Can this thing double the performance of your vintage PC in just seconds?

well hello everyone and welcome back to adrian's digital basement on today's video we're going to be taking a look at this little mystery device along with this pretty bog standard motherboard so without further ado let's get right to it [Music] this little interesting device falls into the interesting category for pc hardware and i love this kind of weird stuff that's not very well documented and no one's really seen or knows much about so when i look at this thing i can't really tell what it is there's really not much writing on it other than made in the usa right there and on the top there there's a sticker that says e4c-7 and over here e4 rev c and on the little paper label there 0.001 there's a heatsink attached to a surface mount chip there's a two pin connector of some type there there's a 74 logic ic right there some passive components and if we flip this over this is some type of connector here that looks like it would plug onto a processor on a motherboard right here copyright 1995 made in the usa sorry there's a bit of glare there we go and i did some searching around and i really couldn't find much information on the markings that are on here at all looking on the internet now if we grab the motherboard i said we were going to look at this is a pretty bog standard 386 sx pc motherboard this one actually happens to have a 40 megahertz 3d6 sx made by amd but i've actually under clocked it down to 20 megahertz because if indeed this is a little accelerator i'd like to see what kind of performance boost we get on a more typical 386 sx motherboard overclocking or underclocking this particular motherboard is quite easy because the crystal oscillator here is in a socket so you can just pop this out and replace it with a different one you take the speed of the oscillator which is 40 megahertz and you divide that by two and that becomes the cpu clock one thing to consider about the 360sx if you're not familiar is that it's essentially a 286 with 3d6 instructions in it intel created the 36sx not as an inexpensive upgrade path specifically for users but for pc manufacturers and the manufacturers of motherboards it is my understanding that the difference between a 36sx motherboard and a 2d6 motherboard are very minimal the cpu still has a 16 bit external data bus just like the 286 which means it's impossible to have local bus slots or pci slots with an sx as well as the ram is accessed 16 bits at a time it's kind of like the 8088 versus the 8086. the 8088 was a cost reduced version of the 8086 i only had an 8-bit external data bust which was cheaper and simpler to make for the manufacturers but did hinder performance if this motherboard had a 36dx on here then the ram would be accessed 32 bits at a time that would mean you'd need all four of these ram sockets installed at a time for the machine to even boot but on sx like this because it's a 16 bit bust like a 286 you only need two of these sims at a time these 32 pin memory modules are only eight bits wide each this socket on this motherboard looks like it might be for a 286 but it's actually for a 3d7 sx which is the math coprocessor that pairs with this it's a different chip than the one for the dx processors you can't just use the same math code processor from a dx on the sx so with all that said the reason why i think this is an accelerator for a 360 sx is because this very unusual socket on the bottom here looks suspiciously like a socket that can be pushed down on top of this quad flat pack package here now it's probably something that would be unobtainium at this point in time like these were made either specifically for debugging purposes or for products like this i doubt it's possible to buy something like this anymore when you look at this little pcb here you see there's a white painted notch right here in this corner that doesn't match the other four and on the motherboard here there's also a notch right here that would indicate that is pin one it's also a little divot on the processor there if i take this this actually does push down onto the processor i'm just aligning it correctly first there we go and i give it a push and it's actually on the motherboard and it's on there pretty firmly like that doesn't just fall off now if this motherboard were in a computer that was going to be shipped and drop kicked this might actually pop off because it is not too hard to get this off in fact if i just use this little plastic tool here just pry up on the corners a little bit it will pop off but i assume a little bit of hot glue right there in the center of the processor or perhaps right here in the center of this socket and when you push this on while it's hot that might make it stay on that much better now when we take a look at the chip that's underneath the heatsink and it is attached with epoxy so i can't easily get that off it appears to be exactly the same size as this one here so i don't really know what's going on here is this perhaps just a faster version of the 386sx is this designed to go on like a 16 megahertz machine and it bumps it up to say 33 megahertz it's like clock doubled or is it something like a 46 slc there was a 46 that was made in the same exact package here as the 36 sx so i had the same 16 bit limitation so it didn't have the full performance of a 46 but it was a very easy upgrade path for even 286 machines because it was my understanding there were actually 286 to 36 sx upgrade paths and there was definitely a 