Upgrading a (Compaq) 486 PC to a real Pentium!
1,033This is the "bonus" part 3 of my Compaq Deskpro 466 XL restoration and upgrade series! You can start with this video if you haven't seen the previous parts, but you may enjoy the earlier videos too:
Part 1: https://youtu.be/bE9Zi8tnHd8
Part 2: https://youtu.be/BFE7D8wk9AM
In this video, I'll be upgrading from the 486DX2-66 that this machine came with to a full Pentium 100. Compaq made that easy with the use of processor boards in their high-end workstations. Mainly this video is just about testing it out and seeing how much faster various things are with the new CPU - it's just a bit of fun.
I'm also testing a new VGA capture setup here, and while I think it worked well, the workflow I used definitely resulted in some blurriness in the final product. There's just a lot of scaling and compression going on at different points in the process - the output straight from the capture card is beautifully sharp. That means I just need to figure out how to minimize quality loss for future videos, but since the original video is so pristine, I should definitely be able to improve things for next time.
Keep in mind, though, that most of the time on YouTube, if you're seeing older games or DOS screens that look super-sharp, that's usually being done with emulation on a modern PC, not real hardware. This is real old hardware.
Enjoy!
Music:
Nico Staff - Walking in the Sky (YouTube Audio Library)
00:00 Intro
01:23 Explaining 486 upgrade options
03:50 Compaq's different approach
05:04 Explaining my (very simple) VGA capture setup
05:58 486 BIOS and benchmarks
09:04 486 DOS games
13:26 Replacing the processor board
14:30 Pentium BIOS and benchmarks
18:20 Pentium DOS games
22:15 Windows games
30:06 Conclusion