Do you know what speed your ISA bus is running at on your 286? overclocking the ISA bus seems to give a good boost to 3dbench scores due to the increased throughput.
If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.
wrote:Do you know what speed your ISA bus is running at on your 286? overclocking the ISA bus seems to give a good boost to 3dbench scores due to the increased throughput.
What'd be the best way to find out? The 286 seems to be allergic to most varieties of inventory/benchmark programs...
I don't know... my 386 has the manual which explains all the options, and my 486 has the settings silkscreened on the board so failing either of those 2 options I'm not sure how you'd tell...
If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.
Ah OK. Well I do have the manual here, and despite being quite thorough in describing every other part of the mobo, it says nothing about the speed of the ISA bus.
Edit: I suspect it would be fixed at the CPU's clock speed in such an old system?
Edit2: Found this: "It has the capability of communicating with I/O peripherals at 8MHz or slower while maintaining high speed for system operation"
I suspect it would be fixed at the CPU's clock speed in such an old system?
This is what I suspected, I've heard that some 20MHz 286 systems did this, although 20MHz is pretty out of spec for an ISA bus. It would certainly explain your high 3dbench scores.
But it sounds like yours just runs ISA at 8MHz async to the system bus.
If you've got jumpers to change it you can try fiddling with it and you can probably get even higher scores, although I found my ET4000 didn't like going above 12MHz. If you look in my 386 build thread RG100 had the same board as me, and got his ISA bus to run at 20MHz with a Cirrus Logic card, and scored a few extra points from it.
If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.
wrote:If you look in my 386 build thread RG100 had the same board as me, and got his ISA bus to run at 20MHz with a Cirrus Logic card, and scored a few extra points from it.
I also changed that mobo's factory installed 80 MHz oscillator for a 100 MHz unit, and subsequently got the bus to run at 25 MHz with that card. 😀
I tested again my 286/16. A few months ago it had scored 5.9 on 3dbench. The only difference is the vga. I replaced the oak card I had with a trident 8900(the oak was working ok, but it was too bright compared to all other cards, I don't know why...). Now it does 6.0fps 😀 That pc is so old, that it doesn't have many settings to adjust like the 386(isa bus speed etc). The only thing I noticed is a zero wait state option, which was disabled, but enabling it didn't change the score at all. Perhaps the isa bus speed is fixed on these.
Might as well contribute.
Intel-Pentium-66-2-133-Unknown-Unknown-Unknown-Unknown-PCI-GrafixMax 400 (Tseng labs ET 6000/6100)-2MB-Svenne-130
Intel C2D 2.8 GHz @ 3.0 GHz | ASUS P5KPL | ASUS GTS250 1 GB | 4GB DDR2-800 | 500 GB SATA | Win 7 Pro/Ubuntu 9.10
wrote:But it sounds like yours just runs ISA at 8MHz async to the system bus.
If you've got jumpers to change it you can try fiddling with it and you can probably get even higher scores, although I found my ET4000 didn't like going above 12MHz.
The board is pretty barren of jumpers, but I will check out the Zero Wait State BIOS option mentioned by Markk, the manual says this should offer a performance boost, can't hurt to try right?
wrote:Intel-486DX2-33-2-66-DataExpert-EXP4044-OPTI-256KB-ISA-Diamond Stealth 24-1MB-SquallStrife-27.7
Got a VLB video card for this sucker!
Intel-486DX2-33-2-66-DataExpert-EXP4044-OPTI-256KB-VLB-S3 805-1MB-SquallStrife-43.6
Have you fiddled with your timings/wait states? I was getting 52.6 in 3dbench on my DX2-66 with that VLB 805... you might be able to squeeze a bit more out of it yet 😀
If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.
