Ozzuneoj wrote:

Why not just do it? It only takes a few minutes to remove all cards except for the video card. […]
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Gahhhrrrlic wrote:

Not sure what else to do except to remove everything as suggested earlier and see if that fixes it.

Why not just do it? It only takes a few minutes to remove all cards except for the video card.

With all drives and cards removed, just boot from a DOS floppy and have speedsys or some other small program you've used for testing on a second disk. Then you can compare the performance with only the video card installed and booting from a fresh DOS disk.

If performance is still bad, try removing something else... anything you can possibly swap out (RAM sticks, CPU, PSU, etc.). Clear the CMOS (make sure it is cleared... if your time and date don't reset, then it isn't really cleared). If its still performing poorly with a different CPU, different RAM, different PSU and a freshly cleared BIOS, then the board may need a BIOS update or have some other kind of obscure problem.

So as an update, I removed all cards except the video and got the same cpu score. Then I swapped the video card with a slightly older mach64 card and the cpu score was still the same. Then I disabled the secondary IDE, serial ports, parallel port and put the FSB back to the stock 60 MHz and got 58 instead of 63, which makes sense for de-clocking but also means the overclock was not somehow causing the slow-down.

So I am running out of things to remove and turn off... I suppose the processor itself or the MB chipset itself could be malfunctioning but I find this weird since the computer operates very stable without any crashes or anything. The only oddity is speedsys says the processor is a P54C, when in fact it's a P54CQS but I don't think that's a big deal since it did correctly report the manufacturing process of 0.35um.

This is a tricky one to be sure.

what exactly did you doo to the bios/cmos so far please? what are your settings for the buses?

As has been mentioned several times previously, the ISA SCSI card is a no-go. PCI has roughly 8 times the throughput of ISA-16. CPU overhead was not a common concern...bus standards were. No one would have put an ISA I/O Controller in their PC in 1995.

I would recommend that you not waste any more time until you either get a PCI SCSI card or an IDE Hard Drive and try this again. Everything is pointing to a bottleneck that is not the CPU, Cache, RAM, or Video Card.

I don't see how a SCSI card would be causing a lower framerate in games. If 3D games with hardware acceleration are the only things running slowly then I would suspect a video card/driver issue. Did you benchmark any games with software rendering to see if they get a normal score for a Pentium 1?

You could try running the shareware TweakBIOS and see if there are any hidden chipset settings that might affect performance.

fitzpatr wrote:

As has been mentioned several times previously, the ISA SCSI card is a no-go. ... […]
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As has been mentioned several times previously, the ISA SCSI card is a no-go.

...

Everything is pointing to a bottleneck that is not the CPU, Cache, RAM, or Video Card.

I have to disagree. As evidenced by the fact that I completely gutted my computer, including its SCSI card, and got the exact same score, the presence of said card would seem completely irrelevant.

If the bottleneck isn't the CPU, Cache or RAM, then why do I still have it when ONLY those components remain in the system? I'm not among the smartest on Vogons certainly, but everything I've seen so far is pointing to a bus speed, BIOS, chipset or CPU problem. The video and CPU being anomalously slow, point to a data transfer problem common to both. With modern motherboards, the north bridge handles the CPU, RAM and Video. I don't know if this is the case in old computers that had PCI video - perhaps not - but maybe there's a common thread. I wish I had another CPU to test but unfortunately I don't have a surplus of CPUs laying around.

TweakBIOS ?? (eyebrow raised) Worth a look.

Gahhhrrrlic wrote:

I've determined that this page (http://vintage3d.org/rage2.php#sthash.cE2dVGSC.dpbs) is a good reference for me to follow, to see if my card is functioning properly. I think it's pretty clear from the benchmarks he ran, that it isn't putting out at full speed.

Gahhhrrrlic wrote:

fitzpatr wrote:

As has been mentioned several times previously, the ISA SCSI card is a no-go. ... […]
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As has been mentioned several times previously, the ISA SCSI card is a no-go.

...

Everything is pointing to a bottleneck that is not the CPU, Cache, RAM, or Video Card.

I have to disagree. As evidenced by the fact that I completely gutted my computer, including its SCSI card, and got the exact same score, the presence of said card would seem completely irrelevant.

If the bottleneck isn't the CPU, Cache or RAM, then why do I still have it when ONLY those components remain in the system? I'm not among the smartest on Vogons certainly, but everything I've seen so far is pointing to a bus speed, BIOS, chipset or CPU problem. The video and CPU being anomalously slow, point to a data transfer problem common to both. With modern motherboards, the north bridge handles the CPU, RAM and Video. I don't know if this is the case in old computers that had PCI video - perhaps not - but maybe there's a common thread. I wish I had another CPU to test but unfortunately I don't have a surplus of CPUs laying around.