286 to 486 upgrade little plug-in pcb kind of like this except its socket on the bottom here was designed to go into the 286 plcc socket like this and then it used that same i think it was a cyrix 46 slc or is it ibm branded chip i think there were a couple manufacturers of that particular 46 chip so i'm not sure who was making it on the make it 46 little upgrade but i'm kind of thinking that this little board here perhaps has a 46 slc in there and when you plug it into this board it will just seamlessly upgrade it to that faster processor now one thing i am curious about is the make it 46 which is the 286 to 46 upgrade you have to remove the 286 and then the little upgrade processor plugs into the socket kind of like this that's just a recreation of course so it doesn't have to worry about the original chip being in there anymore clearly there's no way to remove the 36sx so how exactly does plugging this in on top of that chip disable the on-board processor while i was giving it a little thought and i haven't done any research yet but i'm wondering if that intel included a pin on the processor that say when pulled low disables the processor on a motherboard like this where there's no main second processor slot that line is probably left disconnected or perhaps it's just pulled up too high with like a 10k resistor so when you connect this up what it probably does is ground that pin and i'm assuming it's ground it grounds that pin which will disable the onboard processor altogether so all of its inputs and outputs go high impedance and then this processor here can take over so i think the first thing i need to do is connect this up to the motherboard let's do that so we'll just line up the the notch to the notch let's give this a good push down onto it okay there we go and i need to set this up with the video card and everything let's see if this thing even boots i'm going to set this up with my usual slew of cards i have a vga card from trident i have a regular gold star prime 2 i'm going to be using for the hard drive interface along with floppy although floppy's not connected to anything so i can just remove the cable we'll connect up a regular postcard here so we can monitor for activity of the machine make sure it's actually booting and i do know this computer works this motherboard works fine with the original processor that is because i have tested that i'm going to plug in this little board here which is an xt ide bios that's just for booting the sd card that i have connected to the ide card the original bios on this motherboard doesn't support large disks and then finally i have this little prototype card here where i have some pins installed that allows me to use my oscilloscope just to monitor the isa bus speed all right so the processor upgrade is definitely installed on the motherboard it's right here and then keep your eyes peeled right here on these two seven segment displays that it's sideways but that will show the computer's actually booting if it starts to work all right and here we go oh okay so it stopped at 40. but you know what i don't think that's actually a problem of the processor upgrade i've had that problem on this motherboard before where it just kind of is unhappy about something let's just power it off and power back on again oh there we go we got video all right um it's booting so that's a good sign oh look it says cyrix 46 slc right there all right i ran czech cpu and oddly it says it's a classic 46 running at an internal speed of 22.6 megahertz this figure is not accurate when l1 cache is disabled i don't know if it's disabled or not oh it isn't disabled actually internal l1 cache is disabled let me reboot into the bios because i do kind of remember that there was a setting inside the bios on this motherboard that lets me control the internal cache and with the onboard 3d6 that doesn't actually do anything i've rebooted here into the bios because i remember there was an internal cache memory setting here it is oh and i could not set it to enabled when i was running on the 386 because the 36 sx on here does not have an internal cache but this 46 does now it does say here external cache memory on this motherboard pretty sure that that's not a thing there is no external uh cache on this motherboard but it's set to enabled anyways okay so running this again we still have the same speed 22.9 megahertz does say the internal cache is enabled in right through mode so the funny thing is the crystal oscillator right here is 40 megahertz divided by two runs the processor at exactly 20 megahertz so it's funny that it's reporting that this is 23 megahertz i'm wondering if there's a little bit of some kind of an overclock or something happening inside this processor incidentally the isa bus is reporting 10 megahertz right now this is the actual signal that's coming across the bus and that's because i have the clock signal divided by two to drive the isa bus if i go to divide by three which is the next setting available it runs it at of course 6.666 megahertz which is under clocking the isa bus a little bit ideally isa should run around 8 megahertz but 10 megabits is pretty much fine isa is very tolerant of a wide range of speeds the original xt of course ran the isa bus at 4.77 megahertz then the at ran it at 6 and then the later 80 the 286 is from ibm ran it at eight and that's kind of where people settled eight megahertz was the normal speed for isa most cards can run perfectly at 10. often 12 is fine as well and you get a little performance