Have tested a bunch of cards now on the 4134 board...have to write a detailed list of the board models and chipset.

To my suprise the Matrox card wasn't the fastest...the card that was fastest gave me another suprise

5u3 wrote:

@Amigaz: The ALI M1429G is indeed one of the older PCI chipsets (and most certainly the PCI bus is bridged to the VLB), so the g […]
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@Amigaz: The ALI M1429G is indeed one of the older PCI chipsets (and most certainly the PCI bus is bridged to the VLB), so the good performance is somewhat surprising. I'm wondering if the later M1439 and M1487 are even faster.

@keropi: The AGP implementation in AladdinV is a bit wobbly, but that doesn't affect DOS VBE modes that much.
Also, LFB modes should be faster than banked modes, not the other way around. Looks like some chipset features didn't get enabled by the BIOS...

BTW, my scores for the K6 system are a bit outdated since I forgot to enable write combining on the CPU. Here are my new K6-3+ scores:

AMD K6-3+, Asus P5A, Voodoo5 5500

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1      MHz | PCPBench score LFB (noLFB)
2-----------+-------------------------
3  66x2 133 |  25.1 (20.8)
4  66x4 266 |  45.6 (35.9)
5  66x5 333 |  53.9 (42.6)
6 100x4 400 |  67.9 (53.5)
7 100x5 500 |  80.7 (63.9)

And more scores coming up: When sorting through some old stuff I found an AMD 5x86! 😁
Of course I had to try it out on my 486 board.

AMD 5x86, Asus PVI-486SP3, S3 Trio64V+

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1     MHz | PCPBench score LFB (noLFB)
2---------+-------------------------
3 25x3  75 |  5.7 (5.1)
4 25x4 100 |  6.5 (6.0)
5 33x3 100 |  7.6 (6.9)
6 33x4 133 |  8.7 (8.0)
7 40x3 120 |  9.2 (8.3)
8 40x4 160 | 10.5 (9.6)

Meh. The weak FPU is really holding it back. 160 MHz and no chance for a big score 🤣

The the 5x86 works flawlessly in the Asus SP3 board?

Actually have that board and it's bother AP4 but my SP3 is just rev 1.2 and early chipset which means no BIOS updates 😖
I'm curious on how the Intel chipset performs on the AP4

btw. I actually own the Asus SCSI board that was optional with the SP3 and AP4 😁

Attached my testreport from the cards I've tried so far.
The report file sucks so please not nag on me how crappy it is 😁

Have a pile of other cards I'm going to try.
Also waiting for my AMD 486 DX4 120mhz to artrive..might cross the 11 score barrier then

rename test.txt to test.rtf to view it corectly.
So GX2 is the faster one... yeah it behaves very well, tested one too!

Amigaz wrote:

The the 5x86 works flawlessly in the Asus SP3 board?

Yes, it even is correctly recognized by the BIOS:

Performance also seems okay, here is a Speedsys bench at 160 MHz:

Amigaz wrote:

Actually have that board and it's bother AP4 but my SP3 is just rev 1.2 and early chipset which means no BIOS updates 😖

BIOS updates should work on revision 1.2 too, but they have to be equipped with either a SST PH29EE010 or a Winbond W29EE011 EPROM.
I flashed a rev. 1.2 board with version B2 chipset (496NU+497NS), and it worked fine. I keep it as a backup in case my "good" rev. 1.6 board dies.

Note that the 3.3V regulator for the CPU (U9/Q4) is a bit weak on rev. 1.2 boards. I already had to replace mine... and added a brutish heatsink to keep it cool:

Amigaz wrote:

I'm curious on how the Intel chipset performs on the AP4

According to an old C't Magazine test, this one should be a screamer. PCI transfer rates almost as good as the Saturn chipset, and VLB speed is reported to be excellent as well.
It just shares one flaw with all other Intel-based boards - FSB is limited to 33 MHz 🙄

BTW, your test results are very interesting. It supports the old saying that ET6000 and ARK2 are among the fastest, but the Virge GX2 is a surprise. I will look out for one of these...

Bummer, I get divide overflow when speedsys is run in dosbox.

@5u3

Seems like ASUS has removed the BIOS updates for the Sp3 board from their site...only the manual can be downloaded

Glad we still can find it here: http://www.elhvb.com/mobokive/Archive/index.html

I'm going to check what revision I have on my chipset etc and try and update..

