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The turbo button might sound like some silly gimmick that came with your new RGB headset,

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but it was actually a fairly common and very important feature on older PCs.

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But what exactly did it do, and why don't modern PCs also have a turbo button?

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Like where the heck is my fun? To understand what this button did, it helps to know why they called it a turbo button in the

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first place. It was named after the turbocharger in a high performance car, and just as a turbo

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allows the engine to produce more power, the turbo button on a PC places the CPU

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into a higher performance state. They're on a higher level, man.

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Okay, so it's like a one button overclock? Well, not exactly.

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You see, back in the day, programs that needed precise timing to function correctly

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used the CPU's internal clock to figure out how fast to execute.

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Oftentimes, the program would assume the computer had an original Intel 8086 CPU,

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which only ran at 4.77 megahertz. But as the years went on, newer 286 and 386 CPUs started

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to dominate. And because these processors had significantly faster clock speeds than the 8086,

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older programs would simply run too fast. This led to really weird behavior, especially in games

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where on-screen elements would fly around so quickly that games would become unplayable.

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Your PC is too good! This is where the turbo button became very useful.

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Instead of speeding the computer up, as the name would suggest, it was more common for turbo to

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slow the computer down so that a program that was running way too fast would instead behave

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properly with decorum. Of course, this often led to confusion, as on some machines,

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having the turbo button pressed in would make it run slower.

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To make it more clear which mode the PC was operating in, manufacturers would sometimes

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build a little LED display into the case, which would either display the frequency the CPU was

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running at, or a numerical code, or just the words high or low, to tell the user what state

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the system was in. Although the problem was frustrating, the turbo button did make it easy

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to solve with a single press. And one-click solutions such as these are still super important

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in today's world. Even if you're managing servers, you can still accomplish large-scale tasks

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quickly in this way. But why don't we have a turbo button on modern computers?

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Well, the turbo button disappeared because of a major paradigm shift in how programs kept time.

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As the 386 got older and we got into the era where 486 and Pentium machines dominated,

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PCs were running at a much wider variety of clock speeds than before.

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So, instead of relying on the CPU's clock speed, more modern programs use the computer's

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real-time clock, the same one that gives you the time of day today.

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This way, programs have consistent timing, no matter how fast or slow the CPU is running.

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But even though a physical turbo button may be a thing of the past,

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the concepts behind it live on in a few ways. Programs like DOSBox allow you to adjust the

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virtual clock speed when emulating a retro game, while for other games,

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community mods are available that can slow things down so they run properly.

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And everybody stays nice and chill. We've even seen a few more contemporary

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motherboards with a physical overclocking button. Just push it, and the CPU will run faster.

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Kind of like what you'd think a turbo button would do, just from the name alone.

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And of course, knowing your CPU's clock speed at any given moment can be very useful,

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so you can tell if it's throttling or if your overclock is incorrectly enabled,

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meaning there's no shortage of aftermarket displays you can buy that show your speed.

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Kind of like what was built into the cases of those old 286 PCs.

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Because of course, we need every single component lit up in unicorn vomit RGB out of the box,

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but god forbid we actually include anything useful.

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It's fine. And you know what else is fine? You.