increase of course by doing that now looking at the tools i have on this sd card i do not have the utilities for the make it 46 card because the 286 motherboard has no way to enable the cache memory especially the l1 cache on this 46 processor they create a little dos utility that would enable it in software after you boot it up luckily this particular motherboard seems to support that in the bios but if you're using an accelerator like this and it doesn't have that option like say it's an older 386sx board then you're going to have to run that make it 46 utility after you boot to get the performance increase that you definitely should with a 486 chip like this okay great so i know that this accelerator works what i want to do now is take it off the board and run some benchmarks on the 36sx at the 20 megahertz speed now while that's not the maximum speed of this 36sx it's a very typical 36sx speed and with chips like the 36sx on this motherboard the clock speed makes performance scale linearly so if you run it at 16 megahertz and 33 megahertz it's essentially double the speed everything runs twice as fast well not quite everything because the isa bus runs at a fixed clock speed and there might be some ram weight states but the way the processor executes the instructions it's double the speed so if we go from 20 to 40 on this motherboard with the 36sx it's just going to be twice as fast and i can pretty much assume that the 46 is going to work in exactly the same way it's just going to be twice as fast if i run it at a faster clock speed so i'm going to do my testing at 20 megahertz first and then i want to try to overclock or at least clock up this 46 chip it's going to run at 20 megahertz right now or 22 or whatever then i'll switch out the crystal on this board to the 80 megahertz crystal which i know runs perfectly stable on this motherboard and then that should run the 46 set i guess 44 megahertz because it seems to report a slightly faster clock speed anyways okay so first i just need to pop off the chip here well that came off very easily just that easy and now time for some quick benchmarks all right landmark speed test we're getting 30.59 megahertz and check it 3.0 we're getting 5262 dry stones and 95.5 thousand whetstones and running speedsys doesn't work because i only have four bags of ram on this motherboard and i don't have memory modules handy to go over four megabytes it actually looks like it will be able to give us a processor benchmark though i don't think it's going to do any of the ram testing though and there is the processor score at 4.35 and for top bench we're getting a score of 47 with a total micro seconds of 1480 i'm going to say it's jumping around a little bit it coincides with the machine the dell 310a which has a 36dx but don't let that fool you that is only the case because the video speed on this particular thing vidmem actually has a lower microseconds by up quite a bit and that makes up for the memory slowdown see mem test memea and then the opcode which is the processor itself is not running as quick because it's running code out of ram which of course is slow on this motherboard because it's a 16-bit access the video memory is probably a bit faster on this machine because i overclocked the isa bus to 10 megahertz all right let's run the 3d bench here this is going to be really slow on this particular machine the speed of your video card and the bus it's connected to make a big difference on this test as well so it's going to be hamstrung by the fact that the isa bus is relatively slow compared to say local bus on a real 46 or a pentium or 46 with pci okay well it gave me a benchmark of 67.7 which doesn't seem to make sense i'm gonna write that down but i don't think this is a valid test because this is running at like a few frames per second not 67.7 all right so off with the computer and let's put this back on let's upgrade this with just pushing something onto the motherboard i mean that's honestly one of the simplest upgrades i've ever seen power this up is it going to beep at me nope it seems to work i'm going to go into the bios and turn on that cache because it probably turned off no it's still enabled awesome well i am curious about using the set mole utility here let's see if it actually supports any of the features of this 46 slc oh it says it can actually enable and disable the cache the level one cache so let's try disabling the level one cache so that would be l1d disabling l1 cache and let's look at landmark speed test results really quickly okay below scale 45 megahertz set mall l1e for enable it works so that's awesome if you have a motherboard that does not support turning on the l1 cache in the bios like this one use the set mall utility to do it on the fly it would work for any 46 slc upgrade on an older motherboard that has no ability to do that very handy little tidbits all right while we're in here we're getting a score of 83.72 megahertz which is a big improvement over the 30.59 we got with the original processor in check it we're getting 89 59 dry stones on the previous processor we got 5262 and we're getting 172.3 000 wet stones and on the original processor we were getting 95.5 and speedsys gave us a remarkable performance increase the score is 10.65 and the previous score was 4.35 in top bench our score is 65 now and in previously it was 47. the specific opcode test now is running at 206 207 and before was 230. i didn't write down what the mem test and the mea speeds were but they actually look slower now