wrote:I tested various ISA and PCI cards on one and the same board with identical Bios settings: […]
I tested various ISA and PCI cards on one and the same board with identical Bios settings:
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-PCI-2theMax Tseng ET6100-4MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:83,3
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-PCI-Hercules Dynamite128/V (Tseng ET6000)-4MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:83,3
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-PCI-Hercules Stingray 64/V (ARK2000MT)-2MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:83,3
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-PCI-Cirrus Logic GD5446-2MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:83,3
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-PCI-Matrox Millennium (MGA2064)-4MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:83,3
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-PCI-Number Nine GXE64 pro (S3 964)-4MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:83,3
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-PCI-Elsa Winner 1000 (S3 Trio64V+)-2MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:83,3
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-PCI-Elsa Winner 2000Pro/X (S3 968)-8MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:76,9
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-PCI-ATI Rage II +DVD-4MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:76,9
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-PCI-Integraphics IGA1680-4MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:71,4
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-PCI-Diamond Stealth 2500 (Alliance AT24)-2MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:71,4
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-PCI-Oak Spitfire-2MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:71,4
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-PCI-ATI Mach64-2MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:71,4AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-ISA-Diamond Speedstar64 (CL-GD5434)-2MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:38,4
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-ISA-Cirrus Logic GD5426/8-1MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:38,4
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-ISA-ATI Graphics Ultra (Mach32)-2MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:38,4
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-ISA-Tseng ET4000/W32-1MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:33,3
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-ISA-Elsa Winner 1000 (S3 805i)-2MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:33,3
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-ISA-ATI Graphics Xpression (Mach64)-2MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:33,3
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-ISA-V7 Mercury (S3 928)-2MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:33,3
AMD-5x86-33-4-133-Shuttle-HOT433-UMC8881-256kB-ISA-UMC 408-1MB-Defaults-BastlerMike Score:33,3
Any explanation what have in common the cards that have identical scores? They have different chips, so something other the the chip limits them - I wouldn't be surprised if it was bus speed, but this won't explain why we have a group that scores 83.3, another that scores 76.9 and 3rd 71.4. (Same for ISA - a 38.4 group and 33.3 group).
I'm only getting a score of 280 when booted in DOS, 525 in windows98 when I run 3dbench2. Running fastvid or 3dbench1 decreases or doesn't affect the score at all. Specs are
Athlon XP @ 920MHz (slot a)
voodoo 5500 agp
Any suggestions?
wrote:Any explanation what have in common the cards that have identical scores? They have different chips, so something other the the chip limits them - I wouldn't be surprised if it was bus speed, but this won't explain why we have a group that scores 83.3, another that scores 76.9 and 3rd 71.4. (Same for ISA - a 38.4 group and 33.3 group).
Could be a limitation of the 3DBench program perhaps? ie, its calculations aren't "sensitive" enough for different video cards?
Hmm interesting. I would agree, and also say it's a limitation. Remember version 1.0 maxes out at 99 fps, so maybe it's not that accurate at these high fps.
Might be worth trying 1.0c on these machines and see if we get better results...
AMD-K6-2-66-4.5-300-Tekram-P5T30-i430TX-512kB-PCI-ATi Rage LT Pro-8MB-Olivil-170.9
Isn't it kind of low for a K6-2@300MHz?
EDIT: Just tested this in Win98SE, I get 150.2 😦
Intel-Pentium III-133-10.5-1400-Intel-SDS2-ServerWorks ServerSet III HE-SL-None-Onboard-ATI Rage XL-4Mb-PeteUK-296.8
wrote:AMD-K6-2-66-4.5-300-Tekram-P5T30-i430TX-512kB-PCI-ATi Rage LT Pro-8MB-Olivil-170.9
Isn't it kind of low for a K6-2@300MHz?
EDIT: Just tested this in Win98SE, I get 150.2 😦
Do you have more then 64MB memory installed? The TX chipset can't cache any more then that.
Also running it on a 66Mhz fsb, it can be expected that the chip will have somewhat lower performance then when running @3x100
Yes I have 128MB of RAM, I also have only one stick, as I can't get one of my two SDRAM slot working. If I had a 64MB stick I'd get better performance?
wrote:Yes I have 128MB of RAM, I also have only one stick, as I can't get one of my two SDRAM slot working. If I had a 64MB stick I'd get better performance?
Yes, provided your rig isn't swapping to harddrive.
64MB sticks should be DIRT cheap these days, everyone wants at least 256MB PC-133 sticks. The 64MB sticks are all (virtually all) single sided and usually PC-100 or sometimes PC-133 (with the odd PC-66 stick mixed in between).
Try a 64MB PC-100 stick and (if your motherboard supports it) set the CAS latency down from 3 to 2 😉
Edit:There is 1 way around the cacheable area limit though, and that's getting a K6-III, K6-2+ or K6-III+ chip to run on your board.
