On paper a 386sx is slower than a 386dx, and certainly is in terms of RAM access. But in practice you'd need some expensive hardware to fully take advantage of that speed, like EISA cards and a motherboard that supported them (or, MCA cards on one of the higher end IBM PS/2 models). The typical ISA cards of the era were limited to 8 MHz and 16 bits no matter what processor or motherboard you used.
The 386dx could also use a full 32-bit address space, whereas the 386sx had 24 address lines like the 286. But again, having more than 16 MB would have been expensive at the time.
> Windows 95 on a 386 CPU with enough RAM was alright.
I benchmarked it for PC Pro Magazine when it came out.
We had to borrow a 4MB 386SX from a friend of the editor's, as we had nothing that low-end left in the labs.
In our standard benchmarks, which used MS Word, MS Excel, PowerPoint, Illustrator, Photoshop, WinZip, and a few other real apps, Win95 1.0, not 95A or OSR2, was measurable faster than Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on MS-DOS 6.22, hand-optimised.
When it needed the RAM, 95 could shrink the disk cache to essentially nothing. (Maybe 4 kB or something.) Win3 could not do that.
It was SLOW but under heavy load it was quicker than Win3 on the lowest-end supported hardware.
Under light load, Win3 was quicker, but Win95 scaled down very impressively indeed.
