Pentium OverDrive
The Pentium OverDrive was a microprocessor marketing brand name used by Intel, to cover a variety of consumer upgrade products sold in the mid 1990s. It was originally released for 486 motherboards, and later some Pentium sockets. Intel dropped the brand, as it failed to appeal to corporate buyers, and discouraged new system sales.
OverDrive for 486 Sockets
The Pentium OverDrive was claimed to enable 486 owners to upgrade their machines to Pentium performance, without the cost of having to replace the entire system. However, unless the motherboard had an adequate amount of high-speed cache memory, performance was typically disappointing. The OverDrive chips also produced a substantial amount of heat. The DX4, based on an older chip architecture, could be clocked to a higher frequency, and then typically ran faster. Third-party upgrade chips based on AMD 486 processors clocked to higher frequencies often offered superior performance and value.
PODP5V-63
- Introduced February 3 1995
- 235 pins, P24T pinout
- 5 volts
- 63 MHz on 25 MHz front side bus (25 × 2.5)
PODP5V-83
- Introduced October 1995
- 237 pins, P24T pinout
- 5 volts
- 83 MHz on 33 MHz front side bus (33 × 2.5)
OverDrive for Pentium Sockets
The original Pentium chips ran at higher voltages than later models, with a slower 60 or 66 MHz front side bus speed (Socket 4, 5 V). Although little known, Intel did in fact release an OverDrive chip for these sockets, that used an internal clock multiplier of 2, to change them to a "120/133" machine.
OverDrives for the Pentium 75, 90 and 100 were also released (Socket 5, 3.3 V), running at 125, 150 and 166 MHz (clock multiplier of 2.5). The 125 is an oddity, because Intel never made a Pentium 125 as a stand-alone processor. A version was produced for Pentium 120 and 133 owners which ran at speeds of 180 and 200 MHz respectively and included MMX technology.
OverDrive for Pentium Pro sockets
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A chip known as the Pentium II OverDrive was released as an upgrade path for Pentium Pro owners. This CPU had a 333 MHz core and 256 KB of integrated cache, running at full core speed (unlike the Pentium II cards where the cache ran at half of the core speed). This upgrade could be used in single and dual processor systems but not in systems with higher CPU counts.
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