First post, by Gahhhrrrlic
In my current Shuttle HOT-557 based system I am noticing some inefficiency or slowness that appears to be abnormal for the hardware. To summarize the rig:
HOT-557 Mobo
Pentium 120 (@133)
32 MB SIMM memory at 70nS
ISA ALWAYS IN-2000 SCSI adapter
ISA SB16 w/ dreamblaster wavetable
PCI ATI 3D RAGE II 2MB Graphics
PCI NIC
ISA MODEM
The items of biggest concern are the: CPU, SCSI, VIDEO, which all underperform. RAM is a question mark.
So going through the list, the motherboard features all appear to work, board has a fresh battery (Thanks Jed) and all slots function. For some reason only 1 of the 2 USBs work but I consider myself lucky that any of them work and this is probably irrelevant.
MOBO OK
The CPU appears slow to me. Benchmarking it in DOS puts it more on part with an AM586 @133 and certainly lower than a P133. DOS games that use software rendering such as System Shock still lag at 320 resolution. Sure it was unplayable on my 386 and now it is playable but it should be perfectly smooth and this is not the case. It still stutters a bit when lots of stuff is in view and is unplayable at 640 resolution. Quake at 320 is bordering on unplayable and stutters heavily. Zipping and unzipping files takes forever too. I just feel like it's either damaged, set incorrectly or being bottlenecked by something else.
CPU SLOW
The RAM is only SIMM RAM at 70 nS so I'm hoping the problem lies here. The mobo supports PC66 EDO DIMMS so I am going to grab 64MB of that at 60nS and see if that helps. I will also lower the timings in the BIOS. One thing to note too is that there is 256kb system cache but the expansion slot is not populated so I don't know if another 256k will help with cpu speed.
RAM UNKNOWN EFFECT
The SCSI card is abysmal. I don't know why. I've determined it is limiting my drive to 2GB - Fine, I'll live with that for now - However the transfer speeds are only 1-2 MB/s depending on whether it's read or write and I feel it should be faster. Is this an ISA bus bandwidth limitation? The card is set to asynchronous mode for improved transfer speeds. Windows 95 has built-in drivers for this card though I'll be damned if I can find newer ones. Windows takes too long to boot in my opinion and while I don't think this is affecting my games, it is theoretically possible. I think even 1MB/sec should be ok for games of that era with very small texture sizes anyway.
SCSI VERY SLOW
The sound blaster card is fantastic, aside from the usual Creative BS like clicking and popping once in a while.
SOUND OK
The video card sucks - but I mean more than it should. There's this game that was bundled with the 3D Expression cards called wipeout, which was supposed to be ATI's game, their tech demo so to speak, and I can barely get it playable at 320 resolution. It looks nothing like the promo videos and I am not even sure it's hardware accelerated on my computer, though I did select D3D HAL. I can't get Quake with the GL driver to work at all, even though the card should support 1.0 most games either look terrible or don't load with DX enabled. I know it's not broken though because DXDIAG passes all tests and my VRMAN TidalForces screensaver works ok at 640 resolution which also uses D3D HAL.
VIDEO SLOW
NIC IRRELEVANT
MODEM IRRELEVANT
So does anyone have any theories about what could be the root-cause or the main contributor to one or all of these slowdowns? I'm just trying different drivers to see if I can fix it that way at the moment.