Something inside me broke when I saw your PCI bus running at 60MHz... stable.

There's something so comfy about the gui of that bios.

I always thought that version of the AMI BIOS was so cool back in the day. And I have to say that your sleepless nights were worth it, congrats on your successful overclock!

These are fun to watch for me mostly because back in the day when I ran this sort of hardware, I didn't dare do any overclocking for fear of burning something up. The hardware was just too expensive to risk blowing it up, at least for most of us at the time. So it is cool to see what you could do if you wanted to.

What an awesome video! Thank you for OC'ing old hardware for this. At first, I thought "why on earth would he chose that video card?", but it becomes clear when the insane 60mhz pci bus speed was revealed as the "secret weapon".

I seriously was never put on the edge of my seat for an overclocking video like this for felt ages. My eyes gone wider and wider as you went up the Mhz. Great stuff!

It's only taken 25 years to realise the full potential of this platform lol. This was very entertaining and I'm definitely having a go myself, as I have an ADW revision. Maybe it's magic, like yours. Big props to the guys on the Vogons forum that originated this madness, particularly feipoa.

One of the best overclocks I had back in the day was an AMD K62-233mhz that would do 500mhz on air cooling with stock voltage. Back then that was pretty impressive, I still have the cpu itself too.

You won the silicon lottery with that chip lol. Edit that scaling from the stock to OC value is amazing.

OMG, I just love your channel! So much good stuff for my retro heart. :D

It's been 26 years since I worked on the project, but I remember building a synthetic clock board as comp sci undergraduate research assistant at the University of Washington. We used an (I think) 33mhz 486, and dynamically scaled the clock up and down in increments that matched with vesa local bus, ide, memory, and cpu edge timing. The board also had a small amount of buffer to capture/replay any bits on relevant bus interfaces that would get lost during a clock down event. We were able to scale the frequency high enough to completely loose communication with the video card and other peripherals, so implemented device watchdogs to record failures and put together a statistical map of how many faults and different frequencies things occurred. I recalled being able to greatly overclock the actual cpu, and the real issue was line delays in the motherboard itself - the traces were unable to carry the signals at higher frequency with enough precision. This is a neat project that you performed here, and congratulations on pushing the FPS on the quake benchmark. Superscape 3d vr benchmark is always fun to see too.

I love how excited you got when you saw the Quake FPS value, I was right there with you. My own X5-133 would run at 160Mhz but it was unstable even with additional cooling. I never even attempted 180Mhz. I have a soft spot for the X5-133 platform because it's the first PC I financed and built myself (worked all Summer to afford it). Now I want to see if this can be pushed even further.

Congratulations! I loved doing 486 OC since it did big difference in reality. It was time saving during boot and it could be the difference in game between not playable and playable.

180MHz 486? Damn, didn't even know the X5-133 can clock so high.

I used to have one of those back in the days, and I overclocked it to 166MHz, using a crappy FIC motherboard that I had for years. I had to do some work with a pin in the 486 to be able to use it, I isolated it with glue so it wasn't in contact with the socket. I could use it at that speed for most stuff, including a finite elements assignment, but there were a couple of games always crashing, so I reverted back to a more conservative 150MHz. I now think it was a matter of cooling, but who knows. Nice to see your channel is growing.

Great videos. I didn't realise Quake would run on a 486. I thought it was compiled with P5 instructions. I remember the first time I played the demo on an early Pentium. Also the first time I saw 'true' colour in Win 3.1 Good times.

Very impressive. If I were to try to beat your world record, I’d keep everything identical, but replace the 14.318MHz Chrystal with a programmable oscillator from Silicon Labs. That way you could push everything to the physical limit and the board and software would be none the wiser.

I had one of these and used it at 180mhz from 1997 to 2003. Played unreal on it with a 2MB VLB video card and 32MB of RAM. I used to call it the fastest 486 in the West.

I love watching your channel before sleeping, it relaxes me.

Awesome result, seriously impressive performance! Really loving your channel!

Another excellent vid. And thanks for recommending Atheatos channel. Looks 👍

My 5x86-133 on an ASUS PVI-486SP3 with an ARK 1000vl VLB graphics card and 32MB regular FPM at stock speed maxes out at 14.3 FPS in Quake and 1498 ticks in Doom, or 49.85 FPS. Looking at your stock result I feel pretty darn pleased with that! :) But to see a 486 get over 20FPS is absolutely remarkable. Amazing work, and thanks for sharing.

