[elsurudo]

My first (childhood) computer was a 486 (DX I think?). Pentiums were already out, even PIIs maybe. The LEDs on the front (remember those?) said "100", but I was always suspicious of these, because my computer seemed a _lot_ slower (at playing games – what else) than my friend's 133MHz... But his was a Pentium(!), so I never got to the bottom of it.

For the record I needed to downscale Doom to about a 1/2 window (running in DOS) to have it run at a decent framerate. Can't have been 100MHz, right? Does anyone here have a comparable benchmark of a "true" 100MHz 486 I can compare with?

Thus began my fascination with computers. Booting up DOS in some low-memory mode in order to squeeze every CPU cycle out of that thing. Working within constraints taught me a lot.

I didn't have internet at the time, but this thing had a 14.4k modem that I tried to get running. When the modem was in use, the mouse froze (and vice-versa). They were on the same IRQ interrupt jumper I think. I ended up frying the motherboard trying to fix this issue. I didn't have a computer for a while, but after lots of pleading and my parents seeing that I was serious about this, they eventually got me a Pentium 2 (450MHz or so!). But alas, it had a Voodoo Banshee video card (which had notoriously-bad drivers which often simply hard crashed). Alas, working within another constraint...

[adzm]

Pentium was superscalar and could often run two operations per cycle. The difference between a 133mhz pentium and a 100mhz 486 was way more than just 33mhz. That said I am pretty sure I recall running doom with more than a half window if not a almost full window on a 486.

[whoopdedo]

I only have my unreliable memory to say, but on a 486DX/33 I recall play Doom 2 at least on the second-from-top view size without noticeable lag. But what sound card did you have? In the late 90s hardware manufacturers made budget cards with processing being done in software rather than dedicated chips. If you had one of those it may have been too much for a 486 to handle. Also probably the cause of your modem problems, as "soft modems" were notorious for being unreliable.

Obviously these cards were meant for use in Pentiums with their extra processing power. But some stingy integrators coughPackardBellcough would slap together the lowest cost components without regard to if it'd actually work properly.

[Narishma]

> My first (childhood) computer was a 486 (DX I think?). Pentiums were already out, even PIIs maybe. The LEDs on the front (remember those?) said "100", but I was always suspicious of these, because my computer seemed a _lot_ slower (at playing games – what else) than my friend's 133MHz... But his was a Pentium(!), so I never got to the bottom of it.

A Pentium is much faster than a 486 at the same clock speed, so that shouldn't be surprising.