First post, by feipoa
- Rank
- l33t++
As I have now finally completed setting up my 3 ultimate PCI-based 486 systems, I will be moving on. It took many years to fully optimise these systems. My next task is daunting - a fully optimised 386 with Ti486SXL. I have 5 or 6 different 386 boards to commence this journey with, various hi-end ISA graphic cards, boards needing a custom PS/2 mouse implementation, etc...
But before moving onto 386 optimisation, I thought I would undertake a system a bit more straight forward and in direct line with my obsessive interests - a Cyrix 5x86 running at 266 MHz. I will be using one of the better socket7gxm boards, an ECS P5GX-M. It has 2 PCI and 2 ISA slots. I've already confirmed that the onboard video and sound are fairly junky, so I will not be using them. Phil's site has a nice photo of the board here, http://www.philscomputerlab.com/cyrix-mediagx-cx5530.html
The Cyrix Media GXM-266 is from approx. mid-1999, a time when PII's and early PIII's were fairly mainstream. While the GXM-266 has an equivalent FPU of a P133 and ALU of a P166, I would like to see how far I can stretch its capabilities with the help of GPU 3D acceleration. I am looking for opinions and first hand experiences with PCI graphic cards on the MediaGX platform.
As has been noted with running more modern graphic cards on a 486, even with graphics cards which are severely CPU limited, the right graphic card/driver combination can turn an unplayable game into a playable one. A noteable example was running GLQuake with a MatroxG200 at only 15 fps compared to 28 fps with a GeForce2 MX400.
The target is demanding DOS 3D games as well as Windows 3D games, spanning a time-frame of 1995-1999. These are the PCI cards I have to consider which are not in a case:
ATI Rage 128 VR
ATI Rage 128 Pro
NVIDIA RIVA TNT (Creative)
NVIDIA RIVA TNT (Diamond V550)
NVIDIA TNT2 M64
NVIDIA GeForce 6200
Matrox Millennium G200
Matrox Millennium G450
Matrox Parhelia 256 PCI
3DLabs Permedia2
3DLabs Oxygen VX1
3dfx Voodoo Banshee
S3 Trio3D 4 MB
As for the 2nd PCI slot, I will either use an ATA controller, or use an NIC. I did find working UDMA drivers for this board, but I need to benchmark it still. I plan to make this a tri-boot system, with Win98SE, NT4, and W2K. 256 MB SDRAM.
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.