Even though I worked on it and spent over an hour, I can't believe that it turned out that well. I have a few more CPUs that require the same treatment, but now I am way more confident to get CPUs like that. I also want to try Pentium 4s. They have pins a lot thinner.
You did a great job! When I got my first p4 I dropped it because I was so excited. It fell on one bottom corner and bent the pins over on it to varying degrees. The next hour of my life was very stressful as I carefully straightened the pins. My next cpu had no pins ❤ I hated pins after that mistake. It looked NOTHING like the cpus you rescued
Ah! I can only imagine how you must have felt after you dropped the CPU and inspected the damage! That must have been terrible! I assume that you were able to rescue the CPU!
@@bitsundbolts yes, I was able to save it, thankfully. I yelled loud and enough the neighbors (apartment) came to investigate though 😅 I guess I screamed like someone dying violently... When I saw the cpu show up in post, I was over the world.
I thought these things looked so cool when they came out! I repaired thousands of PCs between 1996-2006, saw everything under the sun, but never saw one of these outside of a magazine. What an amazing find! I don't think you overpaid at all! I always fixed bent pins with plastic BIC 0.7 mm mechanical pencils (0.5 mm for Socket 478 and newer stuff). This wouldn't get them perfect, but would usually allow me to get it into a socket which helped straighten them out further. At one point we had a customer return a Socket 775 board into which they had tried to install a Socket 478 P4. Yes, really. It was as ugly as you might expect, but the manager allowed them to return everything because the customer said that one of our salespeople sold him the parts together and told him it would work. The upshot is the manager just gave me the old CPU, and I bent every one of those 478 pins back into shape and had a free CPU that was worth like $1000 at the time.
Free expensive computer stuff!!! Great! I don't know if I'll ever be that lucky to find one of these CPUs ever again at the scrapyard. Well, one may dream 😉
Back in 95 I had a DX2-66 that I upgraded to 83MHz P24T Overdrive - and it was a BIG jump in performance versus the DX2-66. This was especially true on anything that was floating point intensive as the Pentium's pipelined FPU was a lot faster than the rather anemic FPU of the 486 (and Intel fixed a lot of the issues related the x87's stacked registers in the Pentium's FPU). Provided you had a board that properly enabled L1 writeback caching, it was a legitimately worthwhile drop-in upgrade back in 1995.
I would love to see you try to run some CAD programs like AutoCAD. This is where more powerful processors and floating point units made a huge impact, and was bread and butter for Intel for many years. As soon as they released a processor that had major improvements like this, entire engineering firms would upgrade every single machine in-house because of the amount of time it saved, which they could actually count in dollars. If an engineer had to sit and wait for a model to render for 30 seconds, and then suddenly it renders in 5 seconds with a new CPU, it won't take long for that CPU to pay itself off in increased productivity!
I'm definitely seeing that with switching to SSDs. Aging hard drives can really slow down, and all those seconds can really add up across a fleet of computers.
That is a saint`s patience. Great outcome! It would be nice to see a comparison between this CPU, a 486 and maybe a 386, all clocked at 33MHz. Actually, the most interesting would be to see the benefit of the architecture difference between a 486 and this pentium at the same frequency, and maybe a AMD 5x86 slowed down at 33MHz.
That drop-in after the first install... That clean fall right into the socket, that satisfying ceramic clink... That felt good to my soul, calming, soothing... Wonderful work!
I have one I bought new as soon as they came out. It still sits in it's first home, an AT&T / NCR 3230 486SX. What surprised me was this computer did not require the 486SX chip to be removed as it had an empty socket intended for the OverDrive chip. I definitely noticed a huge jump in speed. The chip came with an install disk for DOS, which may be needed if you find that oem fan. As for bent pins, I'd have first used a very small diameter straw, such as on canned air. Unlikely to scratch the pins, but finding a clear one to see the pin? Yeah, there's the rub. I was surprised with how well your technique worked! VERY well done!
