Uncreative Labs

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I just bought a really interesting CPU upgrade for 80286 CPUs on eBay. It is a a Cyrix 486DLC board with socket for Math coprocessor (IIT FPU included). Both CPU and FPU are 40MHz parts. It seems that this module is for 12MHz 286 systems, and has a built in clock trippler to run CPU and FPU at 36MHz. It's very unusual, I have never seen anything like it before. It is made by a company called Buffalo that produces for Asian computer markets. I don't yet know much about this upgrade, except it is called Buffalo HRX 12T. You can see the auction here:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ih=013&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWN%3AIT&viewitem=&item=230139459163&rd=1&rd=1

I am not sure if there are any other goodies on the underside of the board, like possibly some L2 cache. However, what I am planning to do is remove the Cyrix DLC chip and pop on a TI486SXL instead, which is the same as the Cyrix but with 8kb L1 cache. Hell, I could probably even put on the Intel Rapidcads, but I think it's more useful to have the L1 cache than good FPU performance. Anyway, it'll be a while before I can do the testing, but I will certainly write here about it later.

Joined: 01 Oct 2004 Posts: 169 Location: behind you!

I seen one like this about 13 years ago at school. From the looks of it it has a standard 386 socket.

Find one of these
http://homepage3.nifty.com/sandy55/Interposer/386_upgrade.html#486%20Now

and upgrade the upgrade. Then find a turbochip133 and see if it will take.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Hmm...in this situation I probably wouldn't upgrade the upgrade, because I think since all of these boards have built in clock multipliers it could cause some problems. Now, if I could figure out how to disable the multiplier then we might be in business?

A 5x86-133 on an original 5170 motherboard would be something, wouldn't it?

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

What is rather unfortunate is that the CPUs are soldered directly onto the PCB rather than socketed. I could attempt to desolder them, but I think it isn't worth damaging something so unique.