First post, by Garrett W
- Rank
- Oldbie
Greetings everyone. I'm in somewhat of a pickle. I got my hands on an Digital OEM desktop with the 430TX chipset to replace another OEM desktop I had with the VIA Apollo VP. My goal is fairly simple, I would like to tweak each system to the best possible, but still stable, state that I can. Granted that these are OEM systems, their BIOS options leave a lot to be desired and generally obfuscate important performance options, such as in my case memory timings and latencies. To my surprise, the Apollo VP system, which comes with 512KB L2 cache, was already tweaked to a satisfactory degree. Performance options are enabled, CAS Latency is set to 2. The 430TX comes with just 256KB L2 cache unfortunately, but benchmarking the two I saw that the Intel platform held the lead in every benchmark I performed, DOS or Windows, even if by a small margin. Looking through some utilities such as CPU-Z, I found out that CAS Latency is set to 3, even though my two 32MB PC100 SDRAM DIMMs can definitely do CL2 at 66MHz. I should note I'm using an MMX 233 as the CPU for these systems. The 430TX based system is using PhoenixBIOS and it is very barebones, not even allowing me to disable the USB controller. I was wondering if someone could help me or point me to a guide of sorts of editing said BIOS (surprisingly, even though this is an early-ish 1997 system, the latest BIOS I found hails from late 1999) to include extra performance options or just set them to different values all together.
While looking for answers, I also found a utility called TweakBIOS which appears to set the chipset registers in real-time. I had some success with this program, enabling various performance settings and lowering some memory timings, which did turn a small performance boost. However, what is arguably the most important option, lowering CAS Latency from 3 to 2 will always hang the system, be it under DOS or Windows, using a single DIMM, different DIMMs, occupying different slots, you name it. This is the option that would probably land the greatest performance uplift, so it really bothers me that it freezes the system like that. What's your take on this? If I mod the BIOS to lower the timings would I still get a system that freezes or will I be in the clear?