Thank you! And the idea with the plastic straw of canned air is great! May be a viable option! Nice to hear that you kept your NCR system with the Pentium OverDrive! I have seen the install disk on LGR. Unfortunately, I don't think there's much useful stuff there, mostly an animated install guide and some tests of the CPU. The Intel OverDrive (486), had benchmarks to compare before and after if I remember correctly. Don't know why they didn't have that for the Pentium OverDrive.
Thanks for the mention! 😁 .. The Pentium overdrive for 486 systems is a really unique and interesting processor, that’s for sure! Awesome job getting all of those pins straightened out. Takes a huge amount of patience 👍
Du Glückspilz! Auf dem Recyclinghof sind echte Schätze zu haben!! Erstaunlich, dass der K6-233 mit deutschem Garantiesiegel auch dort angekommen ist. Ich habe damals (vor 2010) diverse Overdrive CPUs für einen schmalen Taler ergattert und der OD83 ist wirklich ein feines Stück Hardware. Habe meinen kurz mal mit 2,5*40 laufen lassen.
Werde meinen auch einmal mit 100 MHz testen. Einfach Mal um zu sehen ob er stabil läuft... Wäre toll einen 100 mhz Premium auf einem Sockel 3 zu haben!
I have restored one such overdrive in the past. Mine not only did not have the fan, but even the hearsink was gone. I used a 3*3cm aftermarket heatsink that I attached with double sided thermal tape, and a fan going to a molex connector on the PSU. Of course it needed the mod to make it think it had the original fan on to make it work at full speed. Furthermore, in order to overclock it I had to volt-mod it. There are guides and tutorials on how to do that on Vogons... I ended up with the diode mod to the VRM, 2 Schottky diodes boosted the core voltage to 4V; at this voltage, the CPU ended up being very stable running at 100MHz (40*2.5).
Do you still have the CPU? I am not sure if I will overvolt mine. With the original heatsink on, it may be a bit tricky to reach the voltage regulator properly for the diode mod. I'm also concerned about running the chip at our-of-spec voltage - I don't want to destroy it for a couple of MHz more. I'm fine with the original frequency. It would be cool if the CPU would do 100 MHz without voltmod, but I keep my hopes low for now.
@@bitsundbolts Well, I saw it coming when, in 90s the old (antique) furniture was raising in price and was very fashionable. By the time, I started to collect pieces of tech that were old and obsolete. I had XT/AT computers from great european brands (Olivetti, Schneider, Siemens Nixdorf and some from Eastern Europe), 8bit computers, printers and peripherals, all in all a room full of them properly displayed. Sadly, I had to change the house in 2015 and all the collection I selled (there were no museum that wanted to get it by then) and I heared that most parts ended in landfill.
That is such a sad story - I'm really sorry that those parts may have ended up in landfills - especially since you definitely had the correct idea to collect those items!
Sad... I guess they don't want to deal with people going through their stuff. Anyway, they're just interested in the raw materials. I could imagine that it's just shipped here to UAE 😂
Good to see that chip is functioning, the current POD83 I am running was in similar state when found it in a box of scrap and is by far my favorite CPU for the platform not just because it is fast but that it has great compatibility for many older games.
The mechanical pen method has the advantage of putting pressure on the solder while the pin is being bent back. I found that ripping the pin off the pad together with its solder blob isn't much of an issue on socket 7 or below. But on 478, especially earlier Willamettes, I broke off a lot of pins before I used the pen method. And soldering those pins back on is a PITA ;-)
Neat overview of this overdrive. Many years ago I remember learning that an 83 MHz Overdrive outperforms a 99 MHz 486 DX4. No longer did i have to enable down-sampling in Winamp to play MP3's without skipping.
that was a good job! I also have some CPUs with bent pins, I'll follow your advice. A friend of mine who is a mechanical engineer recommended me to warm up metal when it's being bent. It might or might not help with CPU pins but I think I'll give that a go when reviving my CPUs! Thanks for the video!
