I'd probably favor #1, but I'm sure that I would have fun with both of them. You can get adaptors and stuff pretty cheap on ebay, i often scan large part lots (Search in description as well). I recently won a large lot with like 20 scsi adaptors, loads of cables, several original boxed fans and more for 3 dollars.

Board 1. DX-50 boards were glitchy and spew RF interference.

Uh oh.
I'm looking for !DTK0003.CFG but it's not going to well...

I have a feeling the lack of configuration is why the adaptec utility won't see the SCSI card despite booting a floppy from it.

I'd stick the DX-50 in the EISA system. VLB doesn't *normally* work well at 50MHz.

Hmmm, that would give me more memory bandwidth but at the cost of processing power...
I'll benchmark it today if I can get the chance.

I did get EISA configured by renaming one of the OPTI config files so now the SCSI controller is seen and I get no warnings on bootup.

[Edit]
I cannot get my ST34555N formatted, sometimes it goes all the way to 100% and says "Error writing directory." or hangs.
The Adaptec low level formatter worked, I've created 3 partitions with fdisk but it's still failing every time.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I'd stick the DX-50 in the EISA system. VLB doesn't *normally* work well at 50MHz.

+1

The dx-50 is faster than the 66 in a lot of tasks, and if you have a proper motherboard to support it, it is actually a beast. Eisa is *almost* a sure bet of a quality performance motherboard.

Also, POST PICTURES!!!!

I'll see about pictures tomorrow. 😁
It's a pretty big board, right now I'm looking into some SCSI issues and possibly tracking down a new drive.

Also, if I weren't dirt poor there are a few 5v 100MHz 486 overdrives on eBay.
I wonder if they'd work at 50x2...

So...
How hot would a DX-50 get anyway?

I have a tonne of heatsinks and fans but as you all know socket 2/3 usually has no mounting mechanisms.
Would it get hot enough to melt glue from a glue stick?

The 66MHz overdrive that's in there now gets painfully hot, I wouldn't be comfortable running it for long now unless I find a fan for it.
I'm still not to happy about using a different EISA config than was intended, if I'm interpreting things right not all EISA slots can bus master and it seems to vary between boards which slots can/can't.

If anyone has !DTK0003.CFG I would love a copy.

I had a dx-50 board. (I wish I hadn't sold it tbh) I never had a heatsink on it but it would get very hot to the touch. A heatsink is ALWAYS beneficial. Ebay seems to have a few right now, from the cheap: http://www.ebay.com/itm/230774234743 to the overpriced but new: http://www.ebay.com/itm/250975677990

A standard 40mm fan will keep any 486 cool that has a permanent heatsink.

Yup the 486-50 could run heatsink free. 486-66 required a heatsink though AFAIK. These CPUs only have a power rating of around 6 Watts.

I like how the shipping is 26x the cost of the heatsink 😁
Luckily heatsinks are a dime a dozen, I just have to find out how to mount it without being permanent.

Also, before obsessing about network configuration and if you've got the correct packet driver; check first that all of the cables are plugged in...

[Edit]
I dunno man...

If you can get one of the magical overdrive chips, you can keep your eyes open for a VRM. I actually prefer using VRMs so that I choose my own chip. A Cyrix 5x86 will run well at 2x50, and a am5x86 will usually work well at 3x50. Occasionally you can find DX4 chips that will work fine at 2x50 as well.

Isn't the memory bandwidth a bit low?
I tried SimCity 2000 SE for Win 3.1 and even with accelerated mach32 drivers it's too slow to be playable.

🙁

[Edit]
If my tests are correct, my M919 board is much faster despite having no L2 cache.
😮

I tried the other board and it's the same deal, the main memory on the M919 is running faster than this board's L2...
Maybe I'll pop the DX-50 in the M919 and compare it's real world performance in Doom vs a DX2-66.

I had an M919 and I saw the same results. Without L2 cache the M919 has about 3 times faster memory bandwidth in speedsys than boards with L2 cache.
I don't understand the workings of the cache or Speedsys that lead to this conclusion. However, if you try 3dbench, a doom timedemo or some other benchmarks you'll find the M919 suffers in performance compared to boards with cache.

What's with the memory bandwidth difference though?
The 30 vs 72 pin memory?

If you can get one of the magical overdrive chips, you can keep your eyes open for a VRM. I actually prefer using VRMs so that I choose my own chip. A Cyrix 5x86 will run well at 2x50, and a am5x86 will usually work well at 3x50. Occasionally you can find DX4 chips that will work fine at 2x50 as well.

I've thought about that but I haven't even seen one of those 486 VRM boards, would a clock doubled/tripled chip even work in a board that doesn't support them?
If I weren't broke I would totally want a 5x86 to play with 😁

If your bios has an option to change L2 cache from "write back" to "write through" give that a try, my memory bandwidth goes from 33mb/s to 133mb/s along with fiddling ram timings.

I didn't see any options there to set the L2 mode, the 2nd screenshot is with the timings tightened as far as they would go.
Is your board using 30 pin simms?

DonutKing wrote:

I had an M919 and I saw the same results. Without L2 cache the M919 has about 3 times faster memory bandwidth in speedsys than boards with L2 cache.
I don't understand the workings of the cache or Speedsys that lead to this conclusion. However, if you try 3dbench, a doom timedemo or some other benchmarks you'll find the M919 suffers in performance compared to boards with cache.

DooM SE 1.9 timedemo 1 results:
----------------------------------------
486 DX-50 486-SV2 21 FPS
486 DX2-66 M919 25 FPS
486 DX-50 M919 2WS 20 FPS
486 DX-50 M919 1WS 22 FPS

It seems that doom favors raw clock speed vs memory bandwidth, I have no idea if L2 is having any effect but I'll try the other board with the 66MHz cpu later.

On the other hand, the M919 board is not stable at 0WS at 50MHz so maybe that is a factor in it's lower scores.
Unless the CL-GD5426 is bottlenecking everything...