This makes me wonder what kind of memory was in larger x86-based systems like 80386-based Sequent Symmetry and PPro ASCI Red. 64MB on a 386 enables some interesting benchmark comparisons vs contemporaneous systems with MIPS or SPARC CPUs running at the same clock rate.

Oh hey, I'm the one who makes those Slaton Computers modules you show around 8:45. They're built pretty much the exact same way, but permanently jumpered to EDO -- you can cut a trace and install a resistor if you really want to make them EDO, but I've yet to find anything that can use them that way.

I used to solder leg onto mine to use them as SIPP modules :) Much fun ! !... people were nicer during that time...

That 450 MHz OC was much important than a lot of people realize. It was better for gaming, but the biggest difference was with DivX playback. 450 MHz was just above the threshold of decoding 480p at 24 FPS, at which most pirated movies were distributed. 450 MHz was also fast enough to handle late 90's internet workflow with browser, communicator and WinAmp playing your favorite pirated MP3. In Europe such CPU was also fast enough to brute force decode analog Canal+ encryption. All you needed is an analog TV card for your PC. Such encryption was done by permutating (mixing order) of horizontal scanlines. Computers were able to decode it, by analyzing static TV logo and finding the correct permutation for each frame. Canal+ soon reduced its logo to small "+" to make decoding harder, but CPUs got 1+ GHz soon anyway.

Blimey, I thought I was King Shit for having 24MB in my 486SX. Brilliant video. 👍

Have you ever done any system design for S-100 bus computers? I would love to add every modern feature that didn't exist in 1977.. SIMMs, M.2, i2c, USB, WiFi, BT, etc Make it run in 2 different modes... and make it backward compatible with original pinout make it run to take full advantage of all the bus pins.. example the data bus had 8 input and 8 output data lines. Would it be possible to make it 16 bit bi-directional?

I've seen those oddball modules before. The ones I had were in an IBM RISC server I bought back in 2003. It had almost an entire gigabyte of RAM in it. I have no idea what it was used for.

Your skills will be in high demand right before Y3k. Keep up the great work.

The max amount of memory I had in my 486 SX2 in the 90s was 20 MB. It had come with 8 MB across 8 slots and I had pulled 4 of those and changed them to 4 MB modules. The CPU I swapped with an Evergreen upgrade.

I'm not surprised that consumer 386 (and even likely some 486) systems that used 30-pin SIMMs had a limit of 64MB when using them. That would have been an *insane* amount of RAM back then, and would have been expensive. The industry largely went to 72-pin SIMMs for higher capacity modules. It's possible that many motherboards were designed such that they could support 16MB modules (if the chipset did), but due to cost and/or availability at the time of release, they only claimed support for 4MB modules. Sill nice to know that some 386 boards out there aren't limited to only 32MB of RAM.

i still have some old sims... 2MB 4MB and 8MB

The memoreeee, had little capaciteeee, but soon technologeeee solved the problem permanentleeee.

Can you re-upload the CACHE-INFO? I can´t find to download. This Andreas Stiller made some several awesome software at that time.

I rocked a 300A for years at 450MHz... killer CPU

Win 95 diskettes are pain int ass. I remember first time when I purhased win95 in discettes some of them are corrupted. I need to go computer shop multiple time to change with new ones. Computer shop send bad discetttes to microsoft center an I have to wait weeks to come.

Oh god, this takes me back. I used to have a 300A, 512mb of some pretty decent memory, and (IIRC) an ABIT BE6, that I bought purely to have a go at overclocking. I got REALLY lucky with the CPU, because on one of my old hard drives I've probably still got the screenshot I grabbed of a CPU utility showing it booted into windows 98 at 599.something Mhz....... Though I remember that it took me a hell of a lot of attempts before it randomly ran long enough for me to open that utility and save a screenshot before it crashed again. :D . It REALLY didn't want to stay running at that speed. I was getting up to some pretty scary core and memory voltages just trying to force it, and there was no way I'd have been able to run a true benchmark, but it was perfectly happy, and 100% stable at 450, so I kept it setup for a fair few years like that. When I eventually upgraded to a Athlon XP 1700+ I gave the Celeron, the board, and the memory to a penniless student friend as his old Pentium 1 PC had just give up. When he realised that the board was slightly too long to fit in his old computers tiny case, rather than ask if I had a spare case he could have (back then he could have had his pick of the used cases I had littering up the place) he instead swapped all the parts I'd gave him with a fellow student for a sh*try bare Pentium 1 board !!! As we say here in England, "What a f*ckin' Muppet". :D Later on I put together a nice Q6600 based PC and the overclocking bug bit again. :D

I recall that those large-capacity modules that You used to source the memory chips from, were used mainly in the HP Netserver series. As all such things, they used to cost a fortune back then - so I'm in a bit of an envy that you've found that lot in the scrapyard. :)

I used to love that game soooo much! The amount of money I made on 2.7 RS... With my Guillemot/Thrustmaster Force Feedback Racing wheel and business acumen, I felt like a racing driver who could conquer the world

I think it's a PIII 667/256/133 Coppermine SL3XL. Because i found pictures with the same modelnumber, PB 746509-001 and the same PCB layout, on a russian auction website.

