Talk:Turbo button

Misleading
It was kind of stupid to have a turbo button that actually would just slow down the system, why didn't they just called it "slow" button instead? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.245.189.166 (talk) 13:37, 18 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Why would anybody in marketing ever call it a slow button? Eeekster (talk) 08:46, 4 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Because that would be a clear indication of the computer normally being so extremely fast that an average user may want to slow it down just to catch their breath eventually! :-) 81.88.210.197 (talk) 12:10, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
 * The argument about this makes no sense. Activating turbo mode always sped up the computer. It doesn't matter if the button is in vs. out to activate it. On some machines, it was active when the button was in. On other machines, it was active when the button was out. But there is never a situation where it is active and the computer is slower.
 * The only source of confusion is that sometimes the LED was on to indicate turbo mode was active, and sometimes it was on to indicate that turbo mode was inactive. It's got nothing to do with turbo mode "actually slowing down the CPU" or the button being in vs. out. It's just there were two different strategies for the indicator light.
 * Also the section about the inverted turbo button is exceedingly low quality and has zero citations. It should probably be removed, but for now I've just marked it as needing citations. --69.121.57.177 (talk) 16:11, 30 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Turbo was on by default. The button on my system when pressed would slow the CPU down so I could play older video games. This was my experience. But in looking at this following article, it looks like other people had the same experience:
 * https://www.howtogeek.com/678617/why-did-the-turbo-button-slow-down-your-pc-in-the-90s/ 2620:15C:2C5:12:E790:44:9C9B:53EF (talk) 22:26, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

What's up with the fight about whether "turbo" is the fast mode or the slow mode? Looks like a bunch of back and forth edits about engaging/disengaging turbo mode. My car has a "traction control" button that turns off traction control when you push it. The default is "enabled". Which one would you call "traction control mode"? The one where the driver assists are engaged, or the one where they are disengaged? Jaredforshey (talk) 18:44, 25 April 2022 (UTC)
 * People who don't know what turbo means. It was a "go faster" settting, on by default, that could be switched off.  Turbo is associated with speed. Disabling turbo would put computers in a slower mode.  2600:1700:CF90:18E0:211B:A014:8B4F:A7C5 (talk) 11:40, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

Most of the edits to try and say turbo is the slow mode were done by the one person, they seem to think they are right when all the evidence points to the contrary. I'm glad they seem to have given up for now. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Neo explorer84 (talk • contribs) 05:44, 15 March 2023 (UTC)


 * All the evidence? There is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Check out Clint Basingers from the LGR YouTube channel (whom I'd consider to be an expert in retrocomputing) video on turbo buttons, where he states:
 * 'It made sense to have the default boot setting be "turbo disabled" for most manufacturers, because otherwise you'd have lots of people using their computer at a slower speed all the time, not knowing they had to press the turbo button to run with the advertised performance!'
 * Note the term 'turbo disabled' corresponds to the faster CPU speed. He shows an example J-Bond 386 where the turbo button had been rewired, so pressing the turbo button would actually speed things up (to normal clock speeds). This means that originally, pressing the turbo button would have slowed things down. Jahtzee (talk) 18:36, 28 March 2023 (UTC)
 * No, xD 152.171.67.96 (talk) 17:18, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
 * All you are saying is just hearsay. I have just added extensive evidence as references in the article (from original motherboard manuals). Clint of LGR is wrong - his own video shows the correct setup (timestamp 4:26) - it shows a PC in normal (turbo) mode with the LED on and button pushed in. Neo explorer84 (talk) 01:36, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
 * Oh wait, you've deleted your account. (Also your youtube comments) - glad you gave up :) Neo explorer84 (talk) 01:39, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
 * Which references are new? Did you watch the video without audio? Clint says that the PC with the correct setup had been rewired.
 * Also, I'm not sure which YouTube account and comments you are referring to. My comment is still up and my account has not been deleted, as you can see. Jahtzee (talk) 08:59, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
 * I'd prefer if you added a page number to your references. The PDFs aren't text searchable and while skimming I didn't see any mentions regarding 'turbo' in the I/O section. Jahtzee (talk) 09:03, 29 May 2023 (UTC)