Your best material yet. Keep it up.

This is such a cool channel I'm so glad I happened to find it!

incredible !! really enjoyed your video !! congratulations for the fastest 486 on earth !!!

Nice job. When I was a kid I overclocked a 386SX33 to 66mhz by replacing the mobo clock crystal with a 66mhz crystal from an ISA modem. I had to add external cooling and a heatsink, but it was very fast but not super stable. Allowed me to run games that were not permitted to run on such a slow machine. Fast forward 25 or 30 years, and overclocked systems are routine.

Great work and congratulations

Amazing. Congratulations!

I must say that I love your videos and I wish you would post more often. I send you all the love I can from the United States

Congratulations, and well done.

thank you for less "yeah". this video is interesting and educative, pleasure to watch. mid 90s is very interesting subject especially because of early 3D

This was fantastic, well done. Can't wait to see if this can be beat, not by much I guess, because that is a bad ass 486 you have put together here!

GREAT work!!!

That was fun! Congratulations on your world record.

Well done! I really liked watching this moment in history ;-)

Amazing video! Continue sending us more content like this. A fan from Brazil

I great you with the record ! Nice job is done!

A legend is born. The real masterpiece here is the overclocking of the PCI bus. Yes, the Game Blaster could take that 60 MHz, but most likely there were other devices on that bus (IDE controller etc.). Insane and ingenous! Now, do you see any chance for that magical 200 MHz? :) :)

Now this is great content! 🤘

You just taught me about CPU wafer binning. Appreciate that.

Your channel is going to be huge.

Thanks for sharing his page! My favourite when larger KZfaqrs recommend notable smaller KZfaqrs, subscribed!!

Sir, you are now... the man - the legend!

This overclocking video was super exciting and enjoyable.

Well done!

A house fire 7 years ago took an entire lifetime of vintage hardware from me, including my favorite rare CPU, an AMD K5 PR-200. Do you have any K5s you could toy around with? I've always wondered if they would function in a dual socket 7 motherboard.

I had one back in the day. This thing rocked !

I can't believe that C&T mae such a 486 motherboard, its insane, considering there were other companies making extreme boards at the time. Having cache modules on a 486 was extremely rare, I only saw them on later PII and DEC Alpha machines. Your board is similar to my SOYO 486 with all types of connections but you may be able to have 1MB of cache by combining bothe the module and the empty surface mount if you can find and solder the chips. Not a fan of AMI or Phoenix BIOS though, I'm an Award fan. All things considered, you have one of the best 486 platforms to work on. Good job. I have overclocked my 486 machines back in the day, but considering how old they are now, I don't want to stress the electronics, so they run at vanilla specs. You are very lucky to find that motherboard with the cache module. I couldn't find one after months of searching for a RISC motherboard that I had so I gave up.

Congrats !

Congratulation! ;)

I'm amazed the PCI embedded IDE/SuperIO controller works at 60Mhz too!

So, how many X5-133's do have to test to find one that will clock this fast? You must have a pretty huge drawerfull!

Great content from this channel as always. For PC enthusiasts, CPUG is without peer on KZfaq. Hopefully this will start a 486 war and we'll finally see just how much could have been squeezed from that CPU. I'd be happy to see the same for earlier Intel chips. Often the PC chassis they were put in didn't do them justice.

thanks for the great video

Very nice! And you have a new subscriber :D

Glückwunsch!

Nice, but wasnt AGP 1.0 "just a 66Mhz PCI"? So any GPU that was available in both PCI and AGP versions should work with your hot-hack? Good video :)

7:18 i love that amibios already support mouse input... i used umc based chipset too for my 486 back in the day

1. Try sticking a bit of red or orange electric tape over that 7 segment display to make it more readable for the camera. 2. I think it should be possible to modify the BIOS to override that 2x PCI clock divider. Or even better, write simple tool to change the setting on the fly from DOS (as long as there is any decent documentation available for the chipset).

That's a fast 486! Little late in the cycle though. Wasn't long after that came out that I had me a Pentium II rig! (w/agp!!!)

