There were a few vendors naming boards after ferocious creatures, and Pandas are terrifying, imagine one fell out of a tree onto you, that would be a very bad day.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-03-25, 18:27:

There were a few vendors naming boards after ferocious creatures, and Pandas are terrifying, imagine one fell out of a tree onto you, that would be a very bad day.

Ah yes, the most ferocious plantigrade in existence 😁

Imagine today some vendors rebranding an NVidia GeForce GPU as a unique, nature inspired, product: meet the nutria GeFrog 4090 Titanium Super AI Hype Edition.

Thanks God for those copyright enforcing laws, eh?

No, seriously... if somebody could write a story about all those fake or rebranded chips that flooded the PC market from the late 80s, I'd be the first to buy his book!

MSxyz wrote on 2024-03-26, 07:17:

Ah yes, the most ferocious plantigrade in existence :D […]
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BitWrangler wrote on 2024-03-25, 18:27:

There were a few vendors naming boards after ferocious creatures, and Pandas are terrifying, imagine one fell out of a tree onto you, that would be a very bad day.

Ah yes, the most ferocious plantigrade in existence 😁

Imagine today some vendors rebranding an NVidia GeForce GPU as a unique, nature inspired, product: meet the nutria GeFrog 4090 Titanium Super AI Hype Edition.

Thanks God for those copyright enforcing laws, eh?

No, seriously... if somebody could write a story about all those fake or rem branded chips that flooded the PC market from the late 80s, I'd be the first to buy his book!

*Cough* DropBear *Cough* would like to know your address to discuss this most ferocious of plantigrades.

Today I was able to do some more in depth test.

At the moment I'm using an ISA graphic card, a Geona Systems 7900B (Tseng ET4000AX), one of the best ISA cards of its era.

Results, however, are a bit disappointing in games.

Wolf3d Timedemo : 28,4 fps
Doom Timedemo (screenblocks=10) : 10.07 fps

I believe this motherboard runs the ISA slots at a fixed 7.159 Mhz. Memory transfer speed measured with VSPEED seems to hint at that:

1This is VideoSpeed v0.42 by Ilya Tumanov. Copyright(C) 1994,95.
2   CPU detection routines by Bobby Z. Copyright(C) 1994,95.
3
4CPU type       : Cyrix Cx486SLC - 40 MHz
5CPU perfomance : 14675 dhrystones per second
6VESA BIOS      : Not found.
7Block size     : Normal
8
9Measure results:
10
11Mode Xres Yres  Col  VFreq  HFreq Write16 Write32  Read16  Read32  BlkSize
12                      Hz     kHz   kb/s    kb/s     kb/s    kb/s    byte
13--------------------------------------------------------------------------
14004h  320  200    4  69.76  31.04   3379    3379     2177    2177    4096
15005h  320  200    4  69.76  31.45   3379    3379     2177    2179    4096
16006h  640  200    2  69.77  31.45   3379    3380     2257    2256    4096
1700dh  320  200   16  69.76  31.45   3379    3379     2264    2264    4096
1800eh  640  200   16  69.76  31.33   3379    3380     2254    2257    4096
1900fh  640  350    4  69.76  31.33   3379    3380     2260    2259    4096
20010h  640  350   16  69.76  31.45   3379    3380     2259    2260    4096
21011h  640  480    2  59.67  31.33   3379    3379     2253    2254    4096
22012h  640  480   16  59.66  31.44   3379    3379     2257    2254    4096
23013h  320  200  256  69.76  31.32   3379    3379     2615    2615    4096
24--------------------------------------------------------------------------
25End of test.

Tomorrow I'll swap the video card with a VLB model. I'm expecting a nice increase in FPS... north of 25% at least!

Where can i found this PC-Info program?

BjornHeimdall wrote on 2024-03-29, 20:12:

Where can i found this PC-Info program?

It is from a collection of old (and, sometimes, lesser known) benchmarks and utilities called BENCH_XT
https://brassicgamer.blogspot.com/2022/12/ben … er-systems.html

Landmark 6.0 and CheckIt 3 results. Last benchmarks before I remove the ISA ET4000 and swap it with a VLB ET4000W32

Update: I finally managed to install the VLB card

The operation was not without hassle. Upon powering up the PC for the first time, I was welcomed by a black screen and a cacophony of beeps. Disappointing, but -at least- the PC showed signs of life. Old cards and motherboards tend to have oxidised contacts or dust in the connectors, so I found that scrubbing the contacts with a solvent/cleaner and inserting and extracting the cards repeatedly from the slot usually does the trick. Anyone who had the 'pleasure' to work with VLB cards knows how difficult is to remove one from the slot; it takes patience and a good dose of strength, but not too much, else...

