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.

486 sockets

The Pentium OverDrive is a heavily modified, 3.3 volt Pentium P54 core manufactured on 0.6 micrometer technology. It is fitted with a 486-compatible bus unit (though with an increased pin-count), an integrated heatsink and fan, and 32 kB of level 1 cache, double the 16 kB offered on regular P54C chips. As the data bus was effectively reduced to 32-bit width, per-clock performance was much lower than that of a 'regular' Pentium, though still substantially faster compared to a similarly-clocked 486 owing to the Pentium's architectural improvements, such as the much improved FPU. It was also equipped with an integrated 3.3 volt power regulator as many 486 motherboards only provided 5 volt power.