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POLL: How much RAM is sufficient for a 486 PC?

POLL: How much RAM is sufficient for a 486 PC?

  • 4MB

    Votes: 2 8.0%

  • 8MB

    Votes: 4 16.0%

  • 16MB

    Votes: 10 40.0%

  • 32+MB (depending on the motherboard)

    Votes: 9 36.0%
  • Total voters
    25
  • Poll closed .
R

retro-pc_user

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Joined
Oct 13, 2017
Messages
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Location
SE Michigan, USA
I have a Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus (PB450 Motherboard) that has 4MB on-board and 32MB SIMM-72 (2x 16MB SIMM-72 FPS) RAM installed running Windows 95C (with the boot selection to go to either MS-DOS, Safe Mode (DOS), or Windows 95C).

How much would suffice, especially for certain 486 motherboards?

Forgot to put the processor I have installed: Intel i486 DX4-100 OverDrive 5V

Also, I forgot to mention I'm using my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus for Windows and MS-DOS gaming (I have the emm386.exe RAM size set to 16384KB just in case for DOS).
 
Last edited:
My vote for 16MB although I have a DX4 with 32MB. More than that will be a total waste on a 486
 
I just threw in whatever I had laying around and ended up with 96mb. Way overkill but I don't feel like opening it up again to take some out
 
I always just maxed out the system I was using at the time so I always had enough
memory for what ever I was using..
 
If it has ISA slots and you plan to use any busmaster/DMA adapters, I wouldn't bother putting more than 16MB in.
 
Another improperly qualified poll: being a "486" doesn't determine the necessary RAM, nor does the motherboard. What are you going to run on it? That's all that matters.

Otherwise, as it is, 1Mb is sufficient.
 
Windows 95C for certain games. I can just keep 16MB of RAM inside and disable the 4MB on-board RAM. The system doesn't have L2 cache installed due to issues with it, mainly because the clock battery I had installed wasn't up to it, or just incorrect ones, but, same latency it supports.
 
KC9UDX said:
Another improperly qualified poll: being a "486" doesn't determine the necessary RAM, nor does the motherboard. What are you going to run on it? That's all that matters.

Otherwise, as it is, 1Mb is sufficient.
Click to expand...

Agreed. NT4 would crawl with 32MB. It would be smooth at 96MB. It's more the OS than the MoBo.
 
retro-pc_user said:
Windows 95C for certain games. I can just keep 16MB of RAM inside and disable the 4MB on-board RAM. The system doesn't have L2 cache installed due to issues with it, mainly because the clock battery I had installed wasn't up to it, or just incorrect ones, but, same latency it supports.
Click to expand...

Okay, thank you. I wonder if you can still edit the first post to include this. I'll have to retract my 4Mb vote, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about Windows95 to say what the right amount is. My gut says the more the better though.
 
Yeah this is very much dependent on OS and use case. I'd also say it depends on what speed of 486 we're talking about. A 20 or 25 probably wouldn't be able to run very much that requires more than 4MB RAM, possibly 8 if you wanted to run Windows 3.1 faster. Whereas a 66 or 100 (such as your case) would open up many more software possibilities, so why not go for 16+.

With DOS it gets trickier, because there are some games that will actually crash if you have more than 16MB, while some later ones can actually use more than that. So you gotta pick your poison.

I'm curious, does NT actually run ok with a 486 and sufficient RAM?
 
I use 32mb in my DOS PC but that uses a 200mhz K6... I know I could install Windows 98 SE but I'd rather leave it pure MS-DOS. I have a IBM P4 PC I use for 9x and XP games.
 
Most 486 probably shipped with 4 or 8MB of RAM and for DOS that's plenty. I tend to stick 32MB in any 486 that is going to run windows 3.1 heavily. Save Windows 95 for a Pentium machine.
 
I used PharLap extenders and Microway compilers for years with 386 and 486 with computers with 8MBytes of RAM to do computer generated images and compute satellite orbits.

These days- use the same tools on machines with 4GBytes of memory booted to real mode, but have not exceeded the need for 1GByte when processing image files. Most of my software runs in 256MBytes of Ram on ICOP embedded processors.
 
I would not be running 95 on a 486, but thats just me. yes it can be done, but 9x seems more Pentium or newer to me.
If you are running 9x go for broke on the ram.
 
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