Genesis
It probably doesn't add anything to the article but I remember that On the Mega Drive (II) (overseas known as a Sega Genesis), you could get 3-button controllers with an additional row of buttons for six buttons total - rather confusingly only emitting three signals, unlike actual six-button controllers. The upper row of buttons were "turbo buttons" which pulsed quickly as described in the article, and had adjustable speed. For me as a small boy this was terrible, when my neighbour had one and I didn't. In Street Fighter II (turbo champion edition) he started picking characters like E Honda, who do special attacks if you just hold down one of the turbo buttons. (Minimum effort, maximum advantage. Of course, I promised to not play with him any more if he did that kind of rubbish - he stopped*) Anyway, I digress. The controller was called a pro-turbo controller or something to that effect.... Ah, it was so long ago...
 * And even after stopping the cheap playing, he still beat be 99.999% of the time that we played that game. Couldn't handle losing ;) For the record I came to read about the turbo button on the 80486's case, not the turbo button on a control pad. 125.236.211.165 (talk) 03:01, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Turbo button analog in modern PCs
Modern PCs still have the remnants of a turbo button. Granted, the clock speed of a PC no longer directly controls the speed of animation, as most multimedia applications' speeds are tied to the timer, video refresh, or audio playback. Nor does it have a button on the case. But PC operating systems still have a "power management settings" form, which has the same end result: a user-accessible way of underclocking a powered-on PC. --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 23:18, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

The modern use of underclocking is power savings or possibly lifetime extension. The Turbo Button was a hardware kludge to accommodate the then common practice of using CPU cycles to regulate the timing of real-time, user interface events. The primary defining characteristic of the turbo button is that it be a physical button, and neither BIOS settings nor acpi have that feature. A second defining characteristic was the ability to change clock speed while applications were actively running. Modern underclocking is either by BIOS or by software daemon and not a design equivalent to the Turbo Button. 130.207.76.74 (talk) 13:11, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

A power management applet can certainly "change clock speed while applications were actively running." And I wouldn't be surprised if some laptops provide a dedicated Fn-key combination for switching between "cool" and "fast" modes. I'd be happy with wording like the following: "Since the 1990s, most PC applications adjust automatically to faster or slower CPU speeds using time values from the operating system. However, some modern PCs that support ACPI allow the user to switch a PC's performance state between low- and high- performance modes." --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 02:05, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Origin of &ldquo;Turbo&rdquo; switch on early PCs that ran faster than the original 4.77 MHz.
It seems that there is something that this article could and should make much more clear about the original use of the &ldquo;Turbo&rdquo; switch on PCs. I could write it up, but it would all be from memory, with no sources to cite, so it would surely constitute &ldquo;Original Research&rdquo;. The original IBM PC, and its immediate successors, all ran an 8088 at 4.77 MHz. As was common at the time on all personal computer platforms, much software was written on the assumption that that was the processor and speed on which it would be run, and depended on timing loops where necessary to control the speed at which the program would run. This was particularly relevant to interactive games, which would become unplayable if they ran too fast, or to any software that needed to perform timing-sensitive operations.

When it became common for PCs to run faster than the original 4.77 MHz, such timing-sensitive software became unusable. Thus, the &ldquo;Turbo&rdquo; button came to be, which would slow the computer down to 4.77 Mhz so that it would run at the same speed as the original PC, and be able to run software that depended on the CPU speed for timing purposes.

Of course, as the technology advanced, and we got different, more advanced descendants of the 8088 with entirely different timing characteristics, and typically ran them at much higher speeds, the &ldquo;Turbo&rdquo; button ceased to be useful for its original purpose; even in &ldquo;non-turbo&rdquo; mode, such a computer still wouldn't have the right timing characteristics to properly run software that depended on the assumption that it was running on a 4.77 MHz 8088. But the &ldquo;Turbo&rdquo; button remained a feature of PCs for many, many years afterward, always providing, for no longer any real purpose, a way to slow the computer down to something less than its normal, optimal speed.

Bob Blaylock (talk) 20:45, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

I need to go hunt up some sources for this, but copy protection was one of the reasons for having a turbo switch: some copy protection schemes, which used time-sensitive checks for dongles or floppy disk defects, would not work at speeds above 4.77 - so the system was set to slow while the software initialized, and then could usually be sped up afterwards, once the copy protection checks were completed.

--Chris Tyler (talk) 15:27, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

33/66Mhz
While growing up, most computers I saw, of the ones that had a turbo button, actually had a numerical display that changed from 33 to 66Mhz. I do remember though, at least one instance that had jumpers to define what the double 7-segment display would show, so I guess it is possible that due to a preference of the people assembling computers where I lived back then, instead of displaying "HI"/"LO" they made them display the actual numbers associated with the two modes. --TiagoTiago (talk) 08:23, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Russian Spectrum clones
It's probably also worth noting that Russian clones of the ZX Spectrum, such as the Scorpion ZS-256 and Pentagon, also had a turbo button for backwards compatibility. So it applies to clones of not just the IBM PC.

ZoeB (talk) 19:03, 11 July 2024 (UTC)