Hmmmm. Well maybe you could do some other benchmarks. Cachechk comes to mind. Maybe something that measures video card bus bandwidth / fillrate, like vidspeed. Or was it vspeed. It comes with Fastvid.

Anything else on PCI ? Do VGA and VESA SVGA games both run slow?

The Cyrix CPU can be troublesome if the board doesn't know what it is and set it up right. There are utils to see how the CPU is configured.

PCI for 486s was definitely not really a top-performance design on any chipset that I've read about.....

swaaye wrote:

Hmmmm. Well maybe you could do some benchmarks. Cachechk comes to mind. Maybe something that measures video card bus bandwidth / fillrate, like vidspeed. Or was it vspeed. It comes with Fastvid.

Anything else on PCI ? Do VGA and VESA SVGA games both run slow?

The Cyrix CPU can be troublesome if the board doesn't know what it is and set it up right. There are utils to see how the CPU is configured.

Norton Utilities 8 sysinfo shows all good performance but can't check video performance there....

Gonna test that other utils you mentioned

Just tested some plain VGA games...performance sucks there too 😜

The board came with this CPU, maybe the previous owner just threw it in without doing any serious testing... 😜

Wow did you disable cache or something? That's the only thing I can get my 486 to equally suck at by doing that.

I doubt the problem is the Cyrix 5x86. That's a good chip. It's probably just a crappy implementation of PCI on your motherboard. I've had PCI 486 boards like this too.

leileilol wrote:

Wow did you disable cache or something? That's the only thing I can get my 486 to equally suck at by doing that.

Nope, Cache is enabled

Starting to suspect the previous ownder has fiddled with the motherboard jumpers...

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I doubt the problem is the Cyrix 5x86. That's a good chip. It's probably just a crappy implementation of PCI on your motherboard. I've had PCI 486 boards like this too.

But the PCI performance can't be this bad? it's like I'm running a 386SX 16mhz....

The games are like watching a slideshow, I've noticed most PC compontents are crap from this era and below but it can't be this bad? 😵

This is the card I'm using (not think it does any difference though)

http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/hercul … s_s3virgedx.jpg

Amigaz, I was taking a look at your photo gallery and I noticed that the board you are using is an Asus 486SP3G with intel Saturn chipset. The board I was using which exhibited the same problems was an Asus 486AP4, which is based on a very similar intel chipset. Also of important note, the boards with the intel chipsets don't officially support non-intel CPUs, so that could be a source of problems, though on my 486AP4 I was using an intel DX4 at the time.

PS: I really like your Baby Screamer.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Amigaz, I was taking a look at your photo gallery and I noticed that the board you are using is an Asus 486SP3G with intel Saturn chipset. The board I was using which exhibited the same problems was an Asus 486AP4, which is based on a very similar intel chipset. Also of important note, the boards with the intel chipsets don't officially support non-intel CPUs, so that could be a source of problems, though on my 486AP4 I was using an intel DX4 at the time.

PS: I really like your Baby Screamer.

Please check my link at my initial post, there you'll see that it's not an intel based moobo..it uses UM8881F chipset

Don't think I own any intel based motherboard except a socket 7 motherboard I no longer own

Update:

Removed the Hercules Terminator 3D and installed a Hercules Dynamite Tseng ET6000....made a huge difference...got 6.4 in pcplayer benchmark which isn't great but it's better than 1.7-1.8 I got with the Virge based card....definately a related to what gfx card I use on this mobo...

Gonna try a Hercules Ark based chipset card next...if I find it, 🤣

Ah, was that link you provided not to your own personal collection?

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Ah, was that link you provided not to your own personal collection?

yep 😉

Just some nice pic I managed to "google out" from the www

bahh...only 1.9 with the Ark based Hercules Dynamite card in pcplayer benchmark...it must be gremlins inside this machine 😵

When using unvibe + pcplayer it resulted in a black screen + frozen PC

1.9 with a Hercules Stingray 128/3D.... 🤐

Time to throw on an AMD 5x86 133mhz and see what happens

Another update...

Installed an AMD 5x86 133mhz, gave me aprox. 20 points boost when benchmarking the CPU in Norton SI 8

The CPU change didn't change the crappy video performance though

My conclusion is that this motherboard is crap, it feels like I'm better off by using an ISA video card instead

*I can hear a persons voice ringing in my head (he's a member here): real 486 boards use ISA + VLB slots* 😉

Think I've found the problem....my board has fake L2 cache
Ran cachechk and speedsys 4.78, none of these reported an L2 cache

Didn't know Elitegroup Computers were crooks too back then?

ECS was worse back then than they are today. Fake cache was their specialty.
http://www.redhill.net.au/b/b-bad.html

swaaye wrote:

ECS was worse back then than they are today. Fake cache was their specialty.
http://www.redhill.net.au/b/b-bad.html

Arghh...it still amazes me how people could put up with these scams back then...
No wonder Amiga/Mac owners teased the PC ownders back then for their crap computers

This mother goes in the bin, that's for sure....it's not worth using as a doorstop 😢

I always thought the ECS boards were pretty high quality boards back in the 486 days. The UM8810P-AIO has a pretty good reputation as one of the better PCI 486 boards. It's possible that the fake cache chips on your board were put on by the retailer. PCChips on the other hand was/is a horrible company that invented the fake cache scam. I think several years ago ECS and PCChips merged, but they were not the same company when that board was made.

If I weren't so far away I'd be quite happy to take the board off your hands.