Creating a 386 Machine: A Deep Dive into Overclocking and Benchmarking

Between the speed modes, we will turn on and off caches and also change the multiplier. There are two main caches that we have to change - one is called the CPU cache, and the other one is called the motherboard cache. For example, in 386 mode, we turn both caches off. In contrast, in 486 mode, we leave the CPU cache off and turn on the multiple cache. However, in Panem mode, we turn on both caches but leave the multiplier at the 2x setting. Under full speed, we ramp up the clock speed by changing to multiply to 6X the CPU cache and motherboard cache.

The CPU cache can be configured through software. The tool I'm using is called SetMal, which can be downloaded from the description below. In Windows, the CPU cache can be changed in software while running at US speeds but the multiple cache can only be changed by bus. To change the multiplier, we can also use some software again, this time in DOS. We're using SetMal very easily and very straightforwardly to use.

In Panem mode, both caches are turned on, but we leave the multiplier at 2X. The motherboard cache is also configurable through BIOS settings - we need to look for options like L1 cache (CPU cache) and L2 cache (motherboard cache). Additionally, the CPU cache can be configured through software while running Windows at US speeds.

Using SetMal in DOS allows us to change the multiplier with ease. However, under full speed, we don't necessarily need to change the multiplier - leaving it at 1X provides a stable performance. In Windows, there's also a utility that can be used to adjust the multiplier. We've got a video footage here where you can see how it works.

To determine which game runs best in different speed modes, we need to experiment and find the optimal settings for each game. For example, Wing Commander performs poorly with the CPU cache enabled at 400 megahertz clock speed. However, disabling the CPU cache and reducing the multiplier to 133 megahertz resolves the issue.

Another game that has issues is Space Quest 5, even when the caches are disabled. Running at 133 megahertz with a reduced multiplier solves the problem. No video review is complete without some benchmarks. We're kicking it off with the hard drive benchmark ATTOh Disk Benchmark. The controller on this motherboard supports the ATA 66 standard, and we're getting close to that theoretical performance.

The SATA 2 audio controller is also in action here. We've got a DOS benchmark suite of the phone one computer with all four modes. You can use this benchmark to compare your existing machine with one built using similar methods. The VGA Benchmark Suite is being used for these benchmarks, which can be downloaded from the description below.

The Windows benchmarks are now shown. It's worth noting that I only benchmarked Windows with full speed and didn't slow down my computer during testing. However, this can vary depending on your specific situation and games. If you have a game that's speed-sensitive, you'll need to use similar methods and strategies to those employed in this video.

Finally, we overclock the processor using SetMal. A 550 megahertz version of the processor was tested with 2 volts for the core voltage. No issues were encountered at this setting, but stability could be improved by further reducing the clock speed. This approach can gain around 30% extra performance due to running the frontside bus at a lower speed.

In conclusion, creating a 386 machine that can play old DOS games smoothly requires careful consideration of cache settings and multiplier adjustments. By using the right software tools and tweaking the system settings, it's possible to achieve impressive performance levels in both Panem mode and full speed. Experimentation is key to finding the optimal settings for each game, and this article has provided a comprehensive guide on how to do so.