After around 10 minutes of fooling around with the card, I finally managed to have a picture on screen: the PC could complete the mem test but it would hang soon after the "press <DEL> to enter setup" prompt. I managed to enter the BIOS (by sheer luck after the nth attempt) and loaded the 'failsafe defaults'. Boom! The PC now booted MS DOS and seemed to run stable.

Now it was time for some guess work. I changed, one by one, all the settings in the BIOS back to the optimal state and rebooted after each change. It turned out it was the last (!!!) option in the advanced setup which caused the system to hang. The option reads "Delay ISA Cycle LDEVJ WS" and the system will hang unless I choose "3 CLK2" as option. The rest of the BIOS was configured back to the fastest setting that I could find by trial and error. On a side note, on the motherboard, there is a jumper that should be closed when the VLB bus works at a frequency above 33MHz (most likely it relaxes the timings a bit) but the card is rock solid also by leaving this jumper in the 33 MHz position.

The card I've used is a California Graphics Suntracer 2000v based on the Tseng Labs ET4000W32 with 2MB of 45ns DRAM. There is little information regarding this specific card or California Graphics in general, although I do remember that it was a fairly well known brand in enthusiast circles. All I've managed to find was an old ad in an Italian Magazine of the era.

Anyway, if you're reading this, you must be interested in the numbers... here are some:

Wolf3d time demo went from 28,4 fps to 48,4 fps. That's a 70% increase!!!
Doom timedemo (using screenblocks=1o, that means full screen, but with the status bar at the bottom) went from 10,0fps to 12,8fps. That's a decent 28% increase, more in line with the expectations.
I also ran the Quake timedemo at 320x200, but -predictably- frame rate went up only from 2,3fps to 2,4fps..

Last, I ran VSPEED to check the transfer speed over the local bus. I was really impressed by the result:

1 Mode Xres Yres  Col  VFreq  HFreq Write16 Write32  Read16  Read32  BlkSize
2                      Hz     kHz   kb/s    kb/s     kb/s    kb/s    byte
3--------------------------------------------------------------------------
4004h  320  200    4  70.30  31.57  18509   32576     5894    9525    4096
5005h  320  200    4  70.31  31.57  18474   32468     5841    9812    4096
6006h  640  200    2  70.30  31.69  16649   20838     5824    5769    4096
700dh  320  200   16  70.30  31.57  16649   20882     5810    5632    4096
800eh  640  200   16  70.31  31.69  16620   20838     5852    5786    4096
900fh  640  350    4  70.30  31.57  16649   20882     5855    5941    4096
10010h  640  350   16  70.31  31.57  16620   20838     5855    5806    4096
11011h  640  480    2  60.13  31.57  16649   20749     5852    5735    4096
12012h  640  480   16  60.13  31.70  16649   20838     5852    5748    4096
13013h  320  200  256  70.31  31.69  18830   37733     7025   13498    4096
14--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Write speed in VGA mode 13h (330x200) is now 37733 KB/sec versus 3379 KB/sec of the old ISA card. That's more than a 10X increase!

Today, I repeated all benchmarks and saved a lot of screenshots that will go into my folder of fun vintage projects.

I never owned nor used a 386 with Vesa Local Bus before, but now I'm convinced that even this 'old' processor can benefit from a faster bus to the graphic card. That +70% in Wolf3D is surprising, and even +28% in a demanding game like Doom is nothing to scoff at.

As for the Cyrix 486DLC, it's a nice processor although it possibly came a little to late to steal the limelight from Intel. It's not "just another 386/486 clone". It's an original in-house design that shares some common traits with the 486 (which, in itself, it's nothing out of the ordinary... its 5 stage pipeline design originated from Berkeley and was adopted by many different vendors to many different architectures). Even with its cache turned off, the Cyrix 486DLC is faster -clock for clock- than a 386. The tiny 1KB cache gives it an additional 20..30% boost in most benchmarks and applications, which -again- is nothing to scoff at.

File is closed. Now onward to my next retro project: assembling a functional PC with a Cyrix486S (the so called FasCache), possibly using a motherboard that can take advantage of its unique features.