Turbo button on the old PCs....

quarryman

I remember on my Pentiums there used to be a TURBO! button that seemed to boost the CPU to a whopping 60MHz (from 30).

All a con, or was it actually doing anything?

unkel

quarryman wrote:

I remember on my Pentiums there used to be a TURBO! button that seemed to boost the CPU to a whopping 60MHz (from 30)

The first and slowest Pentium was already 60MHz

IIRC, the Turbo was a BIOS option to make the older generation (486) a bit quicker as in up the FSB from 33MHz to 40MHz. Long time ago though and that was back in the time that a MB of RAM cost a fortune!

Laguna

I remember those PC's, back in 1st year of high school for me in 1995, my school was so scabby we were still using 486's with Windows 3.1 (with the Lotus 1-2-3 software suite) with a turbo button that jumped the speed from 8mHz to 33mHz.. lol, what made me laugh about the whole turbo button was, why would you ever not be using the PC on turbo mode?, the manufacturers think that one day you might wanna take it easy and chug along at 8mHz?!..

art

It was to make the PCs compatible with older software. The default was turbo. Non-turbo slowed the PC down to allow older stuff work at a usable speed (ie not too fast!).

irlrobins

yea ever play one of the old DOS games (Police Quest) that was designed to run on a 386 on a Pentium PC?

The whole thing went into warp drive!

Ah nostalgia....

Capt'n Midnight

art wrote:

It was to make the PCs compatible with older software. The default was turbo. Non-turbo slowed the PC down to allow older stuff work at a usable speed (ie not too fast!).

Turbo dropped the PC back to 8MHz or 10MHz depending on the multiplier used (8x4=32 many buses ran at 33 so 8.something) Was still too fast for older software by the time 486's came out because of cache (and possibly cpu's processing instructions in less clock cycles)
At 8MHz a 486 ran most XT apps much faster than an XT could ever do.

It was a bit like the Loudness buttons on old radios and amps. It was always on, the only time it was ever off was to when you wanted to see what you could be missing.

colm_mcm

i thought it was a bit like the "11" knob in spinal tap!

deckie27

My old 286 had a turbo button.
Man when u flipped the switch she flew from 8mhz right up to 12mhz
even without the turbo is was still to fast to play "Digger" (the reason i went to college )

Sparky

heres nostalgia

the old Acorn BBC micro computer, youd boot it up and youd see a owl blink.
played games mostly on it
how about this for specs. (i reckon my phone is faster)

Acorn Computer
TYPE Home Computer
ORIGIN United Kingdom
YEAR 1981
END OF PRODUCTION Unknown
BUILT IN LANGUAGE BBC Basic
KEYBOARD Full-stroke QWERTY keyboard, 64 keys, 10 function keys, arrow keys
CPU MOS 6502
SPEED 1.8 MHz
RAM Model 1 : 16 kb
Model B : 32 kb
Model B+ : 64 kb
ROM 32 kb
TEXT MODES 80 x 32/25 (2 colors) / 40 x 32/25 (2 or 4 colors) / 20 x 32 (16 colors) / 40 x 25 (Teletext display)
GRAPHIC MODES 640 x 256 (2 colors) / 320 x 256 (4 colors) / 160 x 256 (16 colors)
COLORS 16 (8 colors + flashing option)
SOUND 3 channels + 1 noise channel, 7 octaves
SIZE / WEIGHT 41 (W) x 34.5 (D) x 6.5 (H) cm / 3700 g
I/O PORTS UHF TV out, BNC video out, RGB vide out, RS423, Cassette, Analogue In (DB15), Econet port, TUBE interface, 1Mhz BUS, User port, Printer port, Disk-drive connector
POWER SUPPLY Built-in switching PSU
PERIPHERALS Controler card for 1 to 4 5''1/4 F.D. drives (1 400 F.F)
Floppy disk unit 5''1/4 250 Ko. (3 900 F.F.)
Numerical cassette recorder 100 Ko. (3 000 F.F.)
Second 6502 microprocessor with card (3

http://img517.imageshack.us/img517/7409/acornbbcmastercompact11zx.jpg

but years ago we has an old ibm we used her for wordperfect, the we went and got a p486, god the case was massive, when you booted her up the hard drive was as loud as hell.
yeah windows 3.1 oh how we have moved forward

Capt'n Midnight

Wasn't the Beeb a 2Mhz machine ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro

64KB - but 16KB was lost to each of two roms, and the OS used some of the rest. see the memory map on http://kasoft.freeyellow.com/Central/Kasoft/Typeset/BBC/Ch48.html

Zero page (first 256 bytes) had shorter address and were faster but the system took a lot of it. And 32KB RAM - but 3.5KB at the bottom was used by system and up to 20KB used in "Hi Res" mode so you could end up with only 8.5KB for programs !

jozi

My boss still has one of them pcs with a turbo button!
Its something like 133mhz or something

How its still allive i dont know, the fan on the hs doesnt work since for ever, the case gets mad hot because of it.
It takes about 2-3 attempts to boot it into win98, cad is unstable as can be on it, anything else is to for that matter.

Jozi