Discussion Intel 386 and 486

[jnjnilson6]

Has anybody ever worked on said CPUs?

They were majorly implemented throughout the Windows 3.11 to Windows 98 era. There was the SX and the i387 adding a math coprocessor if you did not have the 386DX which included it. The 486DX came at much faster speeds and was faster than the 386 even at clocks lower than those retained by the latter.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19910016373/downloads/19910016373.pdf --> NASA used these processors due to high nanometer technology which is stronger and more robust to high levels of radiation witnessed in space.

So do write up if you've ever owned one of these CPUs. You can mention the system specifications, the particular use said CPU was put to, and the OS it ran. (Also the timeframe through which aforementioned system was used).

Thank you!

 

[USAFRet]

I had an AST 486SX.
Purchased probably early 1992.
OS? Whatever Windows was relevant at the time. Dabbled in BeOS for a bit.

I believe 4MB RAM?
Don't remember the rest of the specs.
One thing I DO remember was buying an absolutely HUGE 125MB HDD.

Had a couple of 386 boxes along the way as well.

 

[jnjnilson6]

I had an AST 486SX.
Purchased probably early 1992.
OS? Whatever Windows was relevant at the time. Dabbled in BeOS for a bit.

I believe 4MB RAM?
Don't remember the rest of the specs.
One thing I DO remember was buying an absolutely HUGE 125MB HDD.

Had a couple of 386 boxes along the way as well.

That was a very powerful system in 1992.

There were a few major shifts in specifications.
A good amount of RAM per the following times.

1992-1994: 2 MB for low to middle-end | 4 to 8 MB for high-end
1995-1998: 8 to 16 MB for low to middle-end | 32 to 64 MB for high-end
2000-2001: 128 MB for low to middle-end | 256 MB for high-end
2003-2005: 512 MB for low to middle-end | 1 GB for high-end
2006-2009: 1 to 1.5 GB for low to middle-end | 2 to 3 GB for high-end
2009-2012: 2 to 3 GB for low to middle-end | 4 to 6 GB for high-end
2012-2020: 6 to 8 GB for low to middle-end | 16 GB for high-end
2020-2023: 16 GB for low to middle-end | 24 GB for high-end

 

[Eximo]

We used to have a 386, I stole many parts from it to put in my 486 system. I should say that was my Dad's 386. It was a monster and he paid something like $6000 for it at the time. (ooh, found a video of that model) Came with a laser printer, VGA monitor, 1x SCSI CD-ROM...

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooFhoFctgSU



66Mhz 486 DX , And my personal Pentium 83Mhz overdrive later on, with Paradise Pipeline 64 + dual Voodoo2 in SLI. I eventually got it up to 16MB of 70ns EDO ram.
125MHz DX4.

Played my Doom/DukeNukem3d/Command & Conquer pretty heavily on those things. And with the Voodoo early 3dFX titles. We did have a 10Mbps network at the time so there was quite a bit of multiplayer between those and first edition Pentium/Athlon/Cyrix computers. Someone in the household was upgrading at least every six months or so and we were all very impressed with the improvement and then worked on our own upgrades. Between 1997 and 2003 I built about six computers, and my brothers accounted for another 3 or so each.

I want to say we spent something like $500 on a 6.4GB hard drive, but the details are fuzzy. I know my first machine had a 210MB boot drive and a 2ish GB second drive. Was either a 2.1 or 4.2 I can't quite remember. I still have them somewhere, might check in the old hardware closet.

 

[jnjnilson6]

We used to have a 386, I stole many parts from it to put in my 486 system.

66Mhz 486 DX , And my personal Pentium 83Mhz overdrive later on, with Paradise Pipeline 64 + dual Voodoo2 in SLI. I eventually got it up to 16MB of 70ns EDO ram.
125MHz DX4.