To get started with creating your own 386 machine, be sure to check out the links mentioned in the description below. If you're interested in learning more about SetMal or other software tools used in this project, subscribe to our channel for more content.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou well here I am in New York wondering how Sophia Hapgood get mixed up with Nazi spies it's today's paper glad you could join us i dispatched an enemy never thought I'd be glad to see a wing of plebs I'll time you guys showed up you know the drill now let's go out to the Courtyard for some target practice ready or bow knock an arrow and draw back the string by holding down the attack button make sure you draw all the way back or your shot will not have full power first blood ha okay let's do this let's build this computer just like in some of my last videos I'm going to use time-lapse to show you me building the computer and in the meantime I will talk about the components why I chose them anything to watch out for do check the description of this video any links are talked about any drivers any videos are referred to I'll put all the links in the description so let's start with talking about the case it's an a 1 a 1 - 9 - 3 - u3 + P very cheap 57 dollars and includes a 500 watt power supply it's good for 5.25 inch drive bays and one three-and-a-half quarter inch from external and internally you can put in six hard drives it's got the usual power LED a reset button hard drive LED so it's all there the supplied 500 watt power supplies of extreme quality the five non what rating doesn't do this power supply any justice in reality it's closer to 900 watts you can easily handle SLI and crossfire now let's be honest it is garbage but this computer draws very little power so it won't be a problem next up you have to insert the motherboard standoffs they come with the case in a little back as well as the 632 and the m3 screws I usually use a lot permanent marker and I just highlight the holes where the motherboard standoffs go I also insert the i/o shield and I use a little tool to just tighten those standards a little bit to make sure that everything is nice and secure the choice of motherboard and processor is very important the whole idea of this project is to end up with a computer that can run at four different speed modes so we will have a machine that can be turned into a 386 if 486 opinion and finally running at full speed the motherboard we need to use for this project is called a super socket 7 multiple and the main reason is to be compatible with the chip we're going to use it's an AMD k-6 2 + or AMD k63 plus because that chip allows you to set the processor cache through software as well as changed multiplier and that way we can configure our machine to run as a 386 486 pentium or at full speed the matter board I'm using is 2 gigabyte GA v aax very good motherboard but there are lots of other options I have reviewed a few super socket 7 motherboards that are suitable for this project I will put the reviews in the description the process I'm going for is the AMD k-6 3 plus 400 megahertz it is the 1.6 bolt version so it's very power efficient it has 256 kilobyte of cache so that helps with some of the later windows games so I'm just applying some thermal paste and attaching the cooler so that the processor doesn't overheat and it needs to be a k6 2 + or k6 3 plus in order to be able to change the CPU multiplier on the fly through software and that will work in Windows as well as indoors configure the motherboard with a 66 megahertz front side bus super socket onwards do support 100 megahertz front of us but we will have more flexibility if we go with the 66 megahertz front side bus set the multiplier to 6 X on the motherboard so that will give you the full speed which is 400 megahertz and then through software if we need to slow it down we'll just do that at this point I want to talk about the graphics card I'm going for three defects root of 3 3500 Dae GB version one downside of this card is it runs very hot so I've done a little MOT and I've done a video that shows you how to do it I put it down in the description it's a nice 80 millimeter fan keeps the card nice cool and quiet and because I have to do some cable management with the fan cables I'm doing that right now but there's lots lots to talk about the graphics card because there a lot of choices you have super socket several motherboards unknown for having chipsets that have some issues with AGP video cards and the 3 FX blue card although it's an HB card doesn't actually use any of the AGP features that means that you avoiding any chipset issues straight away so so this card is very highly compatible with super super socket seven machines the image quality is fantastic it's very compatible with early and later dos games it has really good performance with the AMD k-6 processes other graphics card the kafir graphics cards they need a fast processor to drive the pixels it is very compatible with the 3d games the three difficulty levels a card that every game developer every publisher made sure that their game was working with a voodoo card so you will not run into big issues with your games in terms of memory I'm using a twenty-eight megabyte PC 133 SDRAM stick you could go with some more memory but I found hundred 28 to be perfect for this machine all the games you've seen in the first part worked fine with 128 megabyte now comes another aspect of building that I don't enjoy particularly and that's figuring