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- Xref: sparky comp.arch:9062 comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware:22726
- Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
- Path: sparky!uunet!unislc!larsen
- From: larsen@unislc.uucp (Steve Larsen)
- Subject: Re: Does a 487sx shut down the 486sx??
- X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL5
- References: <1992Aug19.154816.19802@hemlock.cray.com>
- Message-ID: <1992Aug26.173154.21890@unislc.uucp>
- Organization: Unisys Corporation SLC
- Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 17:31:54 GMT
- Lines: 35
-
- Kevin Kramer (kak1@cray.com) wrote:
- : In article <1992Aug19.155448.18248@ilinx.wimsey.bc.ca> brian@ilinx.wimsey.bc.ca (Brian J. Murrell") writes:
- : >ks3l+@andrew.cmu.edu (Kenton Shaver) writes:
- : >
- : >>Could anyone clear this up for me?
- : >>I read it in some magazine, but my ECE
- : >>friend is credulous. Will my 487sx
- : >>just shut the 486sx down and take over?
- : >
- : >That's what I heard. IMHO the 486sx is a *big scam*.
- : >
- : >To get your 486sx you buy a chip which is a functional 486dx with the
- : >co-pro disabled (yes more work than a regular 486dx - yet cheaper!).
- : >At some point in the future you need the co-pro, so you buy a 487sx, which
- : >is just the regular 486dx with a 487sx stamp on it, which shuts down the
- : >486sx crippled chip and takes over the machine running it like the 486dx
- : >it should have been!!
- : >
- : >The above is all rumour I've heard from many sources, and read in a trade
- : >rag. It is not the gospel!!
- : >
- :
- : I don't think it involves more work to make the 486sx chips, they are probably
- : rejected chips because of a fault in the math coprocessor part. So they just
- : disable that section of the chip and now they can use what once was a bad
- : chip. It is a big scam IMHO, I can't see why anyone would buy one of these.
- :
- : Kevin
-
- Because right now, they are 1/3 the price of DX chips, and if you look
- around, you can find motherboards with the extra pin socket so that upgrading
- to the DX down the road is as simple as changing the CPU (and possibly the
- oscillator, depending on whether or not you change MHz, and whether your
- motherboard supports multiple oscillator frequencies).
-
-