Thanks Tony! Maybe the hot climate in Dubai makes it easier to bend those pins! I know you're in a colder climate, so, heating up the metal (and hands+fingers) may help with the repair 😉
Great repair, I usually use a needle off a syringe to repair bent pins and I've done loads using that method including a couple of overdrives and loads of P1's and P3's but whichever way works for you is good, it does take a lot of patience for sure, I'll look forward to your next video on it. 👍
Great! Having seen your other repair videos it's no surprise that the pins now looks as good as new :-) I hope you can find a fan soon! Looking forward to the troubleshoot video!
Thank you! I'm partly driven by the CPU which I didn't have yet in my collection. I was really careful and tried to do a perfect job. I hope that I'll soon have an original fan to make this CPU whole again! Thanks for watching!
I would have thought many of those pins would have broken off. I would not have the patience to go through each and every pin like you did to straighten them. Congratulations
I used a tiny stainless steel tube to bend them in place. It is time consuming. The tubing was HPLC line. The ID is just big enough to fit the pin sngly but not a press fit.
The first pin you see in the video on which I worked on, was the one that was bent 90 degrees. This one scared me! But it also bent back without issues. Those pins are surprisingly "soft" - they are strong in numbers, but working on individual pins is almost a pleasure! Especially seeing the final result!
It doesn't get hot at 33 MHz. It barely gets warmer than 35 degrees (measured by touching the heatsink). I think this was a protective mechanism in case the fan failed. The CPU could probably survive operating at 33 MHz without a fan.
As a tech in the mid 90's and mid 2000's, I've binned back many pins and this was far the cleanest. I hated it when customers have forcibly plugged the VGA connection upside down and so a needle nose plier was always needed.
I had this!!! My first PC was a 486 SX33 and one day I went to the computer store with my Dad and discovered the overdrive that could make it a 586 83 (at least that was what advertising suggested)
one method for straightening bent pins is a large blunt needle, like the ones used for refilling inkjet cartridges. you could likely find a size that will fit closely on the pins and bend them straight.
I like to use a scalpel or screwdriver to straighten pins so instead of pushing the pin back up you brace the bottom against the surface and twist for more control
I knew when I saw the teaser pic the other day it was a Pentium overdrive. I never ubderstood what Intel waa going for with this though. I remember it being far more costly than a dx4-100(and later the 5x86-133) that could overclock high enough to beat the overdrive in integer math, and give decent fpu performance versus the much more costly socket 5/7 platforms in 1995-1995 timeframe. I want to say I picked up my 5x86 around March 1996 for around $30 and immediately overclocked it to 150Mhz. It was roughly on par with a P90 for integer games and a P75 in Quake, whixh for the price couldn't be beat at the time. About a year later I finally built a p54-120 socket 5 system when prices dropped.
Yeah, this CPU is an odd addition to the socket 3 line of CPUs. However, I am happy Intel went to that length to make the Pentium compatible with this older platform - now we have some interesting comparisons ahead of us!
Many many years ago there were three CPU makers, AMD, Intel and ....... Cyrix. For some reason Cyrix dropped off the landscape when I was younger, leaving us with AMD and Intel.
Wow, congratulations on straightening all those pins and getting the CPU working! I definitely wouldn't have had the patience to do that, I've given up on CPUs with far fewer bent pins than that. I'm guessing the CPU is just looking for the tachometer signal from the fan, which is what the third pin on a regular fan does. Feeding a 1-2KHz pulse signal from the function generator on your scope would probably work, just check the voltage that the fan runs at so you don't cause any further problems. For a more permanent solution, you could probably design and 3D print a bracket that clips over the heatsink and you can screw a regular 40mm fan onto, then solder the wires onto pogo pins that are mounted on the 3D print in the right spot to touch the fan contacts when clipped on. I mean, if you're well practiced in 3D modelling like I am. 😁 I'd offer to help, but I barely have the time for my hobbies as it is. As for what to do with it? I like how Phil from Phil's Computer Lab plays random old games, so maybe look up some games that would run well on this CPU? A quick trip to the Internet Archive and I found the September 1995 (the same month as this CPU was released) issue of PC Gamer magazine, in which they reviewed Mech Warrior 2. The minimum requirements were a 50MHz 486, but they recommend a Pentium, so it could be interesting to compare the performance of a 486 to the Overdrive in such a 3D game.
