["All the Good Things" by Nocturnal Spirits plays]
Greetings and welcome to a LGR Woodgrain 486 upgrade thing!
And today, we've got the Intel Pentium Overdrive Processor.
"Makes your Intel 486 Processor-based PCs run faster."
Which is great, 'cause that's what I wanna do!
Yeah, we're gonna take the Woodgrain 486's AMD Am486 CPU
that's in there, running at 66 megahertz
and turn it into a Pentium, of sorts.
It's kind of a weird thing, you know,
it takes a 486 and makes it an 83 megahertz Pentium.
Yeah, bit of an odd frequency rating there,
but that's what Intel was doing, man.
In the mid-90s they had all sorts
of interesting Overdrive chips.
And this one in particular just attracted me to it.
Yeah the PODP5V83,
[chuckles] you know 'cause of the weird rating 83 megahertz.
And I've just never messed with one of these
Pentium Overdrives before,
just 486 Overdrives that take like a 486, 33
and turn it into a DX4-100 or whatever.
And perhaps that would be more suitable
for the Woodgrain 486, but I've got this one here,
complete in-box,
it's been sitting in its sealed packaging for 25 years
thereabouts.
It was originally launched in October 1995,
maybe early 1996, depending on where you look.
But, back then it was $299 US dollars
for just this upgrade chip,
and that's the equivalent of around $500
adjusted for inflation,
so a bit pricey for just a CPU upgrade
to the point where they didn't last on the market
for too very long.
And there were a log critiques in the media
about it being just being like,
who the heck is this thing for?
Average consumers found it too costly
and businesses would rather just get a new system.
One IT guy was quoted as saying,
"both a memory and hard disc upgrade made sense
"alongside a Pentium,
"so if you do one, you have to all three.
"And if you end up doing all three,
"it's just cheaper to buy a new system."
So, yeah I mean, all good points,
I totally give all the points to their logic. [laughing]
But man, Intel was pushing all the things it could do,
I mean look at all these software benchmarks, you know.
135%, 144%, 267% better in some programs,
oh wow.
Need help in selecting which one you need?
I mean, look at all these things
that you can do on the website.
And yeah they had a website,
you could go out on the web,
the cyber spaces and you could go and download this PDF,
seriously, I did, it's still on archive.org.
Yeah, the Intel Pentium Overdrive Processor
performance report.
It's 30 pages of like, just benchmarks
and how cool it is to use this thing in your 486
and there's so much going on man.
I don't know, I don't really, I don't know man.
I just wanna play Duke Nukem 3D
and Descent II and stuff.
But,
there were a lot of serious people look at this
and making paperwork. [laughing]
Anyway, let's go ahead and get this unboxed
because I'm curious what's inside.
[smooth jazz]
Oh, the box itself is glued to itself.
Actually looks like this one was made in 1998.
February 13th, wow that's almost exactly 22 years ago
on the day I'm recording this.
Okay, maybe they were on the market
a little bit longer than I've read.
I read they lasted through 1997,
'98 would have been pretty late
to get an 83 megahertz Pentium.
[laughing] They did not make that easy.
Ooh, fresh Pentium Overdrive.
No Bachman Turner included.
Look at that.
Yeah this was one of those,
I believe, the heatsink is permanently attached
and there is a replaceable fan clipped to the top,
but, yeah they were serious about the cooling on this thing.
Just as an example,
my AMD486 that's in there right now
does not require any cooling at all,
it's a 3.3 volt CPU,
so it's never had a heatsink or fan or anything.
But this, yeah they're like "it's 5 volt,"
"it runs hot or whatever"
"you just gotta make sure it's nice and cool."
Gotta wonder about the thermals
in between the CPU and the heatsink, but we'll see.
Let's see here,
wonder what we got, oh man.
So we got a Stay In The Loop registration card,
the beginning of a valuable relationship with Intel.
Just what I've been looking for around Valentines day.
And we have the, wow this is not something I was expecting.
"Overdrive Processor Demonstration and Diagnostics."
Okay.
We've got a little remover tool of some kind.
Intriguing.
And some paperwork.
"Attention, Packard Bell systems,"
oh dear, what now.
"Serial numbers 450 and 470 require additional hardware."
Okay, we're not putting it in any of those.
Yeah quick installation.
I mean, yeah, pretty simple.
Pretty pretty simple.
It's just a drop-in thing, man.
Got some jumpers if we need,
I guess a diagnostics disk to check things out,
that's cool, I'm glad it comes with that.
Lets see if the manual says what to do with this doohickey.
Oh, there's an animated demo, that's gonna be good.
