The turbo button might sound like some silly gimmick that came with your new RGB headset,
but it was actually a fairly common and very important feature on older PCs.
But what exactly did it do, and why don't modern PCs also have a turbo button?
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
first place. It was named after the turbocharger in a high performance car, and just as a turbo
allows the engine to produce more power, the turbo button on a PC places the CPU
into a higher performance state. They're on a higher level, man.
Okay, so it's like a one button overclock? Well, not exactly.
You see, back in the day, programs that needed precise timing to function correctly
used the CPU's internal clock to figure out how fast to execute.
Oftentimes, the program would assume the computer had an original Intel 8086 CPU,
which only ran at 4.77 megahertz. But as the years went on, newer 286 and 386 CPUs started
to dominate. And because these processors had significantly faster clock speeds than the 8086,
older programs would simply run too fast. This led to really weird behavior, especially in games
where on-screen elements would fly around so quickly that games would become unplayable.
Your PC is too good! This is where the turbo button became very useful.
Instead of speeding the computer up, as the name would suggest, it was more common for turbo to
slow the computer down so that a program that was running way too fast would instead behave
properly with decorum. Of course, this often led to confusion, as on some machines,
having the turbo button pressed in would make it run slower.
To make it more clear which mode the PC was operating in, manufacturers would sometimes
build a little LED display into the case, which would either display the frequency the CPU was
running at, or a numerical code, or just the words high or low, to tell the user what state
the system was in. Although the problem was frustrating, the turbo button did make it easy
to solve with a single press. And one-click solutions such as these are still super important
in today's world. Even if you're managing servers, you can still accomplish large-scale tasks
quickly in this way. But why don't we have a turbo button on modern computers?
Well, the turbo button disappeared because of a major paradigm shift in how programs kept time.
As the 386 got older and we got into the era where 486 and Pentium machines dominated,
PCs were running at a much wider variety of clock speeds than before.
So, instead of relying on the CPU's clock speed, more modern programs use the computer's
real-time clock, the same one that gives you the time of day today.
This way, programs have consistent timing, no matter how fast or slow the CPU is running.
But even though a physical turbo button may be a thing of the past,
the concepts behind it live on in a few ways. Programs like DOSBox allow you to adjust the
virtual clock speed when emulating a retro game, while for other games,
community mods are available that can slow things down so they run properly.
And everybody stays nice and chill. We've even seen a few more contemporary
motherboards with a physical overclocking button. Just push it, and the CPU will run faster.
Kind of like what you'd think a turbo button would do, just from the name alone.
And of course, knowing your CPU's clock speed at any given moment can be very useful,
so you can tell if it's throttling or if your overclock is incorrectly enabled,
meaning there's no shortage of aftermarket displays you can buy that show your speed.
Kind of like what was built into the cases of those old 286 PCs.
Because of course, we need every single component lit up in unicorn vomit RGB out of the box,
but god forbid we actually include anything useful.
It's fine. And you know what else is fine? You.