I have no experience with 3D printing yet - same as you, I'm short on time. I wish to change that in the future. I may find a simple solution to temporarily mod this CPU for more tests. I'll definitely look into a few games that run on 486, but a Pentium is recommended! Would be awesome to see if socket 3 owners could benefit from the Pentium OverDrive and keep their systems just a bit longer! Thanks for watching! And no pressure regarding helping with 3D modeling - I'll figure something out 😉
golden cpu are the ones that run coolest, on the least volts and overclock the best. my q9550 was golden. it was the fastest running in the uk at the time.
I guess I should be glad I got mine a while ago in decent condition for $60 on eBay. Works like a charm and has been voltmodded to run perfectly stable at 100MHz.
@@bitsundbolts Definitely a nice CPU, using almost the same board as you (4SA2 which supports up to 1MB L2 Cache) making it one of the fastest socket3 systems when using a fast VLB graphics card.
Works with many socket 2's as well. Had one in my old Compaq to benefit from the 586 architecture Linux builds to run my samba, ftp, http, and SMTP servers. And even dns for a while. Only stopped using it when the 10mps lan card slowed down my network. At the time I couldn't find a 100mbps in an isa card. So I had to upgrade. But the system itself didn't seem to be stressed just serving files and such.
Scrap Computing, Atheatos and I have that board, mine has a DX4 120 in it, I'd be interested to see what kind of benchmarks you get with that chip in comparison to the 120mhz. Great work with the pins btw. I'm assuming they used gold for conductivity but the malleability for retro recovery sure is nice.
I'm absolutely surprised that all the pins ended up straight. I didn't doubt that you'd be able to straighten most of the pins very well, but expected at least a couple to snap.
The pins were surprisingly "soft" and easy to bend back. Never did I have the feeling that one would snap off. I'm sure it's different from CPU model to CPU model. I'll try Pentium 4s some time - someone already mentioned that those are prone to break.
I found one of these on Ebay over a decade ago for $20 because it had bent pins. Though mine wasn't nearly as bad as this one, it looks like it was pried out of a LIF socket at an angle, so all of the pins had a bow to one side. Using two dull box cutter blades pinched together made them straight again. I bought it because I heard about the hype of how much faster they made 486 machines, but I was left disappointed. An Am5x86 overclocked to 160 MHz smokes this chip in most everything except floating point performance. If you needed it for its FPU, it was a good solution, otherwise it was an overpriced gimmick.
Ok, that will be interesting to test! O may have the correct socket 5 CPU for testing. But I still think that the memory throughout is limited - which we should be able to verify.
Here where I live, the scrapyards were a bonanza for old (retro) harware, from electronics to mechanical parts. Sadly, from few years ago, those gold scrappers changed this, everything "golden" have increased the price (actually everything that looks even remotely old and is electronic, for example a VCR from late 2000s cost at least 50-100€, not to speak of memory, CPU, PCI and ISA cards) and even worse, valuable pieces of old computers are salvaged and destroyed. My last find was a 486 motherboard with all SMD and socketed chips missing that I took for the only pupose to make an ISA backplane for an industrial PC104 that I found on that scrapyard and costed me 25€ just because those ISA slots have yellow contacts.
@@sebastian19745 damn that was not a good news.... I dont find any of 486 cpu but i got old pc-98 that after few repair could run... Yeah i dont have any software for it
"Let's see how it fits in the socket" Like a boss 😎💪 I have two of these, both are with new heatsinks and fans, Akasa chipset coolers does the job with 2-sided thermal tape. But neither one of my POD83s won't overclock to 40FSB (100MHz).☹
I'll try 100 MHz on mine. Maybe it really is a "golden" CPU 😂 that would be funny if I also won the silicon lottery! How does your POD behave when overclocking? Unstable or no boot?