than they were before and here we are in 3d bench let's see if this even appears to be running faster perhaps it's pretty sluggish nonetheless but i guess it's faster all right now this is a little further into the test definitely there's a big improvement in speed okay and the frames per second appeared to calculate properly on the test now because it's getting 9.4 which is definitely faster it ran faster than the old test which was 67.7 clearly i have to ignore this test so i create a little chart showing the performance improvement between the 3d6 sx20 and the 46 slc 20. here's a graph showing the change and in all cases the red bar is bigger which is better except for the op code test where a smaller bar is actually faster and on this graph you can see how many times faster the 46 is compared to the 3d6 i'm going to take my little box of crystals here and i have an 80 megahertz and a 66 let's just go right to 80 which will run this processor at 40 megahertz a supposed 40 megahertz all right let's see what goes i'm getting the postcode i know you can't see that in this camera but it is actually posting awesome now because i didn't change the bios it's now running the isa at 20 megahertz which i don't think that's gonna work um but the computer actually booted that's a bit surprising okay well let's try running some benchmarks with the isa bus running at 20 megahertz what's gonna happen all right well this is now running at 167 megahertz which is basically exactly twice as fast as before it was 83.72 i'm really just interested to know if this particular 46 upgrade chip can run at 40 megahertz like it is now because perhaps it was rated for say 33 or even 25 megahertz and now it's a serious overclock so far so good check it basically exactly doubled the performance it was getting before the scaling is linear and that's going to be the same for the 3d6 on here and the 486 it's more just about stability and speed cis also gave us double the performance in top bench almost everything doubled i don't think video memory did but it's now saying that the closest match of a machine is an intel 46 dx266 now a good chunk of that is because the vid mem if you notice is a lot faster on this machine than it is on the 46 and that's because that serious overclock on the isa bus this video card is running more than twice as fast as it should so it's going to have a lot more throughput than it would otherwise and exiting out of there the computer just locked up we're getting a black screen i can't hit control delete i'm gonna have to power cycle it what i'm gonna do is go back in the bios here and i just turned on auto config that is going to set the bus speed back to the correct speed it's going to be slash divided by five i think i think there's a little routine in the bios that detects what your clock speed is and then it basically sets up all the other parameters appropriately i think the instability was probably due to the overclocked isa bus more so than the processor itself not handling this 40 megahertz speed okay so not a lot changed except for the video memory that's the main thing that changed and probably the 3d game thing is that that also is affected by the speed of the video card and actually when i exited top bench it froze again so maybe that is an overclock symptom it's kind of strange that nothing else has gone wrong on this thing except for this one thing well in that case i'm going to turn this auto config back off and we're going to re-overclock the bus back up to 20 megahertz why not it was working seemingly fine and i was trying to run 3d bench and it just crashed right out and the computer is actually frozen right now even though it says file air all right back in the bios i will set this back to auto there we go so that should down clock the isa bus again and just so everyone can see there it is running at pretty much exactly eight megahertz and let's see if this can run now if this still crashes out this could be the processor being overclocked in a way that it's not happy about so maybe 40 megahertz is too fast for this thing all right so the test finished but it cut off the bottom of the screen so i can't even read the performance metric here so that screams like there's a problem because this did run perfectly fine when i did an overclocked brush oh look it just froze wait it didn't freeze it's what's going on now it's just showing weird junk okay so clearly something's wrong let's see if the processor is hot it's not it's not even hot at all but there's definite seeming corruption on this benchmark here so i guess i'll down clock this to 33 megahertz and let's see if 3d bench is performing better so here is a 66 megahertz crystal pop this on the motherboard here that's why i love this motherboard it's so easy to swap the crystal here's check cpu just telling us that it's definitely running at 38.2 megahertz so i guess 33 plus a little bit the isa bus right now is running at 8.3 megahertz so a slight overclock and that's that auto function is able to calculate the speed and figure out the right divider for the isa bus all right 3d bench will this crash or will it work it crashed so does that mean that this chip is only ready to run at like 25 megahertz and i'm overclocking it one would think it would be hot if i were overclocking it but this utility is freezing and we definitely saw that it ran perfectly at the original 20 megahertz speed what's going on here this is weird all right in with the 80 megahertz crystal which gives us that nice 40 megahertz