Wow! I remember playing the original Half Life using an AMD 486 (5x86?)120 Megahertz, slightly over clocked. I can't remember the speed I managed to get it up to as it was so long ago. I also was using a rather crappy PCI graphics card at the time and I actually enjoyed the experience! My friends could not believe I could actually do this until they saw for themselves. I wish that I had your setup at the time as I can only imagine how much faster it might have been! I think that I may still have that old motherboard and processor around somewhere, minus the HUGE tower case that I had it installed in. I miss those days..... Great video by the way! Subscribed! 👍👍

I really liked that cooling solution :D

No way! I didn't realize what I had. I was watching the video and thought this looked familiar. I got an X5-133ADW from a failed estate sale, with an "X" marked on it. It's definitely a cool conversation piece on how different CPUs are today.

man this is my "the first computer" cpu, and motherboard if not the same it is very very similar. you have much better graphics though the bios is the same i am already crying from nostalgia that sound counting memory and you even have 16 megs of ram also i love it

That is awesome!

More videos like this i really enjoyed it. 😉😉

This is fascinating.

The fastest setups of these old days machines have be lost to time 20 years ago. Almost no one remembers even the slot one records or mobile barton records anymore. It's a real shame but at least we can try again now.

brings back memories! we overclocked the living daylights out of a similar CPU back in the days. We scavenged a radiator from an amplifier and modded it to fit the motherboard then mounted two cone shaped extension brackets to funnel air from a big industrial 5V 160mm fan to 120 , then to 80mm to fit on the radiator. that fan was way way too powerful for the fan header, so I rigged the one of the rails to supply the wattage and the amps to the fan. you know you've made a big mistake when the air coming off it can tear stuff of the MB. but hey it worked and we had something in the region of 25 to 30% overclock on the cpu.

Great video. Sad than my similiar woodgrain 486 stoped working. I would totaly atempt to beat you

Ah, the Chips M919, a board famous for questionable build quality and fake L2 cache, though this later board is a little higher quality and didn't bother to install the fake cache chips (though the pads and pointless traces are still visible at the bottom left at the beginning of the video). Red Hill Computer has a pretty good write-up about this (and many other vintage PC bits). PCI standard originally allowed for 16-37.5MHz operation to support the variety of CPU bus speeds common in the early '90s, with a 66MHz option introduced in the late '90s. AGP is essentially PCI signaling at higher speed and with a dedicated channel directly to RAM (as the AGP aperture) for additional texture storage, which is why there were so many video cards using the same chip for both PCI and AGP (later AGP/PCIe cards have to use bridge chips because the signals are too different).

Awesome video - thanks for all the effort you put into this - I was doing this 20 years ago!

Cool video! This is the CPU I used on my very first PC build.

I'd like to see more retro overclocking stuff from you :)

The intro sting alone was enough for me to subscribe

Used to do this sort of thing back in the day, if you're really looking to get 100% you'll definitely want to hijack the PLL output and replace it with some kind of dynamically adjustable oscillator.. I've seen people do this with FPGA's and other more hardware based approaches using some timing circuits. But, you should be able to get much finer clock adjustment than the standard configurations of the multiplier or PLL chip allow. Your chip may not be stable at 200Mhz, but could potentially hit 190Mhz with a custom PLL clock.

I have that exact motherboard, only the two unpopulated pads in the corner have Fake Cache(TM) on them. It truly is glorious how the traces wrap around from one side of the fake cache area and reconnect back on the other side.

Wow the bios gui looks nicer then from my PCs today.

Still loving your new intro!!

43rd week of 1996 is quite impressively late for the 486 / 5x86 chipset. The P6 Pentium Pro was already available commercially for a year that point, and Pentium MMX was also literally launched just that week (~October 22, 1986). The AM5x86-133 (@160 MHz w/VL Bus cards) got me through a rather "poor" period time of my life after a bunch of stuff happened - a lot of value for the $, and I used it from 1995-1997 as my main PC and for another 3 years as a network node to help me get my MCP and MCSE for WindowsNT certifications. The final hurrah for the system came in 2000 when I decided to see if it would run under mineral oil for cooling (and yes of course it worked great). Unfortunately with no way to clean the board, the board and processor went in the trash :/. I do have a "Powerleap 5x86-133" sitting in a box though today. P.S. Wow! I remember that BIOS!

Nice, higher gains than the increas in clockspeed. Interesting what difference "Plattform Performance" can make.

Amazing!