Ha ha, I like animated demos.
Okay, so that's what that's for,
removing the processors from the socket with no handle,
haven't seen one of those in a while.
Not in a 486 anyway.
So yeah, ah yeah, that makes sense.
You got the little groves there,
fits between the pins.
Dang that's cool,
glad I have one of these,
I've had some trouble pulling things out
of like a 386 before. [laughing]
so, yeah anyway, the rest of this just seems
to be generic.
Ah, we've got a datasheet, how nice.
Although I already looked up all this stuff online,
but yeah, check it out, man.
This is something I'm pretty excited about,
16K of code cache,
and 16K of write back capable data cache.
The AMD that I have in there right now
is only 8k of L1 cache.
Still no L2 on board,
that is on the system board itself.
I have 256k of L2 on that motherboard
that we upgraded to in the past
because didn't have any L2 when we first did the build.
But, yeah, this should be quite the lovely thing.
Ha, that is fresh.
Look at this thing.
That's just so clean, so nice.
And check out that integrated fan,
heatsink cooler design, man, it is all clipped on there.
Looks like the fan could come off,
but I mean that heatsink is pretty thoroughly attached.
And I like the fact that it looks like
it gets the power straight through the pins.
There's no connector for a fan to the motherboard
or Molex or anything like that.
This is exciting man,
ah dude, it's not gonna be a 486 anymore,
it's gonna be the LGR Woodgrain Pentium,
that's weird, oh I don't know if I like that,
I didn't think about that. [laughing]
Well, anyway,
this seems like a pretty clear upgrade on paper.
Will it be 100+ percent better like Intel claimed?
There's only one way to find out,
that is get this thing set up
and try out some benchmarks and games and stuff.
Alrighty.
Let's just get the old AMD one out of there.
Well, the new the CPU is old as well,
but you know what I mean.
There we go.
Oh, poor AMD.
Still a good CPU, maybe I'll go back to it
at some point, but not today!
All right.
And now our drop-in replacement.
Okay, so I guess with socket three
we don't have exposed pins,
unpopulated pins around the edges.
I think that might just be with socket two,
you have like an extra row all the way around
each of the four sides.
Okay.
Well that's that part out of the way,
now it's time to get to everyone's favorite part
about old computers,
all the jumper settings.
So there's quite a variety of different things
that this particular motherboard supports,
but what we're looking for here is this P24T.
I believe that is the Pentium Overdrive
code name or whatever.
All right, so JP9 should be on one and two, it is.
JP10 should be two and three.
Okay, that is that one,
now I gotta worry about all these.
Okay, JP13 should be one and two,
there's nothing on JP13.
So we will just add a jumper down there.
[groans]
There we go.
JP23 needs to be on three, four,
five, six, and seven, eight.
[upbeat music]
Okay, I think this is the last one.
[laughing] All right,
gonna triple quadruple check everything here.
According to my list
and hey if everything checks out we'll plug everything in,
power it on, see what happens.
All right, everything's set up, ready to go,
installed, whatever, we just gotta get this on here
and see what that's about.
But just power it on and see what happens.
[computer whirring]
Hm, sounds a little different.
There is a CPU fan going. [laughing]
Didn't have one before this.
Thankfully it's not too loud
or grinding or anything.
Hey, check it out,
so P24T, 80 megahertz, close enough! [laughs]
we'll run a CPU check here in a second
and see how that goes.
All right, so yeah.
Intel Pentium 83 Overdrive,
83 and a half megahertz, indeed.
2.5 clock multiplier, bus speed 33 megahertz,
everything looks as it should.
Yeah, the internal cache is probably not gonna do everything
because I don't believe I have write through mode.
So I may just have the 16 out of 32 possible K
on the chip itself.
It's only gonna be write through for the internal cache,
which means we're not gonna get the full 32K.
We have 16K of the cache on L1,
L2 is write back, that's cool.
Not game-breaking, but worth noting,
this motherboard isn't the most powerful thing
to pair with a Pentium.
All right, so let's try Top Bench, really quick.
Because I want to.
And also because when I ran it before,
back when we installed the external cache down there, 256K,
we were getting around 190,
actually it looked just like this here,
'cause that's just what this is. [chuckles]
So, around 190 points you can see in the top left there
is just running in real time.
So if you run the benchmark in real time here,
we should be, yes, it's a bit faster,
218.
So equivalent-ish of, well it's going back and forth,
Pentium 75 clone or thereabouts.
Let's see what it is with turbo.
Nice okay, so turbo still cranks it down a good bit.
