This is a pretty interesting thread. I'm surprised I didn't notice it last year when it first popped up. In any case, I'm glad I finally got a chance to have a look
I'm pretty jealous that you got Win2K installed on your EISA system before me. I was planning to do so after I got a larger SCSI disk and another 128mb of RAM. It's only been like 8 years since I said I would do it, but it'll happen eventually. That's interesting that you said Win2K doesn't support the AHA 2740W. I have a feeling the NT4 driver would work fine. I had to do this kind of thing quite a bit when Win2K first came out.
I've experienced what you were talking about with memory counts going faster or slower depending on which graphics card is installed...on basically every 386/486 motherboard I have ever owned. I don't know why this happens. Do you think all VGA graphics modes are affected by this problem? I never bothered to check. The ET4000W32P I use in my EISA/VL board is crazy fast, so I never had a reason to check. I recommend trying one of these, or even an ARK1000 (if you can tolerate the shitty windows drivers).
You really need to do something about your memory timings. AT 33MHz I have no problem running in "fastest" mode. I think at 50MHz I ran "slow". It's probably related to either your tag RAMs, cache chips, or even using low quality or mismatched memory. I have server grade 60ns SIMMs in my board, with 12ns tag RAMs and 15ns cache. If you can wait until the summer, I might be able to send you a few spare 12ns tag RAMS (they're hard to get). Though, I have to check how many I still have left (originally I bought 50). I'm saving them for my future AMI Baby Screamer Mark V 386....Oh, one other thing to make sure of is that you fill the first 8 memory banks with match SIMMs. This board supports interleaved memory. Make sure it's enabled in the BIOS. It will double your DRAM scores.
Do you know what your motherboard revision is? I wonder if there are also different versions of the AMI BIOS too. Be patient with this board. I've found it to be no more or no less quirky than other 486 VL boards from 92/93, but it could be a turnoff if you're used to plug-n-pray. This board can be a beast when it's properly tuned. It's supposedly the fastest VL board ever made.
"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium