386SX-40 vs 486SLC-40 vs 486SXLC2-40 and the Curse of PC Chips 

As someone who was building PCs back when these were new products, I can confirm that PC Chips has been garbage since the start. Even then, everyone with the slightest bit of tech savvy avoided them like radioactive dog poop.

Cool content! Did you know the Ti486SXLC2-40 is in fact the exact same CPU as the Ti486SXLC-40? The really cool thing about the Ti Potomac core, (which is an enhanced Cyrix SLC) is that it can run at both 2x20 and 1x40 MHz! So you could have the best of both worlds and desolder the SXLC2-40 from the PC Chips board and solder it onto the ALi board that has the Cyrix SLC on it. You'd have a non clock doubled 40MHz CPU with a 486 instruction set and 8k of L1 cache! Awesome!

There is a part mising from 11:15

Your "Cache vs no cache" section looks completely blank to me, no visuals, I just hear you talking about stuff.

Pressure wash it, or use an ultrasonic cleaner, and use an air compressor to dry it faster. We used that technique for hurricane flood damaged systems, and some of the systems we salvaged lasted over ten years later.

When I was in college I went to a computer fair and built a new PC to replace my AT&T PC 6300. I ended up buying a AMD 386DX 40mhz over a 486SX 20. I think I made the right decision at the time. Later I upgraded to a Socket 7 motherboard with a Pentium MMX 166Mhz.

Remember Blue Lightning, the slc2-66? Those were pretty quick, despite the 16bit bus.

Nice video ! I felt lucky when I found a mainboard with a 486SLC, I don't even expect to find one with a 486SXLC2, this must be pretty rare. I hope you'll find a new host mainboard for that little chip, it totally deserves it. I also hope that you'll be able to introduce the IBM 458SLC2 as a new challenger in a future video.

Great video mate !

THIS IS AWESOME!!! Thank you!!!

Check my 486SXLC2 video ^^ Similar motherboard, similar chipset (just older revision maybe - A4). The flush signal is mostly rooted on my board and the cache worked fine! So it is safe to say that this chipset supports the flush thing and all that. Then the question is what connection is missing there... I can maybe check for continuity and tell you were to connect the missing signal. Another interesting point, on my board I failed to enable clock doubling, So I am very curious. Maybe works there because of A5 revision? You should try the 486SXLC2 at 40/40 without doubling also, it is way faster for sure. Also I have your M396F M/B (with am386sx), also aware of the open Gerbers of this. I have not played there too much. I am planning to rebuild the schematic of the board, but no much time right now. PS: Black screen on your video 11:20? Ps2: there are 386SX M/B with cache on boards, I have one... just rare in general as there are budget M/Bs and many skipped on that. Not sure about chipset cache support also.

the first computer I built from scratch was a 386SX 25, with 2 meg of ram, the math co-processor and a 60 meg hard drive. I built this to upgrade from a 8088 with 764K ram and a 10 meg drive. I remember spending hours playing Dune 2 on it. From there my next build was a a 486DLC 40 with 2 VL Bus slots, which I populated with a video card upgraded to 2 meg of ram and a VL bus IDE controller. This surprisingly beat my friends 486DX2 66 in bench marks.

This is a very interesting review of the various CPUs. Thanks for this!. I’m curious how high of a bus speed that 1994 board supports that came with the 20 MHz bus cpu..

I've got a 386sx-25 as an upgrade sitting on top of an IBM 5170 motherboard. Silly, I know, but I really wanted a genuine IBM 5170 experience but with the 386 instruction set for software compatibility. The little upgrade board also has 16KB of cache on it, and if you turn that cache OFF then the 386sx-25 benchmarks slower than the original 286 CPU at 10MHz.

Was the 486SLC fully pipelined for integer like a regular 486DX/SX? Also would be interesting to see performance differences for 16-bit software which may not be as great as Doom demonstrated here. (16-bit application performance).

You are back! NB, I think I've seen some 386sx boards with cache. So SX should be cache capable on motherboard.

Have you tried Cyrix's bundled software with the Ti processor? It can control A20, FLUSH and A LOT of other stuff, you know. Other than that, a very impressive job and a really rare piece of hardware!

Do you have a link to that project where someone did a modern layout of this class motherboard?

Those was the upgrade or build cheep systems motherboards. Personal fave and I found one. Nice old AT clone case with the original power supply. Probably was a 286 or old 386 that was upgraded or probably died. So you use new motherboard, io card and sometimes vga card. Now you are back in action . Even for windows 3.1 This one had a newer multi i/o card with ide hard drive.

I had a intel 386 40mhz, but not that one motherboard. Interesting video. I remember the fake cache stuff. It preceded RAM doublers.

Maybe try changing the cache mode with some of the utilities. Also, do 386sx boards use page interleave, the RAM performance would be better with 4 banks than with 2. And yes, there is a bit missing in the video

find that board at absolute computing in Albuquerque?

Hmm no video at 11:17 oddly

The Intel RapidCAD 386 CPU is a 386DX CPU with an integrated FPU. It's almost a 486DX but with a significantly smaller cache and doesn't have all the new instructions/

Had no idea that TI ever made x86 procs!

Just so you know I'm getting just a blank screen for Cache vs No Cache.

My first PC was a 386SX-16 that I managed to overclock to 20 MHz

386 SX does support external cache. I have one!