AMD 486DX4 100MHz Part 1 

Beautiful machine! I have a 486 DX4/100 too. It's my "go to" machine!!

I also had this PC and I like to remember those times. It's good to see that something survived also few decades. Thank you RS78. :)

Nice one, hope you'll bring that VLB motherboard back to life.

486 to pentium 3 is sweet spot for retro gaming computers, especially with 3dfx cards like the one banshee you've tested on previous video. thank you for another excellent video. I really wish to have a neighbour like you, from vga cards Rendition Verite is one exotic card with promising 3D for it's time, especially vQuake worth to look at, your subscriber

Ah, those were great machines. Love that era of hardware & software.

Battery leakage is a terrible thing. So many motherboards of that era killed..

Nicely done explanation as to how to hook up the turbo functions

I have exact this CPU machine in childhood, 24mb ram, Tseng labs ET4000 1mb vram. Dune2, Warcraft, Doom, Duke3d, and even Quake, slow but playable! It was long time ago...

I worked in a clone shop in the mid 90s. We HATED those speed displays, settings the jumpers was a nightmare. One day we decided to program them to just say "HI" / "LO", I think I might still remember the positions to do that :D

Much nicer machine compared to that Crapperd Bell XD It must have been the coolest kid in class who had this one! We used to play worms hours on end on a comparable machine, so much fun!

14:02 Ahh, Number Nine Motion 771 (S3 Vision 968), my very first PCI graphics card. 16:26 Thanks for explaining different wiring between MB and case LEDs; it was such a pain in the neck when connector standards were not unified.

very nice trip down the memory lane, thanks! Looking forward to seeing the repair video!

Thanks for sharing in your retro and restoration projects. I love all the detail you include, it either reminds me of trying to figure it out 25 years ago, or my favorite, it teaches me something new I didn’t know. I recently restored a similarly battery acid damaged board with broken traces, it was a lot of work. I hope you share the challenge of repairing your original 486 board, it’ll be difficult but so many good nuances to learn about if you shared a video about it. You have other videos like this already, they’re great and I can’t wait for more!

That startup sounds of the HDD, I love it!!

I liked the part where you measured and explained the different variants and requirements for the turbo switch. Nice video man, keep it up

Me at 0:38: "Battery damage!!!!" Hope you can get that board fixed. Also awesome taht that single speed CD-ROM still works, slow drives are getting RARE and the fast IDE ones from the late 90's are not always compatible. Respect for firing up "Z", that's not a game you see from every youtuber. I say this because I am frankly a bit tired from the usual suspects: Doom, Duke Nukem, Doom and Doom and hence rather grateful to see proof that there were more games out there.

That CD-ROM drive and controller card uses an LMSI interface. It stands for Laser Magnetic Storage International, and was a very early proprietary interface used by a small number of CD-ROM drives. Back in the day we upgraded our family 386 with a kit that included a Media Vision Pro AudioSpectrum 16 sound card and a CD-ROM drive, both using an LMSI interface. I was watching an LGR video on an early CD-ROM drive, and it triggered a memory of that computer, when my dad bought the kit and we installed it in the computer, but couldn't figure out how to make it work. I commented on that video about the memory, and the replies helped me figure out what the sound card was. The PAS 16 cards a little hard to come by here in Australia, so I ended up paying way too much and buying one from the US earlier this year. And watching your video reminded me that I still haven't tracked down the CD-ROM drive, so I did some Google image searches and figured out what model the drive was, and I've now ordered that from the US for a slightly less exorbitant price. It was the CM 205, which was a single speed model, whereas the one in your machine is the CM 206, which is the 2x model. I also acquired a 386 motherboard (although that needs a bit of work), so once the drive arrives I should have the main parts needed to rebuild that machine. Except the case, which was pretty common back in the day, but I haven't seen one come up on eBay for a long time. Anyway, interesting video. I would be interested to see if there's any performance difference between the CPU with the Intel instructions, and the one without. Also looking forward to that motherboard repair!