Very impressive. I dabbled with this a long time ago, but could never get the VGA card to work - knew the CPU was working, because removing the card resulted in angry beeps. Perhaps it's worth another go, just for fun, though I doubt any of the cards I have that might run at this speed would be very fast in DOS. I still feel the WinChip is overlooked here. It's kinda '486-Like' but runs in boards with AGP and SDRAM, as well as being clocked at over 200MHz right out of the box. It just isn't the same, though.

It is interesting to see a channel where old components are overclocked and benchmarked. I will look if you have Voodoo3 overclocks here.

I love that intro!

Very cool!

The PR133 is super rare? Dammit! Mine went to landfill many years ago. I think it was the only drop-in replacement processor that impressed me. I noticed a significant performance boost after replacing my 486dx2100 and as you mentioned, you got Pentium performance for the price of a 486

Awesome =D Goes without saying the graphics card may be happy at 66Mhz, but the southbridge may evetually die if overlocked too long.

Really well done! Hope you can get a 3x66 mhz FSB working for the next attempt!

Awesome video! Worth noting for anyone taking up the challenge, even if you were to achieve say 200mhz (50mhz x4) you likely still wouldn't beat the Quake score because you would be limited to 25mhz on the PCI bus or 50mhz if you have a board like this that can be tricked into bypassing the divider or a PCI enabled board that lacks the divider entirely. Ideally you would want to run at a 66mhz FSB setting, this will net you higher PCI speeds. You will need a PCI Graphics card that uses the same GPU as an AGP card (like the one used here). This will guarantee you are able to run at the full 66mhz as supported by AGP. Other tips would be larger, faster lvl2 cache. I think the key here is overclocking the floating point unit as far as possible in conjunction with a 66mhz PCI bus. I don't know if CPU Galaxy tried this but I would be very curious what the result would be with 66mhz FSB with a multi of 2.5, would the extra 6mhz on the PCI bus make up for the lower overclock, 166mhz vs 180mhz. How much of the uplift is coming from the faster PCI bus and how much is caused by the faster clocked FPU? The ideal would be to run at 66mhz x 3 but finding a CPU stable at 200mhz will be difficult, if not impossible. Videos like these make me sad that I no longer have my collection of 486 and early Pentium/AMD K6 CPUs/boards. Sadly I moved country and could not bring them with me. Now they cost more than they are worth to replace.

Ahh the good old M919. The traces for the two (Unpopulated) cache chips are rather 'interesting' on this board! I had one back in the 90's which had the fake cache chips soldered on :)

Geez…This is freaking AMAZING 😳 I mean reaching about ten times the normal CPU clock speed alone is sub-zero but the fact that the north bridge as well as the RAM modules is still willing to work at 60MHz is something I had never expected would be feasible 😶 Outstanding work! 😍

Pretty neat. That board is definitely a unicorn among 486 boards! I also had one of those AMD chips in my 486 board back in the mid 90's. I ended up having to run mine at 3x40 for a 120 mhz total speed. My board would not recognize anything higher than a 3x multiplier no matter what settings I tried so I ran it at the max bus speed of 40 mhz. By the same time that board was released you could buy a non-MMX Pentium up to 200 mhz which would blow that 486 chip out of the water in Quake. But it's still neat to see it clocked that fast!

Thats amazing

Impressive!

I'm wondering if you added active cooling with thermal paste/pad if you could get this closer to 200Mhz? Also yep that bios brings back some memories as we had some Gateway computers back in high school in my computer network tech class that had them.

Great video! My Graphics Blaster Exxtreme does not have the same BIOS with this really cool startup animation! What details can you share about which version you are using?

Wow, absolutely amazing! I have the same setup and a couple of AMD X5s but I don't even dare to try! What about using another graphics card? I remember testing a GF2 MX400 just for fun on an M915 with a DX4-100 and noticed a huge improvement in Doom, although I didn't test Quake. Can't wait to see the 200mhz video!!!!

This is dangerous for me. I have almost the exact same setup you're playing with in this video! I actually have heard of the strategy you're employing here, but nobody who explained it on Vogons went into this level of detail.

Enjoyed the video. I had an AMD 133Mhz CPU that I overclocked to 166MHz. No FPU though. I didnt add any extra cooling to it and it died several months later. That did give me an excuse to get a new CPU with an FPU so I could finally play quake without going to my Universities computer labs.