Jackal1983 wrote on 2023-07-19, 23:37:

his.lordship wrote on 2023-07-19, 13:59:

feipoa wrote on 2016-06-02, 09:27:

What speed MediaGXm are you using? Benchmark results for all GXm speeds are reported in the Ultimate 686 Benchmark Comparison. […]
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What speed MediaGXm are you using? Benchmark results for all GXm speeds are reported in the Ultimate 686 Benchmark Comparison. For example, the FPU ability of a GXm-266 is about that of a Pentium 133, while the ALU ability is similar to that of a Pentium 166. On the other hand, if you look at Quake (software mode), the GXm-266 equates to a Pentium 100. For Quake II, it is similar to a Pentium 120. The DOOM results for the GXm-266 are similar to a Pentium 200 or a Pentium MMX 166.

I found the integrated graphics to have horrendous quality, so I went with a PCI Banshee card. The integrated audio also sounded terrible, so I went with an ISA sound card. There is an ultra DMA driver, which works in Win98SE, but it was a pain to get it working. Ultimately, I use a PCI Ultra100 card.

There are some performance tweaks for the GXm. I have outlined them here, Register settings for various CPUs
One such tweak is enabling FP_FAST, which helps the FPU results. For example, DOS Quake scores went from 33.1 fps to 36.2 fps after enabling FP_FAST on the GXm.

Basically, the GXm has speeds similar to the Cyrix 5x86, but are about 10% slower on account of not having any L2 cache. What the GXm has going for it is MMX. What I found surprising was that they didn't bother to fix branch prediction, not even with a GXm at 266 MHz. Yet branch prediction works even on the 6x86-P90.

Hi,

Regarding the UDMA driver, did you ever get it to work? I am testing an IGEL-4 thinclient with board MB-5BLGP its the same as a neoware eon. I am using a 44 pin IDE hdd. When i fisrt updated the driver it gave me conflict in device manager and hdd stop showing on device manager under the disks section. Then since this board only has 1 ide connector i set the controller driver settings to only use the primary IDE, rebooted and conflict went away, this disk showed up again and gave me the option to enable DMA. After enabling and rebooting the system hangs on the windows 98 boot screen, rebooting again and pressing escape there are no messages just hangs with blinking cursor. thanks.

I've had the same issue with a ECS P5GX-M. I'm guessing the reference drivers are hit and miss for DMA compatability and the OEMs modified them to work for their individual use case. I'd see if you could hunt down the driver package that shipped with your thin client.

Thanks. I dont think there are much different drivers around, unfortunately. Besides the official driver package i have a couple loose files but i think they are the same. Now that i think about it seems that the driver package doesnt even contain the udma driver, i think i grabbed it from Philscomputerlab website. Anyway i am now testing on this paricular machine, it seemed like an easier mod for fitting my gravis pnp but only now i am encountering some posts about gus incompatabilities as well, however didnt get there anyway, lets see how it does 😀 i am trying sort this dma thing now, however this is just to say that i have another less common thin client with the same cpu chipset combo, an esesix thintune, that i recall being able to use the dma without issues, strange. Other things that i would like to ask, is regaring the atto disk speed test, i made a test and the max speed i got was just below 1.7MB are these speeds normal even with not using DMA? i feel windows 98se a bit heavy for this machine, i dont remeber it being like that on the esesix machine. I intend to try now with a compact flash card to see if dma works or the atto speed test are different.

Just forget about the on-board graphics, it's terribly slow. If you install a dedicated video and sound card you should get about pentium 100-120 performance out of your GXm200. I have one such build using a new old stock ECS P5GX mainboard I found on ebay - I'm currently running a GXm 266, S3 Virge DX, SB16 and a Voodoo 2. Most 1997-1998 games are perfectly playable, especially if you manage to enable branch prediction. The only games I'm having minor issues with are Command and Conquer and Red Alert windows 95 versions, and I have a hunch the problem is related to the IDE controller. The games freeze for a millisecond when loading in sound or graphics assets, but once it's loaded everything into ram both games run fine.

his.lordship wrote on 2023-07-20, 08:04:

Jackal1983 wrote on 2023-07-19, 23:37:

his.lordship wrote on 2023-07-19, 13:59:

Hi,

Regarding the UDMA driver, did you ever get it to work? I am testing an IGEL-4 thinclient with board MB-5BLGP its the same as a neoware eon. I am using a 44 pin IDE hdd. When i fisrt updated the driver it gave me conflict in device manager and hdd stop showing on device manager under the disks section. Then since this board only has 1 ide connector i set the controller driver settings to only use the primary IDE, rebooted and conflict went away, this disk showed up again and gave me the option to enable DMA. After enabling and rebooting the system hangs on the windows 98 boot screen, rebooting again and pressing escape there are no messages just hangs with blinking cursor. thanks.

I've had the same issue with a ECS P5GX-M. I'm guessing the reference drivers are hit and miss for DMA compatability and the OEMs modified them to work for their individual use case. I'd see if you could hunt down the driver package that shipped with your thin client.

Thanks. I dont think there are much different drivers around, unfortunately. Besides the official driver package i have a couple loose files but i think they are the same. Now that i think about it seems that the driver package doesnt even contain the udma driver, i think i grabbed it from Philscomputerlab website. Anyway i am now testing on this paricular machine, it seemed like an easier mod for fitting my gravis pnp but only now i am encountering some posts about gus incompatabilities as well, however didnt get there anyway, lets see how it does 😀 i am trying sort this dma thing now, however this is just to say that i have another less common thin client with the same cpu chipset combo, an esesix thintune, that i recall being able to use the dma without issues, strange. Other things that i would like to ask, is regaring the atto disk speed test, i made a test and the max speed i got was just below 1.7MB are these speeds normal even with not using DMA? i feel windows 98se a bit heavy for this machine, i dont remeber it being like that on the esesix machine. I intend to try now with a compact flash card to see if dma works or the atto speed test are different.

The only thing I didn't do was follow the directions in the driver package (putting the UDMA driver files on a floppy and all) to the letter. I didn't do any speed tests, but W98se wasn't a dog by any means. I was running a 266mhz GXm at 300 mhz with a /4 ram speed divider (lets you run the full 256 megs with speed similar to a 266 mhz with a /3 ram speed divider) however. I agree with the above poster: yeet the internal graphics. They were a truly interesting glimpse of the future, but were barely adequate at the time for basic office shit. I'd recommend a Virge DX with some reasonably fast ram (so you can OC the core, it helps a lot) for good dos and 2D Windows compatability. Another option might be an Dell OEM Velocity 128, which would give you some appropriate 3D acceleration. The only reason I'd stick with the internal graphics would be if you had a Voodoo 1. It might be worth it to save a PCI slot.

Sorry for the delay; I've been on holiday.

From my recollection, the UDMA drivers that shipped with this motherboard weren't available or were not working properly. Attached are the updated drivers I tested years ago which worked with UDMA. I don't recall if I first installed the Cx5530 all-in-one driver first, or just went straight to the UDMA driver folder. I recall it gave me a little trouble, but ultimately worked once I determined how to make Windows 98 with respect to changing the IDE drivers.