I had an Am486 DX4 as well! So many memories! Since you have this MB with PCI slots, I'd be tempted to see how the thing can run Voodoo1 games. I know these came out later, but it would be interesting nonetheless

I have the same motherboard lying around that also suffered from battery leak. But I've needed some reference photos for resistors on left of ISA slots and your close up shots are a life saver! Now I can restore it and build myself a 486! Thanks a lot for your videos)

The closest that I got to a DX4 100 was a DX2 66, perhaps that might have been "faster" due to the 33mhz bus as opposed to the 25mhz of the DX4. I remember upgrading from my 386 SX25 to the DX2 66 primarily to play one game, Comanche....! Proprietary CD ROM interfaces, IIRC my AWE32 soundblaster card had three interfaces on the rear of it, before the later ones had IDE as std. Wow I remember that Superscape benchmark running at the end, ah the memories. Great video, thanks for sharing. I'll grab a cup of tea and settle in for part two :)

CL5446 FTW! One of the first windows dual display supported card, at least for the win9X versions... I was lucky enough to get a hold of 4x 1MB cards back in the days, though mine had the first megabyte of vram soldered on. After a little while of my young self, a blow torch and 2 video cards, I ended up with 2x 2MB cards and dual displays with windows 98. lol on a pentium 100 or 133 or something along those lines. Great times. I never had a 486, jumped from an AMD 386 DX/40 straight to a Pentium machine, I missed out on the whole VLB thing. I did run win95A on that 386 upgraded to 20MB ram... took 7 minutes to boot

That’s a nice machine, ideal for running demanding late era Dos games and some early win’95 games. This is kind of machine that runs Duke 3D well, unlike the 33 mhz 486 that I use to have. I would however upgrade the cd-rom to an IDE model with some decent speed as quite a few games in those days required at least a double speed one. My first cd-rom (in the 486) was a 5x speed from Philips, it was installed around late ‘95.

Just wanted to mention (again) that your narration pacing has improved a lot. It is commendable that you took my suggestion to heart and that you didn't take it the wrong way. It shows that you care about improving your videos and I really appreciate that. I hope you and your family are well and have a nice day :)

Nice video and pretty good build. The "T" in the Am486 chip code describe the cache policy, WriteBack (a bit faster) or WriteThrough (first standard). 20:45 the wonderful Bitmap Brothers game "Z"! Good memories! Cheers, M

AMD nailed it with the 80486 cpus, they were bloody awesome for dos

11:55 1995 WEEK 09 * :) Also these two AMD cpus have 8KB of Write-trough internal cache (instead of 16KB in the Intel DX4). There are also NV8B that exist with Write-Back cache which is slightly better.

Nice retro build again and i hope that you can repair the other motherboard. Battery leakage is terrible. Greetings from Steven from the Netherlands

The Seagate ST3660A was exactly my fist hard drive ever! Oh man, and yes i love the "sound" of this thing too (I still have it in working condition :)) ...and if you have a 486-PC-Build you have to have these sounds (HDD, Floppy Seek etc.) - i personally love 'em ;-)

Ah man! I can’t wait to see the following video’s! The motherboard repairs are always awesome to watch. A bit off-topic perhaps: the L-shaped NIC in the end of the video, do you know if it supports PnP or does it even detect itself in an OS? I can’t seem to get it to detect by any OS.

Awesome that you play Commander Z. i built my DX4-100 just for that game. STILL HAVE IT!!!

Oh so good memories come back. Great!

I had this! I remember I upgraded from my 486 sx to this.

That Number 9 card (S3 968) is cool card. That's the one I'd go with, easily.

Very good machine, from 486 era I used only 486SX 25 Mhz which was Compaq computer. And I have same sound card you showed there in my PC with AMD K6 166.

I had an AMD486 in a phone once. The Nokia 9110 communicator. The 9000 had a 386.

that was an excellent presentation. I look forward to the next one.

Yeah the S3 Virge is a great choice especially with build engine games and the S3vbe318 3K TSR file enabled along with it. It's also a very DOS game compatible card too.

I want to find a DX4-100 Badly! I had one mid 90's, behind the date a bit, but it was PCI & ISA! Loved that system

Great video :) It's an interesting computer since it's right before the voodoo era. I am looking forward to see what games you will play on it.

Great tutorial and tips. Subscribed.

11:32 perhaps interesting to note: ‘Am486’ was trademarked, as you can see, and echoes ‘i486’ which Intel trademarked. Both parties would’ve very much liked to trademark just ‘486’ but the trademarking office decided it was not possible to trademark numbers.

I used to have a 486DX2/66MHz with 16MB EDO RAM which i bought from a friend. And managed to changed the FSB clock from 30MHz to 40MHz (x2 and cant change that). Thus, i overclocked the CPU speed to 80MHz! It was all back in 1995! That was my first experience in overclocking..

