10 Nov
2006
10 Nov
'06
1:21 p.m.
On 10 Nov 2006 at 14:23, Julian Wolfe wrote:
Apparently on the AT model, you needed to have an
early (1984) BIOS to make
it work, but yeah, I know the CPUs in the one I have are 10MHz bumped down
to 6.
There were stories of some folks clocking the 286 as high as 20 MHz.
I think IBM didn't want to be saddled with the support issues that
overclocking entailed, so they modified the BIOS to make the clock
speed check. If you knew someone with a PROM burner, it was easy to
patch out, however. Or you could kick the clock up after POST.
Some early Taiwanese PC clones had a jumper-selectable Turbo mode
that simply switched oscillators (or crystals) to a higher frequency.
Very crude--the time-of-day clock would run way too fast without a
TSR to scale things back.
That brings up an interesting question. Who was the first to apply
the word "turbo" to a CPU?
Cheers,
Chuck