I think this question has been answered before, but i have looked through all SD books and can not find it. Is it true that on a PC the existence of the turbo button can be explained by the fact that people simply enjoy having buttons that say turbo on them? Is it true it has not point other than mindless amusement?
Turbo buttons are vestigal features from yesteryear (and, frankly, hardly appear anymore). Back in 286 time, manny games (and other software) were written with timing dependent on counting CPU cycles. As CPU’s leap frogged ahead in processing speed, these programs became difficult to use (eg., a wargame where you tracked a target with the arrow keys - on a “fast” CPU the crosshair became too sensitive for a typical person to use). Turbo buttons were used to downshift your machinne to the 8 MHz or so that your old game was written for so you could play.
Turbo buttons connect to a turbo feature on the board. You don’t have to connect it.
But its true like the poster said, they do work. So if you got a computer with one, your computer is pretty outdated…
Exactly as said above… any PC Pentium or later will not have this feature enabled. There may still be a case in use with the button but it will not be connected to anything.
Turning this button on would flush any cache chips as well as change the CPU into “8086 mode” which means it drops to 8Mhz.
If you feel that you must suffer, then plan your suffering carefully–as you choose your dreams, as you conceive your ancestors.
Many moons ago, I inherited responsibility for a server that for some reason seemed awfully sluggish. I finally ran benchmark tests to check how it was performing. The benchmarks reported it was actually running faster with the turbo switched off. Yep, the turbo switch had been wired backwards.
Just a quick clarification - some of the early Pentiums ( <= 66 MhZ generally ) do have turbo buttons. I’m servicing one right now as a matter of fact.
Going a little further back 8088/8086 PCs often had switches because 8MHz was the turbo speed. You’re dead on about game play being too fast. In addition there were also compatibility problems some expansion cards that would not work at speeds higher than the original 4.77MHz IBM PC and XT.
In more recent years, the “turbo” function raises the bus speed of the computer a couple of percent. From, say, 66 Mhz to 68.5.
Unless you built your own though, this isn’t really likely a feature you’d have.
Can the turbo button be wired to the on/off connector on an ATX power supply?
This sig not Y2K compliant. Happy 1900.
It can, but you’d have to push it twice to get it to work. Power buttons are momentary contact switches (‘closed’ only when your finger is on it) while the turbo switch is a double throw switch (push once to close, push again to open). The reset switch might work though.
However, I’ve never seen an ATX case with a Turbo button, and ATX motherboards don’t fit AT cases, so I don’t know why you’d want to do that…
ATX cases have TWO power switches. THey also usually have TWO wiring choices to the board.
Don’t connect it to a turbo button because the ATX power supply needs to detect the board properly thru its wiring before it comes on & the power saving features work thru that too.
My tower clone PC started out as a '386. It has gone through several motherboard changes and now has a board with an AMD K6-2 processor which can use either an AT or ATX power supply, which I upgraded (to a cheap ATX box) about a month ago (so, it’s really an AT-style case with an oddly configured motherboard but it does what I need it to do. OK, at work they’ve started calling me Frankenstein, but hey…). It works great, except when I shut down W95, and the system turns off the power supply when it shuts down. I have to unplug it before it will turn back on using the switch on the back of the power supply.
The turbo button is indeed a throwback to the early PC days, when processors could be switched from one bus speed to another. The classic Intel 8088 CPU, when installed on an ‘XT’ motherboard, could be switched from its standard 4.77 MHz speed to 8, 10 or 12 MHz, depending on chipset. Although a turbo switch serves no purpose now, at least in terms of speeding up the CPU, it is still a feature of AT-style cases I have bought as recently as a year ago. (Old habits tend to die hard in the hardware world.)
However, scr4 is incorrect in describing the turbo switch itself. It is NOT a ‘momentary contact’ switch, but rather a ‘push-on, push-off’ SPDT switch. scr4 may be thinking of the common ‘RESET’ button, which does activate a momentary contact switch.
I don’t know why fortune smiles on some and lets the rest go free…
T
Sorry, scr4!!! I just went back and reread what you posted, and you are indeed correct!!!
My humble apologies! :o
I don’t know why fortune smiles on some and lets the rest go free…
T
Yep, gaming seems to drive PC hardware faster more than anything else. Sure it’s nice to load that spreadsheet fast, but that 3D video card probably doesn’t help too much…
This reminds me of this old “Bouncing Babies” we had on our 8088. These babies would come shooting out the window of a flaming building, and you were supposed to move the firemen so they would catch the babies on their trampoline. When I tried playing the game on a 486/66, the babies would just stream out like from a fire hose. Of course, the computer demo was fast enough to keep fifty or so in the air at once…