I remember all of those, The first DVD burner I purchased was an HP and was then selling for $1200 There is a collection of 'old' stuff as one may call it, in my Garage. God only knows how many SOUNDBLASTER and TURTLE BEACH sound cards exist there. 03:53 The NCR chip is manufactured by NATIONAL CASH REGISTER. They certainly cashed in on those. I keep a lot of these old boards, running Windows 98E to drive CNC routers, and plotters as the newer CPUs are just too fast for the job, and I still have in perfect operational condition, an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe v2.0 and the on-board sound is magnificent, powering some high end *harman/kardon* speakers. As I have not played games for decades, I do not need the high-end Gaming PCs. I only rub a 4th Generation INTEL i7, 16GB RAM and a GIGABYTE nVidia GT1030 with DDR5 RAM, and the DDR4 scam that nVidia pulled on unsuspecting buyers. Shame Shame Shame. ..And my HP laptop is a more current iteration of the INTEL i7 Anyways RetroSpector, you made a decent job of the presentation, recalling old memories ( No pun intended) having enjoyed the relaxed presentation, I gave you a 'Thumbs Up' and subscribed.

Those noise blasters are more popular than they should be and the eBay prices ouch, feel sorry for anyone paying top dollar only to have bought a card with the buddy dsp.

Air compressors are expensive so I use a leaf blower on old machines. It works great.

As I recall the DX4-100 was the first x86 CPU that could play stereo MP3s in real time, with Winamp at least. If you had anything slower (like my DX2-66 at the time) it was necessary to set Winamp's output to mono or you'd get bad stuttering - and even then you couldn't do much else with the PC.

Thanks for another thorough explanation 👍 could you please expand/react to LGR's video about the same subject? I'm still dumbfounded with the fact that, according to him, you get the most performance with the Turbo button depressed... 🤔🧐 Your's seems to be the better explanation, it makes much more sense. On another note: could you please showcase these same machines with these same amazing sound cards but with a nice pair of mid range sound drivers (nothing fancy, not studio quality) and maybe a DAC? I'll never forget how I rediscover the hidden power of sound effects, music, special effects and ambience, the moment I switched from regular speakers to a cheap audio cable connected to my sound system... Quake 3, unreal tournament, counter strike, need for speed, Clive Barker's Undying... every experience was enriched 100x instantly with just that simple change...

I hated those CPU jumpers

CPU sockets with levers like Socket 3 are known as ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) sockets.

Some info: Better processor model was A80486DX4-100SV8B with 8 KB write-back data and code cache and some new features like System Management mode Stop Grant state Stop Clock state Auto Halt Power Down state ---------------- By the way, your processor doesn't have ICE microcode. The decision by the federal district court in San Jose, Calif., said that AMD does not have the right to use Intel's in-circuit emulation (ICE) code in the AMD microprocessors. This code is present on all AMD 486s but is only used in a low-power 486-DXL and 486-DXLV processors. … AMD has started to rework its entire line of 486s to eliminate the code...

Lol the S3 Virge/DX PCI card has a 1998 date code on the GPU and 1996 date code on the DRAM. It's always interesting to look at the actual date codes instead of the year of the copyright, if you want to assemble a contemporary / period correct system.

That poor motherboard.. Hopefully you'll be able to get it working again. The one you've chosen as replacement is pretty similar to my own DX-4 setup.

proper looking computer. It all went downhill when they started naming processors

Awesome build! Regarding the display settings, they are extremely easy to configure once you figure the logic behind each segment. You already solved the hardest part (Voltage, switch and LED). Each segment is divided in a T shape consisting of 4 pins with four possible combinations: Always off (no jumpers) Always on On if turbo is enabled On if turbo is disabled Check out for example the alternate diagram for the K-568 on www.minuszerodegrees.net/led_speed_display/led_speed_display.htm there you can see how those Ts are arranged, usually one row is for the ones and another is for the tens and the little 1 for the hundred has one T for both led segments. Once you figure out how the Ts are arranged based on the current configuration, you can easily set the desired numbers, I do it all the time and even with the power on to see the change in real time!

Lol @14:30. Yeah, the S3 Virge was "3D", technically. It might get

Unicorn PCI 486 mobo. So jealous. Awesome build. Would be curious how it benches against the 16K L1 cache DX4-100 in my build. Cheers man!

Please clean the power button

That Power Button is Yuuuuge! ... and GREEN

15:52 Never seen so many jumpers packed into such a small area. It's a tiny jumper jungle, really!

Nice hardware. I have all same parts, but my processor is Cyrix dx2 50mhz.