speed there's that post error 31 again it does that every time it's so strange i should be able to get this working with one more power cycle and there we go it came right up okay 3d bench again and that's with 40 megahertz but i pushed the cpu accelerator down onto the original chip nope look at that it corrupted in exactly the same way i did let me exit the demo though let's run it again that's so weird it's corrupting like that and i know it's not the isa bus being overclocked because it's running at the correct auto speed so 8 megahertz if this messes up again i'm going to definitely conclude that this 46 chip is a 33 megahertz part and 40 is a bit too fast for it look at that same exact corruption very strange it's weird that the computer doesn't crash too let's see if top bunch can run without crashing when i exit well it doesn't crash now weird what's happening well i kind of have the ultimate stress test i'm not sure this will work actually because only four megs of ram but let's try running doom will it actually work i'm not sure it works with four megs let's see okay well doom ran see what the performance is like i have sound disabled because i don't have a sound card in this machine okay it's very slow and we expected that right because it's a 46 it doesn't have a math code processor i'd be more curious if it would crash though it's not crashing so is this chip capable of 40 megahertz i mean what explains that glitch we were seeing in the 3d benchmark while doom is working i mean this is fine this is completely playable and there's no way this would be playable on the 386 i mean it would be a slideshow i mean this is not great let me tell you it's obviously you can see this frame rate is not super good and i don't even have the screen full size but on the other hand if this is all i had back in the day i'd be happy with this it's playable and excuse my bad doom playing don't this is not representative of what i can actually do i usually play on a mouse and uh wasd and i don't use the arrow keys like i'm using right here i'm just loading up arkanoid here see if this works oh let me unplug the speaker don't want to hear this working through the postcard it's got the speaker on it well it appears to be working oh yeah i mean this game would run on an xt so it's not much of a performance test here all right well i think that's about all the testing i'm gonna do for this thing i just popped it off there one thing i'm noticing right now is the bottom of this is actually kind of hot and when i touch this processor on the motherboard it's quite warm so i'm wondering that even though this was disabled by this accelerator card maybe this thing is still running internally at 40 megahertz waiting to respond because it it gets warm when it's normally running at 40 megahertz because the 46 sx chip if i touch the sides of the heatsink it's warm but it's less warm than this 386 chip well this is a pretty cool little part i actually didn't know anything like this existed i think i had heard about it but i've certainly never seen one in person something that could just plug onto a surface mount chip and disable it so easily without having to desolder or do anything this was really a simple upgrade and the performance gains were really substantial and i wanted to test that crystal oscillator change specifically because say you had a computer that was running at 16 or 20 megahertz and you pop this on there theoretically you could then overclock the entire motherboard with a faster crystal and get some good performance gains of course a lot of the older more simple 36sx motherboards don't have a way to control the isa clock speed or any of the other memory timings so when you overclock it with a new crystal it will alter all of that stuff and it might cause issues and stability problems due to say memory timing or other problems like that that have nothing to do with the fact that this processor seems to work pretty much perfectly at 40 megahertz so if you happen to be digging around through boxes of retro stuff and you find one of these little unmarked things like this that look like this then that's a pretty cool rare little device i'd love to find out more about this like i've done some googling i can't find a brand name or anything about what this is so definitely my viewers please use your sleuthing skills to try to figure out what this is maybe we can figure out what brand it is what the packaging looks like maybe even a manual for it perhaps we can even figure out what the actual clock speed rating of this is so i think that's going to be it for this video if you found it interesting i'd definitely appreciate a thumbs up big thanks to all my patrons their names are scrolling up the side of the screen right now and if you want to become a patreon you can do so at the link in the description below there's my second channel if you haven't already seen that a lot of mail call stuff going on over there shorter faster mail call episodes that come out more quickly so uh check out the link in the description below if you haven't already and i guess that's gonna be it yeah put your comments down below i'd love to hear what you think about this little interesting accelerator and i guess that's gonna be it so stay healthy stay safe and i'll see you next time bye-bye [Music]

Channel: Adrian's Digital Basement

Views: 414,441

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Id: QhqZiMhe5UA

Length: 30min 57sec (1857 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 16 2021