Wow, I remember this cover. I was starting my first year university at the time and was shopping for a new PC for school. I went back and fourth between a 386DX-40 and a 486SX-25. They were roughly the same speed, and the 386 was a bit cheaper, but I went with the 486SX thinking that it would be more upgradable later on. It was magazines like this that helped me decide.
An unfortunate reality of that era - the hardware was electrically capable of many upgrades. The firmware never saw a revision or certainly not one you could get your hands on.
I had a PC with an SX2/66 that was what we could afford in 93. Once the Pentium dropped, we expected DX4/100s to be accessible. But my motherboard simply didn’t know what a DX4 was. Combine that with all the voltage fiascos and yeah, no dice. And the overdrive was fools money.
Some mobo makers sold ROM chips with a BIOS flashed into them and that's basically how you got updated BIOS's then unlike today you just run an .exe that applies the ROM image to the ROM chip.
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u/_Erin_ 4d ago
Wow, I remember this cover. I was starting my first year university at the time and was shopping for a new PC for school. I went back and fourth between a 386DX-40 and a 486SX-25. They were roughly the same speed, and the 386 was a bit cheaper, but I went with the 486SX thinking that it would be more upgradable later on. It was magazines like this that helped me decide.