@@bitsundbolts Other one crashes when booting from HDD and other one boots into DOS but Quake1 won't even start. Tried some voltmodding (there's different ways to do that as told in vogons forums) but still not 100% stable. My friend has one POD83 and that takes 100MHz easily. Lottery 😅
Ah yes, I remember owning one of these Overdrive Pentiums. IIRC, it was a later model that was already used and outdated at the time and not my daily driver. Such a cool cooler design (pun intended), they did easily clog up with dust though. Somehow, I was always intrigued by Overdrive CPUs, my 486 DX4 was one too. A-m-a-z-i-n-g job on the pins, this is pure restoration porn. 😅 I never would have expected you to be able to save every single one of them! I suppose it does help that these older CPUs have fewer and thicker pins and that they're made of gold, that doesn't make it any less impressive though. I knew the socket would straighten them to (almost) perfection, I used that to my advantage myself a few times. Good luck finding a matching fan! As for comparison, (GL)Quake would be my first choice. If you want to go for something more obscure, Zone Raiders comes to mind. I remember it (unsurprisingly) not running well in SVGA on my DX4 and am wondering if it would have ran any smoother on a PODP5V83.
Thank you! I didn't expect the pins to turn out that well! I'm happy that it worked out - and I already got an offer on a fan. So, in January, if everything goes well, we will see this CPU again - with an original fan! Never heard of Zone Raiders - but I'll check it out! Thanks for the suggestion!
@@bitsundbolts That's great! I would have imagined a fan to be much harder to come by. One of the perks of being a RU-vidr, huh? 😉 Zone Raiders wasn't particularly successful or memorable, it was just among the first 3D games that I remember offering an SVGA resolution and the one that made me realize that my DX4's days are counted. That's really the only reason I still remember it today. 😅
Pins turned out great! It's crazy to me that AMD still used them until a couple years ago. I had a 3300x for a while and i would hate to have had to straighten any of those tiny pins! Of course i have seen people manage to bend the pins inside an Intel socket and those would be even harder to fix, to me it felt almost foolproof, just set it in flat and shut it, i don't know how people manage to bend them. Like, holding the CPU a foot in the air above the socket on its way down and dropping it? Who knows...
Thank you! I'm happy with the outcome of the Overdrive - and the fact that it's working! I just have to wait for the original fan which should be with me in March. I wonder if Intel decided to "offload" some cost to the motherboard manufacturers by making it their problem with the pins. If you're planning to reuse the board for multiple CPU generations, then it would make sense to keep the pins on the board, but Intel wasn't particularly good to support more than two generations per chipset. AMD did much better with AM4. Wonder how long AM5 will last.
Had one of these. For whatever reason Windows would crash with it, so I kept the DX2-66 for running Windows and swapped to the Overdrive when playing Quake.
Those pins aren't too bad having fixed worse but when there is corrosion they snap off ever so easy (R.I.P). Kinda wild how much the cost of 90s retro hardware has risen lately.
Watching Adrian's digital basement regarding the Pentium Overdrive when the fan is stopped the CPU reduces it's speed performance from 83 Mhz to 33 MHz to save from overheating. So as you currently have no fan I don't think the CPU will not run no where to it's full potential. I think the multipler changes on the fly. Something to take note of when testing the CPU. You may be able to connect an alternative 3 wire fan with speed sencing so it makes the chip know there is a working fan so you will get full performance.
Yes, there are mods that enable the 2.5 multiplier. However, that of course, should only be done when there is actually a fan attached. I got an offer for a replacement fan which should arrive in January.
I probably would have replaced it. I am not sure, but I think those pins can be soldered. I have a spare 486 CPU that is damaged. I could use spare pins from there. I did replace puns on a Pentium III before - the video is on my channel. So, I would assume something similar is possible with this CPU, but I am happy that I didn't have to find out!