Like a 386 DX40,
not nearly as slow as it is with that 486,
but we can disable the external cache and other things
if we really wanna get super slow,
if we're playing certain older games,
but yeah, around 218, 219, not bad,
not the biggest jump though.
I was hoping to get around 240 or 50,
but again this motherboard just isn't the best thing
for the time.
Still, an improvement nonetheless.
I mean, it is working right?
So here's something else I've got another benchmark on here
this 3D benchmark.
Let me show you what it was with the 486
that we had in here previously,
this is more of a test of VGA capabilities and whatnot,
but you know should still be faster with a Pentium,
so with the 486 ended up getting a score of 47.1
or run it with the Pentium here
and see what we get.
Should certainly be faster,
I'm not expecting a ton faster,
'cause again, we need to upgrade the video card
and whatnot to make more of an improvement to this,
I believe.
55.7, okay.
Just out of curiosity, I'm gonna run cache check here
and I'll just have it check the cache.
I'm curious about that L1,
if there really is, just getting a 16 of the 32.
Oh, that's the results.
So, yeah only 16k of L1,
but man that's like two or something times the speed,
maybe three times,
it is a lot faster than the 486 one was.
Plus it's got all sorts of floating point stuff
and Pentium things.
It is a clear improvement
so let's just go ahead and try this Overdrive processor
demonstration and diagnostics disk.
So there's a Windows version.
I don't wanna do that.
Ah, it's got a fan monitor, how cool is that,
and DOS, I like it anyway.
All right, install all the things please.
Listen to the sound of my disk.
[floppy drive noises]
All right so we've got some demos,
we got a fan monitor,
let's just see what that looks like.
[laughing] It's on. [laughing]
No RPMs, no anything, it's just "on."
Okay, let's try this.
The actual program itself!
Mm, got a mouse.
I don't know what kind of weird resolution this is
it is bowing on my monitor
and I don't feel like fixing it.
Let's see if there's any different.
It's the same thing!
Just says whether or not the fan is on.
Review installation demonstration.
Whoa, [laughing]
Oh, that's so cool, man.
The dithering!
I am gonna capture this on the capture device
for posterity really quick, hold on.
All right let's start that over
'cause it's worth it.
Look how awesome that looks.
I mean, I hope it looks good to you.
Or else I'm just going crazy.
Being a weird old man.
[laughing]
this, ah, I love these kind of little things.
Look at those hands.
Dude.
Animations.
[laughing]
Oh, those are phenomenal looking pixels on the motherboard
and there all the little details,
dude, somebody put some real, serious time into this.
Intel, man, they didn't hold out.
Oh, look at that, look at the little removal tool graphic.
[laughing]
Oh that is so cool, aw look at that.
That's enough of that,
if you wanna see the rest of it,
you can see the download in the video description
for the disk and take a look.
Anyway, let's run the processor instruction test.
Oh man, wow.
I'm assuming that that is legit
and it's not just running numbers
in an animation. [laughing]
All right, that's pretty cool.
Floating point conformance test.
Oh that's my kind of test right there;
I love conforming to floating points.
Doing some math, just calculating tons of things, man,
the power of the Pentium.
Look at it go.
All right well that's all for that.
Didn't really do a whole lot
other than show me some really cool animations
and some numbers that I am going to trust
that were real.
Right, let's run some games.
I mean, we gotta try to do it 3D
because it ran like total crap before this.
I mean, it's probably still gonna run like crap to a degree,
but let's make sure everything's good.
320 by 200 normal mode,
we're not even gonna mess with VASA compatibility.
But if you'll see the footage here
of how it was running on the 486,
that we had before this,
this is just the first level of the first episode.
And you can see it hangs around 10 frames per second
just at the beginning.
And it goes much lower down
into the single digits and whatnot,
throughout the rest of the level.
And it's not great.
This is again, 320 by 200
and it's just rolling along, chugging through the game,
it's not a pleasant experience,
mostly single digits.
But now we're gonna try it on the Pentium
and man it's already loading much quicker,
so that's good.
[explosions] Nice.
[8-bit music]
- Let's rock.
[game character speaking]
[laughing]
- Well, it is nominally better,
we're getting low teens up there.
So that's the frame rate more or less right now.
Ah, you know. [gunshots]
It's faster but again,
there's only so much we're gonna be able to squeeze
out of this system considering the other things
that are installed in there
like the video card.
It's certainly more playable though,
that's for absolute sure.
Not as good as I could be, but I'll take it.
Time to die.
If I were spending the equivalent of 500 bucks
on this back in the day for games or whatever like this,
this would not be the most satisfying thing.
