This card claims to make your IBM PC or XT five to ten times faster (Breakthru 286)

CPU replacements and accelerators were made for the PC and compatibles back in the 80s as a way to save some money on your initial investment while giving you performance boost. This card, the Breakthru 286 form PCSG Inc.p romises to give improve performance up to ten times. Does it deliver?

-- Info

Breakthru 286 by PCSG Inc.

-- Links

PC Magazine:

Drivers and manual:

VCF Forum post with more info:

Adrian's Digital Basement Merch store:

Adrian's Digital Basement ][ (Second Channel)

Support the channel on Patreon:

My GitHub repository:

-- Tools

Deoxit D5:

O-Ring Pick Set: (I use these to lift chips off boards)

Elenco Electronics LP-560 Logic Probe:

Hakko FR301 Desoldering Iron:

Rigol DS1054Z Four Channel Oscilloscope:

Head Worn Magnifying Goggles / Dual Lens Flip-In Head Magnifier:

TL866II Plus Chip Tester and EPROM Programmer: (The MiniPro)

TS100 Soldering Iron:

EEVBlog 121GW Multimeter:

DSLogic Basic Logic Analyzer:

Magnetic Screw Holder:

Universal ZIP sockets: (clones, used on my ZIF-64 test machine)

RetroTink 2X Upconverter: (to hook up something like a C64 to HDMI)

Plato (Clone) Side Cutters: (Order Five)

Heat Sinks:

Little squeezy bottles: (available elsewhere too)

--- Instructional videos

My video on chip removal without damage:

--- Music

Intro music and other tracks by:
Nathan Divino
@itsnathandivino

[adriansdigitalbasement]

Update: After making this video, I decided to try some faster oscillators on this board. Unbelievably, it seems to run perfectly stable with a 36mhz oscillator installed! (CPU running at 18mhz) I tried a 40mhz oscillator but it would no longer POST. Now remember I am using these possible "fake" and rebadged Harris 286 chips. They claim to be 20Mhz, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are 16mhz parts so that could be why it's not running them at a full 20Mhz. It could also be the components on the Breakthru 286 board. Either way, it's running the board more than double the original speed this board was designed to run it. I tried some more games including Silpheed and Prince of Persia, and they run smoothly, a noticeable improvement over the 12mhz I showed off in this video, and miles ahead of how they would run on a stock 4.77Mhz 8088. This card continues to impress!

[kennethjohnson]

PCSG, Inc. "Professional Computer Services Group." was founded in 1986, focusing on providing software development and IT consulting services. The company primarily served clients in sectors like finance, government, and healthcare. It is not clear when PCSG ceased operation and whether they went out of business or were acquired.

[cpm]

Prince of Persia on a 12MHz 286, is exactly what my college roommate had in the fall of 1990. We played it all the way to the end. In spring of '92, we downloaded Wolfenstein 3D and played that on there too.

[DIYDaveOK]

Our office updated a slew of original 8088 PC's with 386 speedup daughterboards and got a couple more years out of them. They offered a legit value proposition in that era.

[hinzster]

In the mid- to late 1980s I was programming a shift planner for hospitals, and my development machine was an original IBM PC XT (my boss was a former IBM employee, that's probably why he had an original and not a clone - IBM employees got hefty rebates). When it was time to present my work on a trade show for hospitals we were "partners" on the IBM stand, and the machine I was given to run it on was an (again original) IBM PC XT286, which was more like a real AT (actually a bit faster). I was blown away by the speed of that "beast".
On the last day of the conference the IBM people gathered around their /34 which they used to read company news. And they read about the machines that were to be announced the next monday - the IBM PS/2. And we (as partners) should actually not know that, but since it was only over the weekend they just told us to keep quiet about it at home until monday :D

[CaptainShiny]

I've seen the amount of effort some 286 boards require to get good performance out of them. What's most impressive to me is how - for the lack of a better word - plug and play this feels. Almost like a modern system.

[DanielB]

Hello Adrian from Germany.
An american neighbour who worked as a computer technichian somwhere at Ramstein Airbase gave me his Tandy 1000 system when he moved back to the USA. He told me that back in the day he payed over 8800$ for the whole system.
This Tandy 1000 had a ISA-Card built in which made it a 286 with - if I remember correctly - 2MB RAM.
Unfortunately I had to throw the computer away in the early 2000s because I had too much stuff stored in my parents house.
I wish I still have this nice machine today.

[nurmr]

It looks like BSS.SYS supports command line flags to enable caching. The manual mentions that this is useful if the machine won't boot with caching enabled, but works fine if it's enabled later. This may be why the BIOS caching jumper was disabled.

[cesibley]

I had an earlier version of this card, purchased in 1986 if I recall correctly. It was everything advertised. Benchmarked 7.2x faster than a stock XT when tested with Norton SI.

[RandomBSOD]

interesting voice-over technique @11:25 🙃 great video as usual 👍

[smokerich]

great to watch, it is long time ago I touched old stuff like this

[BurleyBoar]

The next level is custom upgrade motherboards for the 5150. I was happy to find a 5150 in a throwaway pile. The exciting part was finding a Hauppauge 386 MB in the system and a replacement power supply. It reminds me at the time the number of small shops selling so many upgrades in magazines. Every month had something new and weird and interesting. Thank you for working and setting up one of them up and showing it off.

[jeromethiel]

I used to work at computerland in the mid 80's. There were people who definitely wanted an authentic IBM computer, even though we also sold compatibles, and they were very compatible. I remember when the hooplah about the Compaq 386 releasing before IBM's version.

[frostwise]

I cant explain why but ive watched this twice and i just love it . top video

[drewnewby]

I definitely installed a few processor cards, and worked on systems with them, but I can't say I remember this specific brand. Thanks for the memories.

[JosephTyson]

Wow, this was a fun video. Thanks Adrian!

[memadmax]

You know what would be cool?

Strap one of those 286 > 386 thingies on this card.

[gwhizz]

Thankyou for posting this video. Very informative. My first PC had a 286XT mobo with 1MB Ram, and it made use of the extra 384KB Ram (above 640KB XT limit) to create a virtual ram-drive which was super fast compared to floppy drives. I'll have to find the old thing. Look forward to your next video.

[LeGoMyLegHo_yrsLater]

Most of the hardware on this channel is before or around my birth in 1988, it's so fun to see this ancient stuff in action!
An amazing benchmark to me would be a side by side comparison in video rendering. If even possible, because of codecs, software and hardware limitations.
I enjoy your videos, please keep making them.
Greetings on this beautiful Sunday from Germany :)

[jasonharmon]

I had a similar card but with a 386SX CPU, called the Sota 386si. I could be used in either 8088 or 8086 PCs, had an onboard memory cache, and the original CPU was plugged into a socket on the card so you could if necessary select between either the 386SX or the 8086/8088 via a toggle switch on the card slot cover. I used it in an 8Mhz IBM PS/2 Model 30, and it boosted the speed under Norton SI from 1.8 times XT speed to 18.7. The Sota board also had a connector for an optional 16MB ram expansion board (the "Memory 16i") which would allow full speed access to memory, including base and extended RAM.