They cut down the Pentium for socket 3 but there was a good reason, 486 owners could see a pretty substancial performance boost often outrunning 486DX/4-100s especially with the Pentiums far improved FPU, including the benefit of being able to run Pentium specific software, unfortunately other companies chips were even faster, cheaper and most applications didnt take of Pentium specifically at this time. So it was simply outsold by cheaper faster alternatives such as the Cyrix 5x86 133 series of CPUs and the likes. (AMD) If I remeber correctly that Cx486 is essentially a clock-doubled 486SLC adapted to a 386 socket and bus.
I worked at intel testing the 1st batch of these chips. The 1st thing we did was take the whole batch into a machine shop to have a couple of the pins in the corner removed. I can see in your video that the chip you were showing had blank spots where those pins and where several others we didn't remove used to be. Obviously yours was from a later batch where intel fixed the issue. I recall the chip failed every once in a while because the fan was not seated properly but most of the time resolved itself by clicking the fan in place. I know the concern was how hot the chips ran. I'm wondering if the pcs we tested had a specialized BIOS so we rejected bad chips/fans, or if later BIOS updates solved the problem by turning off the multiplier. I hope you find a fan.
Interesting! Would be nice to find one of those earlier models where the spots with the removed pins are visible! I may just have found a fan for this CPU. If so, assembly can take place in January 2024 😄
Few years ago i was cleaning my Z77 MSI motherboard and i forgot in the socket is missing processor.. i was doing it using soapy water and large soviet brush ( the brushes are kinda soft ) and by doing so, i accidentaly run over the open socket, bending almost 600 pins. With magnifying glass and needle, i was able to repair it in 12 hours straight. One whole night and a bit of hours from the other day... crazy
@@bitsundbolts it works untill now but sometimes when i move a case or i move a whole pc somewhere else ( transported by car ) i loose one memory channel, i've even tryed different cpu but same problem. It can do everything what motherboard itself offering but as i said.. sometime, very very occasionaly happen this
Probably one pin is slightly misaligned. They are so small and very difficult to fix. I am surprised that you managed to get it working in the first place
I may be wrong but i think you need a fan for that cpu otherwise it does not work correctly. Or at least fool it into thinking it has one. I think Adrian's digital basment had a video on that topic.
Yeah, there is a simple hack. Just a 1k resistor between ground and the sense pin, and it will work as if the fan is installed. I may do such a temporary hack soon because I want to experiment more with this CPU!
Competition was the reason for Intel creating the CPU, If other manufacturers didn't have other drop in parts they would have forced users to upgrade the platform.
9:07 🤭Those were the days when he checked the ram for errors. And you could see it running through. Imagine that today, with 128 GB of RAM installed. 🤔"A few hours later".
I'm surprised that you can still find such old CPUs in recycling waste and get them. I would have assumed that the recycling companies would be more interested in the gold contained in the CPUs and would use such CPUs for recycling.
It is less common to find old components over there. 90% of the stuff is Dell and HP office systems or "off-the-shelf" PCs. Those old electronics come from all over the world, that is why you may find old components from time to time - at least that's my theory
Cyrix CPU's have power that requires special commands or software to unlock bit and bolts if you want to see those Cyrix CPU's full performance unlocked.
Yes, I have seen this in many videos, including CPU Galaxy. But I think there it was their 5x86 CPUs. I'll definitely have to do some research for those CPUs.
@@bitsundbolts no there were some commands to get better performance out of those old Cyrix CPU's but it was not widely made available so many people never even knew it existed, so they never used it which sucked but it was what it was as that increased the CPU's performance so look high and low for it cause if you can find them and use them you'll get more out of those old CPU'S by activating them
@@SaraMorgan-ym6ueYes, apparently Cyrix CPUs had several poorly documented features, although the fact they weren't automatically enabled suggests they weren't reliable or consistent. Please try and include at least some punctuation, it makes reading long texts so much easier. 😉