I get what you're saying about data transfer, in relation to the northbridge, etc. There is definitely a bottleneck, but you seem to have thoroughly verified a number of things.

From your testing, your cache is working properly. I agree with you that with everything operating in a stable, yet slow, manner, it is unlikely to be a problem with the chipset/CPU. Don't get stuck on the Speedsys scores alone, but they could certainly be an indicator.

The RAM you're using is PC-66 CL2? Early SD-RAM was somewhat slower than Burst EDO RAM, so it could be wise to swap out with some PC-100 or PC-133 to give yourself some headroom.

You might be making a few assumptions that you can't necessarily make, in my opinion. One is that you can compare your system to the linked system. Without any specs being given about the benchmarking system, you only know that a Rage II can operate better than it is in your system as it stands (I couldn't find the test system's specifications). You cannot infer that your system is not operating correctly as a result. I found the Rage 2+ to be a comfortable fit in a Pentium MMX 233. Double, or so, the performance of your Pentium. It could very well be bottlenecked in your system.

The reason that I'm saying to change out the SCSI card is because a card being on the ISA bus could be introducing wait states or interrupts on the CPU, which could be slowing performance down in-game, especially under a Windows environment. Additionally, I've only found one source on this, but the ISA bus may only be able to use DMA on the first 16MB. You say that your CPU score didn't change even with the SCSI card removed, and that is interesting, but not conclusive.

Have you cleared the CMOS completely in accordance with the manual? The procedure depends upon which BIOS chip your board has.

Have you triple checked that all Jumpers are correct, and that all BIOS Settings are optimal?

Which OS are you using?

Can you provide pictures of your components?

Good luck.

Again, I think you are simply expecting too much of your system. You have a good 1995/96 pre-voodoo system ideal for duke nukem and that era of games. The rage 2 and pentium 133 simply can't play those sorts of games you're interested in

In this benchmark, they are getting 10fps in Mechwarrior 2
http://vintage3d.org/rage2.php

Here you can see the general effect of having a cpu that is too slow
https://www.philscomputerlab.com/voodoo-2-and … ng-project.html

oohms wrote:

Again, I think you are simply expecting too much of your system. You have a good 1995/96 pre-voodoo system ideal for duke nukem […]
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Again, I think you are simply expecting too much of your system. You have a good 1995/96 pre-voodoo system ideal for duke nukem and that era of games. The rage 2 and pentium 133 simply can't play those sorts of games you're interested in

In this benchmark, they are getting 10fps in Mechwarrior 2
http://vintage3d.org/rage2.php

Here you can see the general effect of having a cpu that is too slow
https://www.philscomputerlab.com/voodoo-2-and … ng-project.html

I was wondering myself whether the GPU was being limited by the CPU - most likely it is. I still don't know why the CPU isn't competing with the reference but in Phil's evaluation of Wipeout, he got decent framerates at 512 resolution using a P133 so I thought 320 should at lease be doable. Mind you, I don't have access to all the settings through the demo so who knows what's enabled.

Using Duke3d as an example, I am not getting a smooth framerate in 640 res, only 320.

PC-66 ram is the fastest the MB supports so unfortunately I cannot upgrade further.

Windows 95 OSR2. All jumpers checked to death. I haven't cleared the BIOS yet due to losing all my PCI/PNP settings but I have toggled just about everything and will probably end up resetting the BIOS anyway.

Dumb question about the video card? Is it integrated? If so, does it have its own memory chips?

fitzpatr wrote:

As has been mentioned several times previously, the ISA SCSI card is a no-go. PCI has roughly 8 times the throughput of ISA-16. CPU overhead was not a common concern...bus standards were. No one would have put an ISA I/O Controller in their PC in 1995.

All the SCSI complaints are nonsense (except if the controller used really sucks - hint: use one that can do bus mastering), as the SCSI speed is limited by the speed of the SCSI bus, not the ISA or PCI bus. For SCSI-1, that's 3.5-5 MB/s, SCSI-2 is 10 MB/s, and Fast/Wide SCSI-2 20 Mb/s (and this needs to be a PCI card by design). In practice, those speeds would be even lower...
Furthermore, on a SCSI system that boots from SCSI, all the drives would ideally be on the SCSI bus, including the CD-ROM drive.

Finally, ISA SCSI cards were quite commonplace in 1995 because many older VLB systems couldn't use three VLB cards at once despite having three VLB slots.