Played my Doom/DukeNukem3d/Command & Conquer pretty heavily on those things. And with the Voodoo early 3dFX titles. We did have a 10Mbps network at the time so there was quite a bit of multiplayer between those and first edition Pentium/Athlon/Cyrix computers. Someone in the household was upgrading at least every six months or so and we were all very impressed with the improvement and then worked on our own upgrades. Between 1997 and 2003 I built about six computers, and my brothers accounted for another 3 or so each.

I want to say we spent something like $500 on a 6.4GB hard drive, but the details are fuzzy. I know my first machine had a 210MB boot drive and a 2ish GB second drive. Was either a 2.1 or 4.2 I can't quite remember. I still have them somewhere, might check in the old hardware closet.

That's cool! My first system from 2001 had about 40 GB HDD, Celeron Tualatin @ 1.3 GHz (overclockable to 1.5 GHz), GeForce2 MX 400 w/ 64 MB memory and 256 MB RAM. Had Win98 SE, Win2000 Pro and RedHat Linux 7.3 on it originally... Funny thing my laptop currently harbors more RAM than the entire capacity of that machine's hard drive.

Thing is I stayed on it for many years and the RAM had always been a problem, because just in the few years following 2001 the memory requirements jumped so much that you'd be subjected to a torturous experience with anything below 900 MB RAM.

Many, many years later I upgraded it to 1.5 GB RAM (as far as I can remember) and it flew like an arrow on Windows XP.

 

[Eximo]

2001 I would have just recently switched from my aging Celeron 466 to an aborted attempt at an Athlon T-bird 1Ghz. That system never worked right but all the parts worked in other systems. Parted it out and blew a good chunk of change on the just released Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53Ghz) with first generation DDR if I recall.

Also ended up with a Duron 750Mhz in partial trade and built another box around that I used to run game servers at LAN parties.

 

[CelicaGT]

I skipped the 386, went from a 286 to a 486DX2-50. Some local PC shop clone. The -50 ran on a lower bus speed vs the regular DX2, so 50Mhz vs 66Mhz. My first official overclock was moving a jumper to bump the bus speed up to 66Mhz. I think it only had 1MB of RAM and maybe an 80MB HDD (Those things were upgraded later, as this machine had a loooong life). I'm stretching the old memory banks here. Machine was general use, school and some DOS games. Believe it or not no Windows, it was out and installed but was such a pita that we all just booted to the C: prompt and ran from there. It got to see win98SE by the time it was retired. Went from that old beast to a Duron 800 (Overclocked to a clean 1Ghz with the pencil trick lol). There was a lot of messing around to get hardware to play nice but I do miss the older days of PC, you felt like you really built something special after all that work.

 

[Luv2Tech]

I was a tech working for a mom and pop shop back then. I built a ton of machines in this era. Tweaking the config.sys and autoexec.bat to load as much into high memory, Limulating expanded memory to make more extended memory. Xtree Pro Gold was my goto file manager in DOS. Loved the 3DFX stuff, all the games that were coming out from ID. Great times!

 

[Maebius]

I was actually team AMD back then, owning 386DX-40 and after that the 486DX2-80.
Fun times!
I put a Diamond Edge 3D for the latter (Nvidia NV1). Now, that was a terrible choice.

 

[Eximo]

After my Voodoo 3 16MB, I went with the mid-range Geforce 2 MX400. That was pretty shortlived, but it mostly got the job done. I replaced it with an equally low end FX5200 I think. Then a 6600. And finally when I had some decent income again my first foray into higher end territory. 8800GTS 640MB. Pretty much had 80 class cards since.

I still to this day do not know what happened to my AMD K6 166Mhz (overclocked to 233Mhz) I think I even have the DRAM stick for it, but no clue what happened to the CPU/Motherboard. I still have the 466 Celeron too, but I know what happened to the motherboard/case. Upgraded it to PIII 800Mhz maxed the ram and gave it to my brother for college paper writing.

XP 1800+ motherboard died of capacitor plague and I replaced it with a 2800+. After some time I gave that one to a re-use place. Just that lone K6, up and disappeared.

