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If I remember correctly the AMD 386DX/40 sold for about the same price as the Intel 33 MHz part, was definitely faster in any benchmark, and in the same era whe

If I remember correctly the AMD 386DX/40 sold for about the same price as the Intel 33 MHz part, was definitely faster in any benchmark, and in the same era when a 486DX/25 and motherboard was a very expensive system, matched or outperformed the 486 in a few benchmarks. It was very popular around 1992-1993 or so. In terms of ratio of price/performance in the budget category, it would probably be analogous to a zen3 based $175 ryzen today installed on a $150 motherboard.

rasz 5y ago
386DX40 was somewhere between 486SX16 and 20 when running 32bit code. Both 386DX and 386SX executed 16bit code at very similar speed to 286 clock for clock. 486 arch as a straight up x2 speed increase. https://dependency-injection.com/the-slowest-486-vs-fastest-386/ https://dependency-injection.com/the-slowest-486-vs-fastest-... I have old 1994 catalogs listing AMD 386DX40 + motherboard (128KB cache) combo at a price point of three 1MB simm sticks, or one Intel 486DX25 processor, or one VLB graphic card, or one 14" VGA mono monitor :) 386SX with motherboard was 2/3 of that. I build whole 386 computer at the time spending pizza money on it (386DX40 + bunch of older used components). If you really wanted to compare it to today it would be more of a $40 board + $50 CPU situation while everyone buys $150 boards for their $200 CPUs.
- StillBored 5y ago
  So, I was there and made this purchasing decision too. And if you remove doom from the benchmarks you linked it matches what I remember. Which is that the AMD 386-40's where faster in pretty much all cases than the Intel 486SX-20's. They were also slightly cheaper at the time. And that fact gave me a terrible time deciding which one to buy, but in the end I got the 486 because it had two huge advantages. The first being that at the time, if one carefully selected the motherboard it was possible to overclock the 486SX-20's to 40Mhz and have a rock solid system. The second was the VLB was starting to be a thing. A 486 with a VLB graphics card was considerably faster than anything I would have been getting on the 386. And of course it was pretty clear that faster 486's could be plugged in, rather than requiring a motherboard upgrade. So IIRC, it was like an extra 15% difference in price to get a machine that was well over 2x faster. So, I saved my pennies and borrowed some from my parents and got the 486SX. It was rock solid for the next couple years until I managed to get my hands on a DX2. That was also my first overclocking experience and by far the largest increase I've ever managed. That machine is also probably the fastest booting x86, I've ever owned because it was running MRBIOS. The boot time to DOS was entirely limited by the HD spin-up time, and with a much later DX4-100 upgrade was one of my longest running linux firewall/network servers i've ever used until it died in the mid 2000's in a heat event. (well maybe the abit bp6 counts...)
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    MRBIOS was great. I flashed that onto a Pentium board (Elitegroup IIRC) and it even had an option for serial console!
  - rasz 5y ago
    >slightly cheaper Start of 1994 oem component prices: 386SX40, 0 cache motherboard ~$70 (mainly due to super cheap mobo) 386DX40, 128Kb cache motherboard ~$140 1MB 30pin simm ~$40 512KB SVGA ~$35 486SX20 CPU ~$150 486 VLB motherboard ~$150 486DX33, VLB motherboard ~$450 486DX2/66, VLB motherboard ~$650 486DX2/66, PCI motherboard ~$850 4MB 72pin simm ~$170 1MB ET4000/S3C805/CL5428 VLB card ~$150 2MV VLB card with 2D windows acceleration ~$300 Jump from 386 to the cheapest 486 was x2 the cost of main components, ~$200-300.

rasz 5y ago

386DX40 was somewhere between 486SX16 and 20 when running 32bit code. Both 386DX and 386SX executed 16bit code at very similar speed to 286 clock for clock. 486 arch as a straight up x2 speed increase. https://dependency-injection.com/the-slowest-486-vs-fastest-386/ https://dependency-injection.com/the-slowest-486-vs-fastest-... I have old 1994 catalogs listing AMD 386DX40 + motherboard (128KB cache) combo at a price point of three 1MB simm sticks, or one Intel 486DX25 processor, or one VLB graphic card, or one 14" VGA mono monitor :) 386SX with motherboard was 2/3 of that. I build whole 386 computer at the time spending pizza money on it (386DX40 + bunch of older used components). If you really wanted to compare it to today it would be more of a $40 board + $50 CPU situation while everyone buys $150 boards for their $200 CPUs.

StillBored 5y ago
So, I was there and made this purchasing decision too. And if you remove doom from the benchmarks you linked it matches what I remember. Which is that the AMD 386-40's where faster in pretty much all cases than the Intel 486SX-20's. They were also slightly cheaper at the time. And that fact gave me a terrible time deciding which one to buy, but in the end I got the 486 because it had two huge advantages. The first being that at the time, if one carefully selected the motherboard it was possible to overclock the 486SX-20's to 40Mhz and have a rock solid system. The second was the VLB was starting to be a thing. A 486 with a VLB graphics card was considerably faster than anything I would have been getting on the 386. And of course it was pretty clear that faster 486's could be plugged in, rather than requiring a motherboard upgrade. So IIRC, it was like an extra 15% difference in price to get a machine that was well over 2x faster. So, I saved my pennies and borrowed some from my parents and got the 486SX. It was rock solid for the next couple years until I managed to get my hands on a DX2. That was also my first overclocking experience and by far the largest increase I've ever managed. That machine is also probably the fastest booting x86, I've ever owned because it was running MRBIOS. The boot time to DOS was entirely limited by the HD spin-up time, and with a much later DX4-100 upgrade was one of my longest running linux firewall/network servers i've ever used until it died in the mid 2000's in a heat event. (well maybe the abit bp6 counts...)
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  MRBIOS was great. I flashed that onto a Pentium board (Elitegroup IIRC) and it even had an option for serial console!
- rasz 5y ago
  >slightly cheaper Start of 1994 oem component prices: 386SX40, 0 cache motherboard ~$70 (mainly due to super cheap mobo) 386DX40, 128Kb cache motherboard ~$140 1MB 30pin simm ~$40 512KB SVGA ~$35 486SX20 CPU ~$150 486 VLB motherboard ~$150 486DX33, VLB motherboard ~$450 486DX2/66, VLB motherboard ~$650 486DX2/66, PCI motherboard ~$850 4MB 72pin simm ~$170 1MB ET4000/S3C805/CL5428 VLB card ~$150 2MV VLB card with 2D windows acceleration ~$300 Jump from 386 to the cheapest 486 was x2 the cost of main components, ~$200-300.