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Bought an Old Zenith 386 that I remember having as a kid and...

T-R-A said:
Just an FYI...most Win 3.1 games will need at least 4MB of RAM to do much of anything (you seem to suggest that you only have 1MB...which isn't even enough to use 386 Enhanced Mode)

https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/w/win3x.htm
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I don't know for sure because I have to get a new cmos battery for it cause luckily someone removed the old one and have to find a keyboard adapter too which I've already ordered both and then got to figure out if I can use some sort of SD adapter to use an SD Card as the HDD so I don't have to worry about getting an actual HDD for it and having it fail cause it is so old.
I only plan on Playing 3.5inch and 5.25inch floppy games on this machine it'll be my early DOS / and very early Windows 3.1 and 1.0 machine for 386 and earlier games.
 
I have a working Zenith 386, and it's "only" 16Mz. At the time that was blazing fast. ;)

AFAIK it has the same passive backplane as the Zenith 286 system. The memory & glue chips are all on one board, so all you have to do is pull out one cpu+memory card and drop a newer one in. Back then even PC turbo clones were relatively expensive, so a lot of companies experimented with the concept. These days it's usually cheaper just to buy a new motherboard.
 
Casey said:
I have a working Zenith 386, and it's "only" 16Mz. At the time that was blazing fast. ;)
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Actually, not really. https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=46350

Clock for clock, the 386DX was almost within error margin performance wise and the 386SX was a lot slower. What blew out the scale on the graphs was the use of the IIT 387, which is orders of magnitude faster than the Intel 387, but so were most 3rd party 387 chips.

It wouldn't have made much financial sense back in the day to get a 386 over a 286, unless you needed the extra features the 386 provided like 32 bit protected mode, virtual memory and a 4 GB address space. But those were limited use cases for years after the 386 was released. It wasn't until the late 486 and Pentium era that many of those features were widely used. The first Pentium was released in 1993 and we were still in Windows 3.1. It wouldn't be for another two years that Windows 95 was released.

Of course there was a lot of hype with the 386 being released, as with any major product launch from Intel since then, but they had to put lipstick on that pig, like they had to again with the release of the Pentium 4, and again with their latest string of CPU releases that have fallen flat.
 
They might have tweaked the old benchmark programs to make the 386 look better. All I know is that is screamed through the old Compaq DEMO.BAS program. I was floored when I read an article on the relative efficiency of the 8088 vs. the 6502.

I went from a 286-12 to a 386sx-20 (financial constraints) to a 486dx2-66. That held me a few years until I finally got a Pentium 90. Wow.

Just last week finally sprang for a 4 core box with (gasp) Windows 10. Hey, it arrived assembled & working. These days that counts for a lot to me.
 
Casey said:
They might have tweaked the old benchmark programs to make the 386 look better.
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Definitely wouldn't put it past Intel to do that, because they still do it today. Their 10th and 11th gen parts are power hungry heat monsters that put even the Pentium D to shame. They fudged a good number of their performance graphs to try and make their lipstick pig look better vs the AMD Ryzen 5000 series.

Casey said:
Just last week finally sprang for a 4 core box with (gasp) Windows 10. Hey, it arrived assembled & working. These days that counts for a lot to me.
Click to expand...

I've been on quads for over a decade now, and just upgraded to an i9-10850k 10 core/20 thread CPU. My server is an 8 core/16 thread Ryzen 7 2700x. I couldn't go back to a quad because I do so much multitasking. My previous i7-6700k was starting to feel slow. I'm probably going to upgrade to 32 GB of RAM soon because I'm running out with the VMs and applications I have running together.
 
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