Mail Archives: djgpp/2009/01/11/12:30:39
"Rugxulo" <rugxulo AT gmail DOT com> wrote in message
news:66b3d054-4b29-497b-aea5-dcbae71865d3 AT s20g2000yqh DOT googlegroups DOT com...
> > > Old Cyrix chips (e.g. early 586s or whatever) couldn't even use unreal
> > > mode, which is yet another blow to such a weirdly useful hack.
> >
> > Really? I've got 5V Cyrix... DX2-50 (?, I think...) packed away around
> > here somewhere. I got it cheap, right after Cyrix's reputation was
damaged.
> > I never had any problems with it. I basically gave the cpu away a number
of
> > years later to a co-worker at the time. I installed it for him too. But,
> > he returned it about a month later saying his kids complained one of
their
> > games was "flaky" with it.
>
> I don't know if you mean ran slower or had electrical problems (hinted
> at by your other comments). I never had one, but from what I've read,
> the FPU on the Cyrix 6x86 was much slower than the Intel Pentium,
> hence Quake (compiled by DJGPP, no less) was too slow on that machine.
> So people who thought they were saving money on the Cyrix (which was
> cheaper, at the time) really couldn't play Quake, so they ended up
> playing stuff like Duke Nukem 3D instead (which ran perfectly fine).
I played both. But, I don't recall off-hand if it was on the Cyrix... I
recall the first cpu that my friends at the time thought DOOM ran well on as
being a "AMD DX2-75." Although that's what I recall, I can't find any
reference to this cpu ever existing, only AMD DX2-80 and Intel DX4-75... I
thought the next cpu I owned was a "DX2-133," but they weren't upto 133 yet
and the next cpu I had was in the 133Mhz class, but I don't know why I
would've gone with a DX2-66 when I had a DX2-50. One of the ones after that
was an odd one: DX4-120. I got it cheap too. The guy couldn't sell them
because everyone knew from the 120 that the cpu ran slower than the 133's...
Anyway, it was clock tripled on 40Mhz bus instead of like the DX4-133 which
was clock quadrupled on a 33Mhz bus. (You can find many references to the
DX4-133, just no photo's on any cpu collection site... Some sites indicate
this chip may have actually been an 5x86. I never saw the chip they used,
so I don't know why they were calling them DX4-133's.) Anyway, I almost
didn't get to use my DX4-120 cpu. My friends kept wanting to test it, buy
it from me, sell it back to me, borrow it for extended time periods, etc. I
can only guess at what they were doing: hoping the higher bus speed and
albeit lower cpu speed would produce better memory throughput for DOOM or
perhaps Quake. Yahoo pulls up comments that some people were able to run
this cpu at 160.
DX4-120
http://www.chipdb.org/cat-dx4-120-14.htm
Rod Pemberton
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