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,