feipoa wrote:For a dual PPro system, going to IDE looses some cool points, even if it is just a CD-ROM. […]
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For a dual PPro system, going to IDE looses some cool points, even if it is just a CD-ROM.
Many SATA host controller cards have NT4 drivers. Did you dry DirectX5 for NT4?
Back in the day when I was using a dual PII-400 (late '98, early '99), I still found NT4 to be quite a bit faster than W2K. I un-upgraded and went back to NT4 shortly after installing W2K. I kept NT4 going for few more years before giving in to W2K.
Part of the fun these days of using NT4 is getting it running well.
Indeed. The IDE is just for testing at the moment. Also, I may have to use it. Turns out the IBM scsi cd drive I have does not play well with CD-R disks. I may just have to keep the IDE around, at least for the time being.
So far as I can tell. There is no difference in performance between 2K and NT4. I was just having too many issues with NT4 and drivers. Also, I HATE dealing with software, but I will faff about with hardware for hours on end. True story; I "upgraded" to windows 10 on my main machine months ago. I still have the default background and everything.
rgart wrote:Is that DOS Quake using the onboard S3 Trio64?
Do you have plans to install a different video card?
Did you end up sticking with Windows NT 4.0 ?
No, the S3 caps at ~16fps. The matrox has other tricks that allow FPS to be what it is, that include bios tricks. look at the ultimate 686 benchmark thread for more info on this.
yes I do. I have several canidates. the matrox 200, a Hercules 3D prophet 4000xt pci (info: http://www.amoretro.de/2011/10/hercules-3d-pr … wervr-kyro.html ), and somewhere I have an ATI 9250 on pci. I'm leaning towards #3 to be honest. Come to think of it, I do have a voodoo banshee. If I decide to dual-boot with dos it might be a better option.
No I will not. 2K is going to be a better fit for me.
moving on. I've done a bit more benchmarking with different drives. The results are dissapointing, but I am not exactly surprised. I've come to realize that devices that cache data suffer a stereo type that they always improve performance. It turns out, this is not one of those. I get a performance boost by putting the I960 into dumb bridge mode. In fact the 70mb/s I was getting went up to just over 90mb/s. Considering I'm using a pci video card, this is the top of performance I will see. I see the same performace boost in writing speeds as well. I tested this with three drives. The before mentioned 10k scsi and 5400rpm sata. I dug through my parts and located a 15k U320 drive and adaptor. This drive completely saturated the scsi channel at 40mbs. total flatline. I might move to this drive for booting, as its access times are going to be as close to 0 as possible without ssd.
The issue is, the cache/buffer is for SLOW devices. The cpu can just send all the data to the I960 and go do something else. The I960 will do its job while the cpu is doing its thing. The drives I have are just TOO FAST. The cache is always empty. So it just becomes a performance hinderance. Now, if I was using period hard drives, the situation might change. I have some old 40 and 80mb drives, I might just test them out doday for giggles to see if I can do anything with them.
Also, I was hoping that the I960 would enable the onboard scsi chip to be raid enabled. This so far does NOT seem to be the case. I had hoped to use a pair of 15k scsi drives in an simple stripe array as boot, but I could find no option to do so in the bios (scsi bios included)
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.