this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
313 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37707 readers
406 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Some games/software expected/relied on a certain CPU speed to run correctly. If your computer was faster than that, the software would run too fast. The turbo button let you toggle between the maximum speed your computer could go, and the speed that the software needed/expected in order to run normally.
Basically, there was an actual reason for the turbo button, it wasn't just marketing on computers.
Indeed. As a silly example, I had a Pacman clone game that ran based on CPU cycle speed. I needed to turn the in-game speed setting way down and toggle turbo off to make it slow enough to be playable.
note: on most computers, it worked the opposite to how one would think. Turning it on slowed your cpu to around 33 MHz