No it's not, the HOT 557 is a basic socket 7 board with i430VX chipset, 256KB of cache + COAST slot and dallas rtc

ISA doesn't support bus mastering; controllers that do this are a little suspect. PIO Mode 2 maxes out the bus (<5.33 MB/s) let alone SCSI-2, which might just do for a 486 but not a P120. It's right to distract people's attention here. 😀

Not totally sure how realistic the OP's goals are for the 2-megabyte ATI 3D Rage II. You definitely need proper hardware acceleration, like a Voodoo Graphics, for those types of games.

I'll try this myself to compare when I have time, just wait a bit ^^

firage wrote:

Not totally sure how realistic the OP's goals are for the 2-megabyte ATI 3D Rage II. You definitely need proper hardware acceleration, like a Voodoo Graphics, for those types of games.

More and more it's seeming to be not very realistic. However, I've tried to operate on the assumption that my goals are ATI's goals since they did market the card as a 3D accelerator. Presumably they were obligated at a bare minimum to ensure that there were at least 1 or 2 games in existence that would run well on it. I've been looking to find the crappiest games around that support DX5 to see if the card is actually working properly.

Hopefully Deksor can shed some light. I'll patiently wait for word on that.

No point in duelling on the graphics card and ISA SCSI until he figures out whats up with the CPU speed. Its way too low for a Pentium 120/133. I’d run a cachechk as a next step.

That's true, a 63 in Speedsys is about P90 level. Since neither cache is disabled, check the other BIOS settings.

So I did run speedsys using the same mobo, the same CPU (pentium 120) and a similar video card (ATi RAGE 2 +DVD with 4MB of RAM) and here are the results :

I also tested several configs like disabling L1 cache which made the score to reach the 20's, disabling the L2 cache which had no result on the results oddly enough, using EDO ram instead of SDRAM (made no difference). I also tried to set an 1.5x multiplier which gave me "68.x". Close enough, but still ...

For the BIOS I just used the "BIOS default" settings. And I'm using the latest revision of the BIOS. (you can grab it from here : http://www.win3x.org/win3board/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19462)

Hope it helps ...

Gahhhrrrlic wrote:

Using Duke3d as an example, I am not getting a smooth framerate in 640 res, only 320.

this should be running rather well in software mode, so gpu does not make much of a difference; you should hit 25-30fps imho by a quick google

Gahhhrrrlic wrote:

I haven't cleared the BIOS yet due to losing all my PCI/PNP settings but I have toggled just about everything and will probably end up resetting the BIOS anyway.

take note and do a reset; very many of those old biosen are buggy, nothing else but a reset will do in order to rule out;

Deksor wrote:

So I did run speedsys using the same mobo, the same CPU (pentium 120) and a similar video card (ATi RAGE 2 +DVD with 4MB of RAM) […]
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So I did run speedsys using the same mobo, the same CPU (pentium 120) and a similar video card (ATi RAGE 2 +DVD with 4MB of RAM) and here are the results :

HOT557.gif

I also tested several configs like disabling L1 cache which made the score to reach the 20's, disabling the L2 cache which had no result on the results oddly enough, using EDO ram instead of SDRAM (made no difference). I also tried to set an 1.5x multiplier which gave me "68.x". Close enough, but still ...

For the BIOS I just used the "BIOS default" settings. And I'm using the latest revision of the BIOS. (you can grab it from here : http://www.win3x.org/win3board/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19462)

Hope it helps ...

Well if there's any hope in hell of me fixing my computer, it's thanks to you. Against innumerable odds you not only have the same hardware to verify my issue but also a BIOS update too? Thanks a lot! I am upset my computer is a turd for no obvious reason but hopefully it's just the BIOS after all this.

Question: You have the BIOS voltage jumper settings reversed from what the manual says. Was this a typo in your post? Should I just leave the jumper alone? The voltage presumably was correct before so unless the new BIOS revision needs the voltage swapped (doubtful), I suspect I should leave it alone. Also, I believe I have 1.32 because of the big heatsink at the bottom of the board so I downloaded 55XWUQ0E. Hopefully this is the recommended one. I will try after dinner.

Just for thoroughness, I set the entire BIOS to defaults and no difference in score.

Well... I guess it's over. I flashed the BIOS to the latest version and I'm still getting the same score. I guess something on the board or the CPU is damaged. Odd that the computer should work fine in every way but just at 60% speed. Oh well. I guess I should be grateful that it works at all. DX5 isn't the be all and end all. I can still enjoy all my dos games that wouldn't run on my 386. That's something anyway.

The only other unorthodox thing is the Green PC feature; not very likely, but I guess if the CPU were on Doze mode, it would be slower.