Amand Tihon
ltning#Overclocking time! One of my favourite 286es is getting a makeover!
This one has a weird chipset branded "Solutions", but it turns out it's really a bog-standard (but very cool!) C&T NEAT chipset. The board itself seems to be of the brand Cotek, but that's just going by the stickers on the BIOS and KBC. According to #TheRetroWeb however*, the brand is PCT - but no model name is to be found anywhere. The stock configuration of this board seems to be a 25MHz CPU with a 50MHz crystal driving it. So it's already a damned fast 286 - but there's no reason it can't go even faster!
Well, long story a bit shorter: After some extremely clumsy soldering on my part, I was able to replace the main 50MHz crystal with the Any_Clk, a custom, variable clock generator from MiGron**.
Turns out this machine is stable at 31.25MHz! Now if that doesn't take this 286 well into 386 performance territory, I don't know what will!
See the beautiful close-up pictures in this post (details in the alt-texts), and look for benchmarks and a hint of drama in the follow-ups!
Xenenic