My best 486 was a DX266 when I went to the DX4100 I sadly realized that it broke most of my favorite DOS games.

6 Varta batteries disliked this video.

The PCI motherboards with onboard controller eliminate bottle necks and are about 15% faster than VLB motherboards from what I have read using the same CPU.

What was the racing game you showed near the end? Didn't recognize it. Also, does the removal of the "Intel code" you mentioned from the later 486 CPU affect performance at all?

I now know how turbo buttons interact :)

Small correction on manufacturing date of the CPU... 9th WEEK, not 9th month.

If my memory serves, no pun intended, the AMD DX4-100 was the last AMD CPU an Intel chipset supported. I could be wrong.....

8:01 Is there a frigging 1998 copyright date sticker on the CMOS chip? How come there were still 486 mainboards in like '99? (copyright is always a year or two behind). Industrial use oriented stuff?

My first computer was AMD 486DX4-100 with 16 M RAM, 1.2 G HDD and S3 ViRGE...

MAXI Tower... Someone was rich in 90s

I always rather liked the look of Windows 3.x / WinNT 3.x

ohhh my first PC

I still have a 200meg HDD in my 486. Space limitation is tough when loading games so I will likely go CF at some point :)

This old Seagate drive is 'reliable'?!... Yeah, I had a different experience with those Seagate drives in the past.

does having or not having the Intel code make any practical difference in compatibility or performance? My guess is no since I've never heard of any but just curious if you were aware of any. I'm currently testing a Rendition Verite as well, Its a faster Windows build though as Its a pretty horrible card for DOS though a few games do support its API. I remember DOOM running horribly slow with that card as it has issues with certain modes some DOS games use.

5:40 Little bit of Billy Coore here.

I think you told me the brand of the CF to IDE adapter before in another video but could you tell me again? I want to buy adapters I KNOW will work with old computers and boot CF cards without issue. As always, great videos!

I got exactly the same Typhoon loudspeaker for my first pc 1998 :)

When i saw the Blizzard logo, i thought you will play StarCraft....:D

CT2260...not bad, however, you might want to replace 15ns cache chippies.

I had V8T - the shittiest version of DX4. But I was able to run it 2x50MHz (decent DRAM) with VLB card. It was close to P75 in some benchmarks.

Nice

you said that is made in 1995 month 9 related to "9509FPB", but the 2nd CPU is marked "9452FPH" . .. well I'm confused !!!

Here this type of case was called a "Mid-tower". Rather than "Full-tower" or "mini-tower".

Sir, would you be willing to discuss Binning of CPU and processors? I recall something about it and its an interesting factor of our older PC's/

Beware of the Alliance VGA card. Performance is quite poor. I really would love to see this rare OTI/weitek based card in action but as daily driver I think the Cirrus Logic or any S3 is best.

Which one of the cpus did you end up putting in the one with or without the Intel instructions?

Believe me or not, but I played Hitman 1 on 5 FPS in this machine. Heretic was like 15 XD

Hi. Nice video. Where i can buy this CF board ?

I wonder if that 486 without Intel microcode is faster or slower in integer and/or floating point tasks?

6:29 5.4V is NOT ok. It's 8% over speck. Most 5V hardware are designed to take a maximum variation of ±5% (including spikes!). Anyway, you should ALWAYS test a PSU (especially old ones) while under load (3 HDDs connected, should be enough... and of course don't use good HDDs, in case the PSU is bad).. Otherwise the measurement could be way off..

My first pc back in 1997,had the same typhoon speakers,are they for sale by any chance?

I recently got a 486PC with exactly the same motherboard as this one. It doesn't post whatsoever (no beeps or error codes) and the main SIS chipset chip (85C471) gets scorching hot a few moments after powerup. Is it doomed or still fixable?

Are there any performance difference between the two versions of amd cpu's

Can you do a video on fixing that VLB motherboard. I would like to see how to go about it.

After you finish with this DX4, are you going to do the IBM PS/ValuePoints?

what was the game being play towards the end of the video please?

thought DX4 was intel not AMD ? mine certainly was

what about ditching the motherboard and replacing it with a DAA78L + A10-7800k + 64GB of DDR3 RAM + your PSU + A SATA DVDR/W drive + 100TB SSD and you can have whatever OS you want and you also can have WIFI capability with the little WIFI card that slots into the motherboard plus the WIFI Antennas that could fit on the back and you won't need a VGA cable as it uses HDMI for video and sound so should work with TV so why not.

my pc back in 95 :)))