AMD 486DX5 '5x86' desktop tower


 
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General Technical Information

HOSTNAME CYGNUS
SYSTEM CPU AMD 5x86 133MHz @160MHz
CACHE (2nd, 1st) 256 KB, 16 KB
RAM  64 MB FPM SIMMs (Max. 96 MB)
IDE BUS 2 x ATA-16 (Max. 16.7 MB/s)
SCSI BUS 1 x SCSI-2 (Max. 10 MB/s) Adaptec 2940 PCI adapter
INTERFACES
 		2 x serial ports and 1 x parallell port
OPTION BUS 3 x PCI slots, 3 x ISA slots
GRAPHICS Matrox Millennium 4MB PCI Max. 1280x1024 for 32-plane @75Hz
HARD DISK DRIVES 1 GB DEC RZ26 SCSI-2, 200 MB Western Digital IDE
CDROM DRIVES 4x Panasonic CDR SCSI-2,  24x NEC IDE CDROM
FLOPPY DRIVE
 		1.44MB Floppy drive
NETWORK 10baseT 3com Etherlink III ISA ethernet card
AUDIO N/A
OS Windows NT 4.0 SP6
YEAR (mainboard / CPU)
 1994 / 1995
SPEED 60 VAX MIPS
COMMENTS This computer the fastest i486 class PC I have ever encountered.
PRICE '06 / EST. PRICE 1995
 		$0 / $3,500

Windows System Information

 

History and other comments

This peecee was built entirely by using left-over parts from my several storage places. The commercial value of these parts is more likely to be on the negative side (considering fees for processing electronics junk etc.) altogeather, at the moment of writing, Jan-2006. In other words: a zero-budget hobby project. As it is set up now, it is an AMD 5x86 overclocked about 20% without any modifications to CPU voltage or heatsink. The official CPU frequency is 133MHz however it runs well @160MHz, the maximum clock speed possible by changing jumper settings on my mainboard. It is amazing that an i486 class computer can outperform a Pentium 75MHz or even a Pentium 90MHz (on CPU intense tasks, according to some benchmarks). The memory bandwidth, however, is really not much to speak of, "thanks" to the old i486 compatible chipset running at only 40 MHz.

It is somewhat interesting, that I was able to set up this peecee as a semi-modern, working web surfing computer with almost acceptable responsivness, using some older software versions. I installed Windows NT 4.0 plus all the necessary service packs (do you still remember how many major updates there were for NT 4.0? At least SP3, IE4, SP6 and IE5 are required!) and version 6.01 of the Opera browser.  I also tried a new FireFox binary (Version 1.5 Jan-2006 to be exact), however, eventhough it runs OK it seems to be a bit too heavy for serious usage on this 12 years old peecee.

How can all this be possible on a peecee hardware this old? People didn't really start to use NT 4.0 nor surfed the web before 1997, right? Well, first of all I installed 2 x 32MB SIMMs (the system only has 3 SIMM slots!) which gives the system a total of 64MB RAM. This is more than enough for NT 4.0. Back in 1994 only very few home peecee users could afford 64MB RAM. It used to cost real money back then. The same goes for the SCSI subsystem which also would have costed pretty much back in 1994. Especially with a computer this old you can notice that the SCSI subsystem shares the load of disk I/O very well, which is an important thing when the is very little raw CPU power. At that time, 1994, IDE disk owners could only dream of the wonderful busmaster DMA capailities only available for SCSI devices.

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Last updated:  11-3-2005