Nice! That is plenty of memory for such a system indeed. However, I would add buffers to those modules. Bringing VCC down to 3.3V is not enough, the datasheet for those dram ICs says, that the voltage on all other pins also has to be in the same range as VCC, between -0.5V and +4.6V. The chipset on the mainboard will drive the data lines with up to 5V and that could potentially damage the memory modules. Unfortunately there is not a lot of space for an additional buffer, but you could save one voltage regulator and may be bring it to the other side to squeeze three chips onto the PCB. Edit: Ah, just scrolled through the comments and there were already same concerns. I guess, looking excited forward for the next even better revision ;)

From what I can remember I never actually had a 386 back in the day - I went from a 286 Tandy to a 486DX2-66 with 16MB.

In 2000, our home PC only had 32MB RAM, 3GB HHD and 300MHZ AMD K6-2 processor (586?). The fact you were able to get twice the ram on a system at least two generations older is impressive.

What a magnificent attempt!

"Keine Garantie ohne diesem Etikett!" ah yes these "Warranty void if removed" stickers. Is leafing one of these on a eternal sin on this channel? 😇😉

I had an 300A and it ran perfectly at 450MHz😃

Look up the S-code on the CPU itself. Example, batches with SLWM code overclock right out of the box easily. Others may require slight additional CPU Vcore (also requires motherboards capable of manually adjusting CPU Vcore). Also try finding Intel Coppermine Celeron 566MHz, which can overclocks to 850MHz easily also by changing FSB from 66MHz to 100MHz (but the same idiosyncracies also applies, some CPUs may require slightly higher CPU Vcore).

0 cache! Was shit!

If I am not mistaken, those 168-pin EDO RAM modules can be very handy in some old Macintosh systems (like PowerMac 7200, etc.). They will also work in Pentium Pro and Pentium II systems, as those also support EDO RAM (the i440FX only supported EDO, later i440LX added SDRAM support, but it supported only 512MB of SDRAM, but 1GB if you used EDO!, same goes for i440BX). Those modules are really rare as we usually think of EDO RAM as an 72-pin SIMMs and not a SDRAM-styled 168-pin DIMM, but those do exist and are really rare

I had a 300A overclocked to 450 on an Abit BH6 mothrboard and a Riva TNT2. It was the best bang for buck available in 1999. Nobody I knew ever had an issue running the 300A at 450.

i have some 30 pin sims

Also Soket370 Celeron 300A up to 450MHz stable with FSB100. Super CPU!

After watching this video I realize that I have 2x EDO memory sticks (probably each 16Mb), that I storage a few decades ago. I can give it for free if someone needs it. In the chips are written CW424410-7 9528 and 9519.

I remember paying £400 for a 16mb sim.

Yes, Abit BH6 and 450Mhz. Add Voodoo 1 4Mb and it was heaven on earth!

My 386 did not have enough RAM to run Doom, but Dune II, Pinball Fantasies, Duke Nukem 2, and even Jazz Jackrabbit worked well iirc.

I didn't even know that there was an AM486-SX! O.O

*Blood from the eyes* *My teacher of special technology would have grabbed the cordial pills for a long time.* The sequence of soldering is not observed in the most cynical way. The correct sequence of assembly of the scheme: 1 soldering connectors and switches 2 resistors are soldered 3 capacitors are soldered 4 transistors and other semiconductor devices mounted directly on the PCB are soldered (after each soldering to cool) 5, lastly, IC Chips are soldered, so that there is time to cool, so as not to damage the wire connection of the crystal output inside. 5.1 IC Chips that are afraid of statics are soldered by the very last with all precautions - with heat sink, if possible, and necessarily with a grounding bracelet. (of cause see p.5 about cooling) Here I see non -compliance with technology. =)

Ypu can format 11 sectors per track 84 tracks giving almost 2mb. If you increment the sector numbering you can increase read speed !!

Thanks so much I had a ton of sim modules that where from a different pc that did not physically fit in my 486 pc now I can use them (I believe they where server or smth else) and now I can put them to use without throwing them out!

I was one of the lucky ones. Found out about this fantastic deal when I was working at Electronic Arts Canada from one of the tech services guys, and was already in the market for an upgrade from a Pentium 133 as I needed alot more power to play the upcoming MMORPG EverQuest, but as a new father, poor AF. I was able to score an Asus board and a fully overclockable Celeron 300A that ran at 450MHz right out of the gate. It was my go-to gaming rig for a LONG time.

Overclocked to 450MHz the Celeron was actually faster than the P2 450MHz in game benchmarks due to the full speed L2 cache.

I had the BH6 and Celeron back then and it was awesome. Worked like a charm!

I would like 8

I lost my first job (tech in a PC shop) because of this processor. I explained to the co-owner that the 300A was so fast because it had it's cache on the die. He claimed that the SMD passives on PCB were cache memory 😁

Holly shit, the same time that i've an orgasm

Impressive, great work. Impressive what u can salvage from old computer parts. That scrapyard looks like paradise to me, i've would've spent hours there. I have loved electronics since I was a young kid, it started when my dad bought his first pc with a 12mhz 286 cpu. Always been fascinated by computers and stereo equipment. I'm both into retro pc and retro stereo components, and I always will be. In highschool my teachers told me that I knew more about pc's than them, they were fascinated by my electronics/pc knowledge.

And there we are the IBM PS/2 users with our non standard 30 pin FPM with parity modules 😅

Does dosbox run freedos?? Years ago I had a legitimate use of dosbox. I used to control a bunch of pbx's accessed via modem, and the software would only work on dos, though I did get it to work ok windows 98 but was a poor experience. It meant I could not easily remotely access this console so I installed on an XP computer accessing the serial based modem, and 'just worked'. It was one of the few WOW moments of my life.