We're talking 1000 MEGAHERTZ!

Saw this posted elsewhere and had to post it, as it reminds me of a time when technology releases were far more exciting, especially on the advertisement side of things! (Referring to PC components here )

One of my favorite commercials,

You chose Intel? YOU CHOSE WRONG DAVE!

ahaha yeah, I remember the turbo button on my first pc, from 33mhz to 133!!!11

You mean from 133 MHz to 33 MHz - many people don't know, but the turbo button REDUCED the speed of the CPU, not INCREASED. I did an article on the history of overclocking for TheOverclocker and covered the turbo button as well, one sec...

33 to 66 mhz is what I remember on the turbo button. 33 to 133 was a HUGE jump...

Anyway, those were the days!

I rushed out and bought a Dell Intel 1GHz machine when they came out. I don't remember what it cost. I still have it in the garage

A big problem with overclocking of the time was that as everything was running at the same clock speed and most software was tied to the system bus rather than using its own internal timer. Applications would often run faster than intended and rendered games unplayable. Other applications became unstable or refused to run at all. This is how the Turbo button seen on PCs from the 286 to 486 came to be. Contrary to popular belief, the Turbo button was not intended to run your system at a higher speed but rather to underclock it to a speed usable by older applications. As its purpose was misunderstood, Turbo was left enabled by most people who assumed application crashes were due to buggy code.

Click to expand...

Full article part 1 - TheOverclocker, page 20
Full article part 2 - TheOverclocker, page 18

It's a fairly long read covering a total of 12 pages, but it should be enlightening/educational/a good read/not a waste of time/(I'm doing in descending order of the outcome I'd like, I hope it doesn't go lower than that ). It took me a bloody age to write

If that was it's purpose, why would it come disabled? One would think to leave it at 66 mhz and press the button if there were issues.

I didn't read the artie, but, is that information sourced or just a theory?

That's the pretty well accepted understanding of it as far as I've known. Called it turbo to make it seem like you weren't slowing down your computer

EarthDog said:

If that was it's purpose, why would it come disabled? One would think to leave it at 66 mhz and press the button if there were issues.

I didn't read the artie, but, is that information sourced or just a theory?

Click to expand...

Absolutely EVERYTHING I ever wrote for TheOverclocker is sourced, the magazine is owned and run by a very good friend of mine so I have a vested interest in not uploading speculation (unless expressly stated)/inaccurate information. We're going back quite a long time and to an article that had literally hundreds of sources so I don't remember exactly which one I used, but here are several:

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/case/switchTurbo-c.html
http://superuser.com/questions/192891/what-was-the-purpose-of-the-turbo-button
http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/t/turbo.htm
http://www.quora.com/History-of-Computing/What-did-the-turbo-button-on-early-90s-PCs-do
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_button

Yes, I know some of those are wikis/sites where anyone can post anything, but you get the idea.

I went in confident I knew most of what there was to know about the history of overclocking, having started in the 90s myself. I was dished a very powerful dose of humility however, when I found out that many things existed prior to the commonly accepted first appearances For example, the first experience I had with BIOS overclocking was ABIT's SoftMenu III and from what I knew that was the first of it's kind. A lot of research later I found out that... I'm going out on a limb here, but I think it was EPoX that had an even older motherboard with BIOS overclocking, but then delving even deeper into the archives I found that ABIT actually introduced the original SoftMenu back in 1996.

Anandtech and Tom's proved to be very valuable resources, with both being old enough to have reviews online covering a good portion of what I needed. For older info my sources even included the likes of BYTE magazine and Computer Shopper UK magazine. All of these were used for hard facts only (eg getting the specs of a motherboard) and cross referenced online wherever possible once I knew what I was looking for. Anything which could not be cross referenced between at least two sources (even if one ended up being someone who once owned the item in question, or personal experience such as slocket adapters, pencil mods, Gold Finger Devices, etc) was left out.

I hope that gives you some understanding of my... How should be say, journalistic standards? If it's in the article, it's as factually correct as I could possibly manage.

From personal experience, they downclocked in order to alleviate clock speed issues with software (particularly games). A lot of people have the misconception that because it says turbo, it means higher clocks. The name is an intentional misnomer.

Turbo was a misnomer, as what it did was reduce the clock speed, not raise it. It was made for older games and software that relied on the clock speed of the CPU for timing purposes. The older software would run too fast on newer CPUs that were clocked much higher then the older CPU (I think it was around 12MHz the 8088 ran at), so the "Turbo" button would reduce the speed of these newer CPUs to a slower clock.

Turbo was enabled as default so yes when you "turned it on" then it was lowering clock. In my 386SX it was switching from 33 to 16MHz ... and I overclocked it to 40MHz. In these days more important was to have co-processor rather than higher CPU clock.

DEC's Alpha was the first 1GHz CPU. It came out years ahead of Intel or AMD's first 1 GHz CPU's
Who would've figured DEC would die back then?

I love going through old issues of maximum pc some of the stuff from the 90s really blows my mind like the usb cd organizer. If anyone wants to go through back issues you can do it via google books https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=maximum+pc