old pc's - turbo button?

roid said:
Ah brings back fond school memories of trying to get the computer to crash by poking the turbo button as fast as humanly possible :P

In a similar sort of vein, a few of my mates spent several CDT lessons trying to destroy an otherwise unused 386 by flicking the power-switch repeatedly on and off. Surprisingly resilient, after about half an hours effort each time they had to give up as it still worked albeit it was always going to be too slow for anyone to actually use anyway.

Cheers samcat, Werewolf and Papa Larazou for the info, 486s were just starting to disappear when I started to get interested in PCs.
 
I can remember my first PC (just) my dad gave it to me when he got his brand new dell P133 it was a intel DX2-66 it had a cracking gfx card in it for the time a 1mb cirrus logic and a turbo button that dropped it down to 33 if i remember rightly. those were the good old days when buying a CPU was simple, just go Intel!
 
Ex-RoNiN said:
Ah yes, those and their successors (686 they called them, no? The ones that had around 200MHz) were notoriously known for their poor floating point performance.

AMD's successors were the K6, then later K6-2 and K6-III's (with built in huge L2 cache)

Cyrix/IBM's (Super) Socket 7 chips were the 686's.

At that time AMD and Cyrix (<=500MHz) chips had only one FPU pipeline compared to the two in Intel's Pentium .. hence the slower floating point...

Then everything changed when AMD launched the Athlon and Duron ... I remember the fun overclocking my 600MHz Duron way way up... ;)
 
The Diamond card will be a Nvidia chipset of some sort, probably the TNT2 as they only did NV based video cards.

I remember the card in our third PC all too well- A Diamond Viper V550 16mb (TNT2). Went well with the rest of the spec really-
P3 400mhz
64mb RAM
20gb disk
Crap when my father bought the thing, and utterly useless by four years later. Still, at least when the processor died (Fan failure) I had very good fun dismantling the PC with a hammer :D

-Leezer-
 
Trill said:
A leftover from machines of five to ten years ago, the turbo switch still remains on many cases, even though it really serves no purpose any more. In the early days of the PC, there was only IBM, and there were only a handful of different speeds a PC could run at. Early software was written by programmers who believed they were writing it to run on a machine of a specific speed. When newer, faster machines would come out, some of this software (especially games) would stop working properly because it would run too fast. Turning off the "turbo" function of the PC (which meant anything that made it run faster than an IBM of a particular era) would make the machine run slower so this software would work. In essence, it was a "compatibility mode" feature, to slow down the machine for older software.

Now, there are dozens of different combinations of processor types and speeds. Software cannot rely on knowing what the speed of the machine is, so most programs use speed-detection algorithms to determine how fast the machine is. The turbo button no longer serves any useful purpose, and in fact on many motherboards there either isn't anywhere to connect it, or there is a place but the motherboard does nothing when you press the button. The best use for this button is to never touch it, or use it for some other purpose. Some older machines will still slow down when the button is pressed, and if you press it by accident your machine will lose performance; it can be surprisingly hard to track down the problem, since it seems that the front of the machine is the last place anyone appears to notice anything. You can correct this problem if you find yourself doing this frequently.

Fortunately, the turbo button has all but disappeared from modern system cases, especially newer NLX, ATX-family, and WTX form factor systems.
Interesting post!

I remember taking my favorite game, A10 Tank Buster from my Olivetti 286 (with 20MB hard disk) round to a mates house to play on his 486. As soon you pressed F10 for full throttle the plane would fly down the runway and straight across the map until it hit the edge of the map in about 10 seconds. If you pulled up you would reach the planes ceiling in about 5 seconds! Made the game completely unplayable :D
 
leezer3 said:
The Diamond card will be a Nvidia chipset of some sort, probably the TNT2 as they only did NV based video cards.

I remember the card in our third PC all too well- A Diamond Viper V550 16mb (TNT2). Went well with the rest of the spec really-
P3 400mhz
64mb RAM
20gb disk
Crap when my father bought the thing, and utterly useless by four years later. Still, at least when the processor died (Fan failure) I had very good fun dismantling the PC with a hammer :D

-Leezer-

Nah a Diamond Stealth would be earlier than that :)

From memory, a Diamond Stealth 32 used a Tseng Labs chipset. A Diamond Stealth 64 used an S3 Trio 64. A Diamond Stealth 3D used an S3 3DVirge chipset for supposedly 3D acceleration (although it was actually so bad, the processor generally did a better job!!).

If it was one of these it would be highly unlikely to have 64mb ram. 4mb would probably be more like it!
 
mark66 said:
Interesting post!

Looks more than a shade cut and paste plus old as I haven't seen a new case within the past 5 years containing a turbo button but you are right interesting all the same, if I'm wrong and Trill wrote it all themselves, my apologies and I guess it is a sort of backhanded compliment to say it is written informatively enough for me to be mistaken.
 
Google is your best friend. :)

Altough i did have a case with a turbo button on it, i never did push it...
 
seek said:
this one is..

150mhz
64mb stealth diamond gfx card (or something like that)
128mb ram
409mb hard drive
old cd-rom i'm guessing 4x or something.
200 watt psu
win98se

i reckon it was pretty good for a fiver!

rofl 150mhz, what are you planning on useing the machine for? does windows 98 fit on a 409mb hard drive? dont suppose you have much space left over?
 
I had a PC with a turbo button and it boosted the CPU by a whole 3Mhz or something like that :p

I think it was a 286 with something like a 50MB HDD :o
 
seek said:
just bought a full system for a fiver to have a play around with :D

it has a button marked "turbo" on the front of the case... what does it do?
When IBM made their original PC's the 8088 processor had a clock speed of 4.77 Mhz.
Most manufacturers of 'Clones' provided much faster machines. But IBM actually wrote some software which detected the clock speed and would not run of it was faster than 4.77.
So the Clone guys invented the 'Turbo' switch which made the PC run faster on any software which did not detect the clock. Don't ask why IBM did this as it seems pretty strange. I guess they thought they could stop the manufacture of clones and sew up the PC market for themselves. ;)
 
Werewolf said:
I remember some of the 486's used to have it, and the fancier ones would also have an LED display prowdly showing it's current speed as 99 or 66 ;)

The memories :)

I had that. Oddly though if I held down the reset button it would make the counter increase. Always had it set to 999 to impress the friends :D
 
lol brings back memories of my very first PC, something like a 386 FX? I remember having a conversation with my mate and trying to figure out how you'd ever fill up an 80MB hard drive ;)

And the turbo button rocked for crazy pacman antics :D
 
My first PC had a massive 10mb hard drive with it's own disk controller card. To be fair - in those days files were not of the outrageous size that they are now.
The old adage of give people more space and they will fill it still holds true. :o
 
Papa Lazarou said:
Nah a Diamond Stealth would be earlier than that :)

From memory, a Diamond Stealth 32 used a Tseng Labs chipset. A Diamond Stealth 64 used an S3 Trio 64. A Diamond Stealth 3D used an S3 3DVirge chipset for supposedly 3D acceleration (although it was actually so bad, the processor generally did a better job!!).

If it was one of these it would be highly unlikely to have 64mb ram. 4mb would probably be more like it!

Well, we both appear to be wrong :p
There is no way any of the earlier Stealth series would have had anything near that amount of RAM.
From a Google ferret, the only 64mb PCI card by them would appear to be one produced after they went originally went bust & the brand was bought by somone else- A Radeon 7000.

-Leezer-
 
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