out the front header connectors so I printed out a little diagram and I'll label it beforehand and always challenge myself will it be able to hook up everything correctly and all the lights and everything will work on the first go in this case yes it did with the LEDs you're just got to be careful to have polarity so if an LED doesn't work just swap the cable around and it should come on after that all you have to do is put the motor port inside of the case and secure the motherboard using the screws through the standards for the sound card because this motherboard has a nice a slot and we are interested in toast gaming you should definitely go for a nice a sound card I'm going with the Yamaha audition 32 plus it's got a real opl3 chip wave table header no hanging note bucks and it's comparable with the windows sound system standard for some 16-bit high definition audio you can listen to a demonstration in the turrican 2 game in part 1 of this video for mini general midi to be precise I'm using the dream Blaster s1 that's a brand new wave table module that are a chap in Belgium has developed and is selling this device out of its website for 30 euros including postage really good sound very good value and definitely lifts the MIDI sound quality of this machine so I'm just inserting it into the machine and that's it we're ready to go for the next part so in this part we're going to have a look at some storage options I will insert a hard drive but also a hard drive bay which allows it to be easily removed we're going to install a DVD RW drive and as featured in lots of my videos a gotek floppy emulator which allows you to use a USB stick and have 100 floppy images on it very useful or highly recommended with every every system that I built now harddrive solution those who have watched my video before I'm using modern SATA hard drives in this case it's a 2 terabyte hard drive using Seagate ctools I've limited the capacity to 120 gigabytes so it's basically under 20 gigabyte hard drive and then I'm using a salah' to ID adapter to convert to the audio interface that's on the motherboard so this auditory Canora goes at the back of the hard drive bay so it's a removable Bay where you can pull out the hard drive the Duty Drive is a stock standard ID drive it's got CD analog audio port at the back because a lot of the games from this area will use a CD playback for music and now comes another activity I really don't enjoy a lot and that's hooking up all the power leads and doing a bit of cable management so we're going to put some power leads to the motherboard to our storage devices the floppy emulator the hard drive and also the DVD drive we also need to route the CD audio cable from the back of the CD dryer cd/dvd drive to the sound card for the CD to mix the CD audio output signal into the mixer of day sound card so I'm just going to fast forward everything and then we're going to move on today to the next part okay and now comes the moment we'll all be waiting for will it post will we get the post beep is everything workings of hooked it up to keyboard mouse speakers and why more time or just firing it up and making sure that everything works create everything is working so next I'm going to tweak the bias a little bit I usually start by loading default and then I do things such as Auto detecting the hard drive setting the boot order I usually disables the serial and the parallel port to free up some resources I enable USB keyboard support because I'm using a wireless logitech k400 keyboard to sit in the background and control everything and also setting the RAM timings to the fastest timing possible which is case latency to add a few other settings which you can just see on the screen you okay so we're ready to install windows I'm installing windows 98 s II this is going to be a really quick part I'm just going to fast forward everything once this is done I'm going to switch over to direct screen capture and show you how to install the drivers and configure Windows and ms-dos mode you okay so here I'm just enabling DMA mode for better harddrive performance you just do that through device manager it's a property of the hard drive tick the box press ok and then reboot your machine now what I did now is insert my USB flash drive which has all the drivers on it I didn't show installing the USB flash drive driver I'll put a link in the description week and get it from so you can see it just configures it and then I'll proceed to copy some of the drivers onto the desktop before installing the installations okay now I'm installing the video 3dfx driver so just run startup and everything gets installed okay next I'm running the overclock utility that will enable overclocking but also access to visiting options to enable and disable reason for direct X games and also OpenGL n client games next up I'm installing the Yamaha sound drivers I'm using the latest website drivers from the Ammar website I'll put in a link in my description so you can download it from there and this part is a bit tedious it evolves setting up ms-dos mode so you have a working Mouse cd-rom driver all the memory options conventional memory XMS memory EMS memory in ms-dos as well as a working sound card and all that now the steps are they're not hard but they're quite involving so rather than showing this in this video I've actually made a separate video that talks about configuring ms-dos mode and I'm just going to put a link to that in the description because otherwise this video is just going to be too long