that would explain why they are very difficult to find. 1. I still have a Cyrix 5x86-120Mhz Windows 95 machine which I use to play old games like the first XCom DOS games. 🙂 2. And I also still have a Kingston AMD 5x86-133Mhz chip, which I used to upgrade my old 486-66Mhz. That also was a nice boost. 3. CPU upgrade nostalgia: The last "upgrade CPU" I bought was a Powerleap Tualatin Celeron at 1.2Ghz... I used this to upgrade my Pentium 2 400 to a Tualatin Celeron at 1.2Ghz... wow, that Celeron had a motor on it. 🙂
You don't happen to have any reference material to what the SMD capacitors are that sit between the memory modules? I have one that is damaged and was hoping to work out what it was, the alternative being to pull one of the other ones off and measure it.
The tolerance on crystals is very tight, typically 0.02% (20 ppm) Using a 19.6608 MHz instead of 19.7568 results in about 0.5% variation, so you're way out of the normal tolerance. But for sound, 0.5% difference in speed is just not perceptible, especially when using wave samples (patches) that last for about a second or so. Great find.
Very impressive chips. A shame Intel sued them from existence. They were clearly mad they were being destroyed by UMC. An efficient chip is always best and literally became AMD and Intel's focus by the mid 2000s and everybody focuses on it now.
I was going to say, that Doom performance seems atrocious from what I remember on my 486SX 25. I think I had a VESA video card though, but I can't recall. I used to play Doom on 25MHz 386 machines (I can't recall if they were SX or DX). This was in my computer lab in high school. We shrunk the screen down much smaller, but it was perfectly playable. We did multiple simultaneous 4 player Doom matches over the Novell network.
I’ve been watching your back catalog here on RU-vid and I’ve been very impressed by the depth you manage to get into while still being a reasonable time investment. Really enjoying it so far!
In reference to you comment @1:41 where you said "I have no doubt that the release of Doom pushed some people to upgrade or buy new systems in 1993 but most people who shelled out you know three or $4,000 for computer back in the early 90s well they play Doom anyway" A $3000-4000 PC from the early 90s would have been a very top end 486 and would have had no trouble running doom. Based on advertisements found in Byte and PC Magazines; in 1991 386SX-16 systems were selling for $700-800 (including VGA and a hard drive) while a 486DX33 system could be bought for $1500. In 1993 when Doom released budget 486SLC-33 systems sold for under $600, 486SX33 systems were $800-900 while $1500 would get you a 486DX2-66. There is a persistant myth that PCs in the 80s and 90s cost thousands of dollars but the reality is that the majority of PCs sold to home users in this period were these kinds of cheaper locally assembled ones.
I never saw a 486SX packaged in that way before; I always remember seeing 386SX’s in this packaging and thought it looked advanced for the time. This looks like a pretty good budget choice for 1992! Subbed. (My first OC was a 486DX-25 laying around that I finally put in a ‘33 MHz board’ in 1992 or so.. eventually a Digikey oscillator assortment got that combo to 48 MHz stably :) ).
Not sure if it was your channel but I commented to someone doing doom trials that I used to put the demo on loop under win3.1+3.11wfw back in the day overnight as a burn in and stability test before delivering a system. If you can do that without a blue screen then you know what your doing and your real mode drivers are rock solid.
Another very good video. Thx for sharing :) It's also good you mention the stuff you work with. For example which solder would you use? I found out that some pf my old repaired PCBs got corrosion where i soldered. I think cause of flux. Now I wonder if there is solder with bad flux which leads to corossion.