 

[jnjnilson6]

After my Voodoo 3 16MB, I went with the mid-range Geforce 2 MX400. That was pretty shortlived, but it mostly got the job done. I replaced it with an equally low end FX5200 I think. Then a 6600. And finally when I had some decent income again my first foray into higher end territory. 8800GTS 640MB. Pretty much had 80 class cards since.

I still to this day do not know what happened to my AMD K6 166Mhz (overclocked to 233Mhz) I think I even have the DRAM stick for it, but no clue what happened to the CPU/Motherboard. I still have the 466 Celeron too, but I know what happened to the motherboard/case. Upgraded it to PIII 800Mhz maxed the ram and gave it to my brother for college paper writing.

XP 1800+ motherboard died of capacitor plague and I replaced it with a 2800+. After some time I gave that one to a re-use place. Just that lone K6, up and disappeared.

What CPU did you run the 8800GTS with? It should've been pretty good for games like Crysis. Not indefinitely powerful, but say, to levels where you could play on High at something like 1280x720 and still get decent FPS most of the time.

The 8800GTS definitely was an enthusiast-type card when it came out; a sort of breakthrough in the perennial sphere of swiftly changing graphics adapters.

 

[CountMike]

For a personal, home PC i never had anything bellow first Intel 386SX -20 I think, cheapest one anyway My Atari 1040ST was doing great job, better than 286, Started with 2MB 120MB HDD etc, Next one was also Intel the infamous 66 with calculating error,
Soon after switched to AMD and Cyrix processors much cheaper even counting some performance drop. Only other Intel CPU era was a superb 200pro nut 486/586es soon replaced them AMD K processors were my last ones before first Athlon,

 

[Wolfshadw]

Those were the days.
It was the '91-'92 time frame that I purchased my AST 486DX2-50. Don't recall the hard drive size, but it came with 4MB RAM and ran Windows 3.11. I was in the military at the time so I purchased it from the base exchange which had a policy. If the price decrease at all within 30 days of purchase, you could come in with your receipt and claim the refund. Two weeks after I bought it, the price came down $200. Surprisingly enough, they were also selling 4MB RAM modules for $200 each. A week later, the price dropped another $100 and I used that to pick up a bunch of games.

A number of years later, Cyrix came out with a chip that boosted it to a 486DX4-100.

-Wolf sends

 

[Eximo]

What CPU did you run the 8800GTS with? It should've been pretty good for games like Crysis. Not indefinitely powerful, but say, to levels where you could play on High at something like 1280x720 and still get decent FPS most of the time.

The 8800GTS definitely was an enthusiast-type card when it came out; a sort of breakthrough in the perennial sphere of swiftly changing graphics adapters.

Athlon 64 X2 6000+ with 2GB of memory, which I later bumped to 6GB. (Sorry that was supposed to be 6000+)

I built that to play the latest Direct X 10 versions of some the games I was playing at the time.

Crysis was borderline. That series of GPUs was known for running hot, and it did, pushing close to 100C to try and run that game. I want to say 1024x768, can't recall exactly when I made the switch to 1280x1024. Playable, but not a very good frame rate.

That system is still running, minus the 8800GTS. Needs to be retired and consumed back into my collection.

 

[punkncat]

I never owned either of the 386/486 although I had quite a bit of experience playing with them that other friends had. The first (PC) computer we had was a rental from someplace like Aarons that had that first gen Pentium in it. The first PC I actually purchased was a Pentium with 'MMX' @ 233Mhz. This puppy right here: Intel® Pentium® Processor with MMX™ Technology 233 MHz, 66 MHz FSB
I can't really recall any of the specs anymore, but I played a whole lot of Abe's Odyssey on that machine...lol. Just after that a friend who was being deployed gave me a huge lot of AMD PC and parts. I don't recall the exacts on that either, but was able to put a PC together with a Thermaltake tower cooler that worked really well for the time. One of my old friends still has that computer and it is still operable, if you can call it that.