and too tedious but all the files are ready to copy/paste so you have a config service in an order exit batch files and you can just copy that as shown in the video and once you've done all that you can shut down into ms-dos mode and you'll get my our boot menu that has all the options for memory and if you want a mouse or a cd-rom drive it's the same boot menu I use in all my videos I've also got a version for playing ms-dos 6.22 if you're interested again I'll put a video link in the description and as you see it loads the cd-rom driver now the sound the sound card driver and the mouse is working and everything is good to go under ms-dos okay this is the last part of the video thank you for persevering it's quite a long video but I wanted to make sure that everything is contained in this video and that you can go up there and replicate what I'm showing you here so in order to switch between the speed modes we will turn on and off caches and also change the multiplier there are two main caches we have to change one is called the CPU cache and the other one is called the motherboard cache and for example 386 we turn both caches off whereas in the 486 we leave the CPU cache off and turn on the multiple cache in Panem mode we turn on both caches but we leave the multiplier at the 2x setting whereas under full speed we ramp up the clock speed by changing to multiply to 6 X the CPU cache and the motherboard cache can be changed in the BIOS you need to look for the options l1 cache which is the CPU cache and l2 cache which refers to the motherboard cache the CPU cache can also be configured through software the tool I'm using is called set mal and I will put a link in the description of where you can download it so the CPU cache can be changed in software while you're running Windows at us but the multiple cache can only be changed in the bus in order to change the multiplier we can also use some software again in DOS we're using set mal very easy and very straightforward to use in Windows you might actually not really have to change the multiplier at all just leave it at the full speed but if you need to change it there is a Windows utility I also put it down in the description and we've got a video footage here where you can see how it works and now all you need to do is figure out what game runs best at which speed mode for example I've got Wing Commander here if you have the CPU cache enable it is way too fast and another game that has issues is Space Quest 5 even with the caches are disabled if you're running at 400 megahertz clock speed it won't initialize the Sound Blaster it throws an error but if you reduce the multiplier and run at 133 megahertz then the Sound Blaster gets detected fine no video review is complete without some benchmarks so we're kicking it off with the hard drive benchmark ATT Oh disk benchmark the controller on this motherboard supports the ATA 66 standard and we're getting close to that theoretical performance so that's the modern hard drive together with the SATA 2 audio controller in action and here we have the DOS benchmarks of the phone one computer with all the four modes so you can use that and compare it with your existing 386 or what about the Machine you have and you just want to see you on how it stacks up the benchmark I'm using is the VGA benchmark suite I put together for a VGA database project I'll put a description the link you can download it it's a sip file it's got a a menu system you just have to push a few buttons and it does everything for you and spits out some results it's really easy to compare here we have the windows benchmarks now do note that I only benchmarked windows with full speed I ran in no internal situation where I had to slow down my computer so but that can vary if you do have a game that's a bit speed sensitive then you can use all the same methods and strategies strategies that we used under doors ok here we have some overclocking results now usually I don't like to overclock old hardware but in this case I'm making an exception because the processor makes it really so easy now do note that I went for five hundred fifty megahertz with two volts for the core voltage and II never released a 600 megahertz version and they did a 570 megahertz version with really odd frontside bus so I believe there's some internal limitation that prohibited prohibited them to reach 600 megahertz stabili or without insane voltage so I stopped at 550 and stability was fantastic I had no issues and you can gain around 30% of extra performance a bit of that has to do with running the frontside bus now at 100 megahertz but the downside is that at this setting you can't slow the Machine down as much so you have to redo some of the benchmarks and see where you end up but not everyone is into playing those old dos games and maybe you just want to have a Windows machine that is flexible enough to play some of the old dos games but still have as much performance as possible for Windows and in that case just reconfigure your jumpers on your motherboard and overclock that chip and that's it for this video thank you for watching if you made it all the way to the end I applaud you I really enjoyed doing this project hopefully you enjoyed watching it and maybe I can inspire a few of you out there to follow in my footsteps and build a similar machine as always hit that like button any questions any comments down below do check out the descriptions a lot of links to this project are in there and subscribe to my channel if you haven't done so\n"