Nice sst score you got there 😎

BIOS date from 1998?? I thought socket 3 design/life was buried back then

The weak voltage regulator might explain why I can't get my Pentium Overdrive to work neither on my AP4 or SP3 board and it gives me problems on my VL/I SV2G GX4 so it might be a general problems on the Asus boards?

After I've tested some more cards on the ALi chipset board I'm going to stress that Intel chipset on the Asus board 😁

The S3 Virge GX board should be faster on paper because of the faster RAM so that might explain the result

This is how the booring the GX2 card looks like

OK, I did more testing using MXK6OPT and NOLFB progs , and pcpbench scores are:

normal LFB mode : 45.3
with NOLFB only : 46,1
with NOLFB+MXK6OPT : 46.0
with MXK6OPT only : 59,3 !!!

guess what prog made it to my config.sys 🤣
..I wonder if windows perfomance is also affected by this...

Ah, something I can compare with; under DOSBox, my e8300 at stock 2.8GHz does 66.x in pcpbench.

Amigaz wrote:

BIOS date from 1998?? I thought socket 3 design/life was buried back then

Whoa, that reminded me that I still have the beta 0307 BIOS flashed. This version is indeed from 1998 and while I'm not really sure what it is supposed to fix, it introduces two annoying little bugs: Warm reboots via ctrl-alt-del fail when the CPU is in protected mode, and the turbo button does not work reliably any more.
Thanks for the hint, flashing back to 0306 now.

Amigaz wrote:

The weak voltage regulator might explain why I can't get my Pentium Overdrive to work neither on my AP4 or SP3 board and it gives me problems on my VL/I SV2G GX4 so it might be a general problems on the Asus boards?

Nope, the regulator can't be the problem in this case, because Socket 2/3 Pentium overdrives come with their own voltage regulator and only take 5V from the board, so the mainboard regulator does nothing...

keropi wrote:

guess what prog made it to my config.sys 🤣
..I wonder if windows perfomance is also affected by this...

There also are a couple of other programs to enable K6-2/3(+) features. I simply chose MXK6OPT, because it autodetects suitable MTRR ranges and is very simple to use. If you want to try out other utilities (also available for Windows), look here, here and here.

thanks 5u3!
the main prob with mxk6opt is that it cannot work with EMM386 , maybe I use setewb+k6wc1 in this section of my config.sys...

5u3 wrote:

Whoa, that reminded me that I still have the beta 0307 BIOS flashed. This version is indeed from 1998 and while I'm not really s […]
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Amigaz wrote:

BIOS date from 1998?? I thought socket 3 design/life was buried back then

Whoa, that reminded me that I still have the beta 0307 BIOS flashed. This version is indeed from 1998 and while I'm not really sure what it is supposed to fix, it introduces two annoying little bugs: Warm reboots via ctrl-alt-del fail when the CPU is in protected mode, and the turbo button does not work reliably any more.
Thanks for the hint, flashing back to 0306 now.

Amigaz wrote:

The weak voltage regulator might explain why I can't get my Pentium Overdrive to work neither on my AP4 or SP3 board and it gives me problems on my VL/I SV2G GX4 so it might be a general problems on the Asus boards?

Nope, the regulator can't be the problem in this case, because Socket 2/3 Pentium overdrives come with their own voltage regulator and only take 5V from the board, so the mainboard regulator does nothing...

keropi wrote:

guess what prog made it to my config.sys 🤣
..I wonder if windows perfomance is also affected by this...

There also are a couple of other programs to enable K6-2/3(+) features. I simply chose MXK6OPT, because it autodetects suitable MTRR ranges and is very simple to use. If you want to try out other utilities (also available for Windows), look here, here and here.

Really?

I thought the overdrive CPU's had a stepdown Vr from 5V to 3.45V?

On the AP4 mobo i have to set the CPU voltage to "3.6V cyrix voltage" for the Pentium Overdrive or 486DX4 Overdrive CPU to work...the system refuses to boot when set to "Intel 3.3V" jumper setting

btw. the PCI performance sucks on the AP4 mobo...did some tests with the same CPU and memory config I have on the Microstar mobo and I max out at only ~7.7-7.8 in pcplayer

Have done some tests on my ECS UM8810 mobo I'm going to post here soon....the results aren't stunning.

I second that. The AP4 is poopy.

keropi wrote:

OK, I did more testing using MXK6OPT

Lol, the man who has written MXK6OPT taught me computer architecture at the university. He knows almost everything about CPU architectures, listening to him talking about the evolution of the x86 processors is pure pleasure.