There's other bottlenecks
that I think are making much bigger of a difference
in terms of games like Duke 3D.
Let's try Descent II.
Because that's another one that just ran like total garbage
on the 486,
let me show you what that looked like,
here's some direct capture of Descent II
on the 66 megahertz AMD CPU
that I had in here before.
And again, single digits.
Low teens.
A little better than Duke 3D,
but
yeah, not great.
Even when cranking down the settings.
This is the highest settings here,
but if we crank the detail all the way down to the lowest
it's you know a little better,
you get a few extra frames here and there.
I mean, I would have played this when I was a kid.
[laughing] It's just such a cool game
that I wouldn't have cared.
But, this is not great nowadays,
that's for sure.
And low detail, mid-high detail, whatever,
it's all pretty sucky.
So.
[rhythmic music]
moving over to the Pentium.
Let us see how this goes.
[upbeat music]
Looks better.
Let's turn on the frame counter.
So, okay yeah, I mean that's,
again, pretty clear improvement.
Oh, much more playable.
[lasers firing]
Not great,
still dipping into the single digits here and there
but not nearly as much.
And again this on the highest detail setting.
[lasers firing] So,
that's a red door,
what am I shooting for?
[lasers firing]
Yeah, you know.
[lasers firing] [laughing]
Can't handle all the action.
[lasers firing]
Let's see what it's like with the lowest again.
[upbeat music] [lasers firing]
Nominally better,
you know like it was in the 486, but,
I mean honestly this is about how I played Descent II
for the first time back in the day.
It was on a Pentium 90 I believe.
So it was maybe a little quicker than this, but...
[laughing] Oddly nostalgic in a way.
But just really the whole point of this build
is not to make the fastest 486 or early Pentium,
just I'm experimenting with parts
and seeing what things do.
Because now I can. [laughing]
It's fun.
All right one more thing that I wanna try here
and that is Quake
because it didn't work whatsoever,
but we're gonna try a benchmark.
The venerable Phil's computer lab benchmark
shout out to Phil for these handy programs
and things you can download on his website.
So we're gonna run the Quake time demo,
just the normal one.
And again, this did not even run at all on the 486.
I mean it tried.
Well, this doesn't either.
Let's try one of the other ones.
Lower the resolution, I believe.
Nope.
Okay, a clean boot here,
let's see if it does anything different.
Nope.
That totally doesn't wanna work.
Let's just try Doom,
see if that does anything.
Max details.
[laughing] I didn't run this on the 486,
so I don't really have anything to compare it to,
but certainly looks like it's running a bit smoother
than it did on that CPU,
just looking at it.
All right.
2134 gametics.
2664 realtics.
Those... are numbers.
Again, I don't have anything to compare it to,
unfortunately.
Man, that sucks
I couldn't even get the Quake time demo
to work at all, man.
[Windows 3.1 Startup Sound] [LGR humming along]
So final thoughts on the Pentium Overdrive Processor
83 megahertz, for now anyway.
It's unfortunate that it's connected
to such a computer!
You know if it was a more capable machine,
we would be getting more of the capabilities of it.
You know, it's a weird conundrum.
I was reading about that in the reviews,
its contemporary reviews back in the day.
People were like, just again,
questioning who exactly is this for because
the faster your system is the better it is,
the newer it is, the better capable your 486 board it,
the more you're gonna get out of this.
The older it is, the less you're gonna get out of it,
it's like backwards.
You know, the people with the slower, older systems,
don't get as much out of the upgrade
as the people with the newer, faster systems
that are already newer and faster, so...
Yeah, I much rather have a 486-DX4/100, stick that in here,
or maybe even one of the AMD P75 or something
you can overclock and do cool things.
Maybe I'll try that in the future.
And I also do wanna try with messing around
with different VLB compatible cards,
like some different video cards.
And memory as well,
I wanna try to maybe some faster memory,
because I think that would make a good difference, honestly.
Got I think that's a bit of a bottle neck.
Anyway, all sorts of things to mess with on this 486
and [laughing] that's why I have it.
It's just, yeah, screwing around with configurations
and things that I never could back in the day.
Wondered about them.
I've always been curious if they'd been any good
ever since diving back into the hobby
as an adult and yeah it's like,
I don't know it's just fun.
I love messing around with these things.
[arcadey sound effects]
And I love Missile Command.
And my camera battery just died,
so I guess that's the end of the video.
I mean, it pretty much was anyway,
I was just wrapping up,
so right, if you enjoyed seeing this
then do checkout some of my others
in the 486 updates, upgrades series
or whatever else I post here
each and every week on LGR.
And as always, thank you very much for watching!