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 3

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...)