Memory performance on vanilla DFI bios are crippled.
The soggi bios gave me performance similar to the Aopen AX59 Pro.

Getting decent memory performance out of MVP3 likely requires chipset registry tweaks in wpcredit similarly to 693A. Both are chipsets to avoid.

kirikl wrote on 2022-08-27, 04:18:

Hello everyone! I'm recently trying to polish my Super Socket 7 system. Switched from DFI K6Xv3+/66 to Gigabyte GA-5AX rev 4.1 T […]
Show full quote

Hello everyone!
I'm recently trying to polish my Super Socket 7 system.
Switched from DFI K6Xv3+/66 to Gigabyte GA-5AX rev 4.1
There is a reasons for that:
1.Memory performance on MVP3 motherboard is not great at all! Difference is approx 100mb/s apart, According to Everest. And it is degrading according PCI USB and connected devices very bad.
2.It is actually not supporting UDMA66 with non-66 drives!!! Wow!
So I switched to Ali chipset. Where memory performance is very good!
So I have Ultra66 PCI adapter, not gonna worry about that part, but then I want USB 2.0 and here is something I noticed.
If I want Full 50-57Mb/s I don't use USB 2.0 devices... If I want USB 2.0 devices speed of DMA66 lowering as low as 20! and as high as 37 maybe.
OR... If I plug OPTi card for example it is working as USB 1.1 and it is not affecting ATA66 speed much.
I checked it with PIII 1ghz, VIA PLE 133 with built in UDMA66 and PCI (ALI) USB 2.0. When I connect USB 2.0 devices - ATA speed reducing something around 44 to as low as 15.
Sorry my ignorance, maybe I'm missing fundamental knowledge here, but it actually made me more calm and not that mad at SS7.
Am I missing something here, is it possible to run full speed ATA66 and USB 2.0 on SS7?
Or that is normal situation? And I'm trying too hard to make old horse running as Ferrari?

PS:
Memory read on DFI with MVP3 - 180-200Mb/s
Memory read on Gigabyte with Ali - 290-310Mbs. (345 if overclocked 115mhz bus, but I don't do it for long)
Processor: K6-2+ 570mhz, modded and run as K6-3+ 600mhz, Mobo L2 cache disabled. 512MB (256x2) PC133 @PC100 Cl2

Are you talking about transfer rates from your IDE devices to something on the USB 2.0-bus, or are you talking about hard disk speeds after you have a USB 2.0 controller present system wide?

The reason that I ask is that USB (for all its positives) was actually a pretty bad solution for data transfer in the early days. The original 1.0 and 1.1 specs gave us rates of 11 Mbit/s (that's megabits/sec, not megabytes/sec!) and USB 2.0 was very CPU dependent - if you wanted anything close to the rated 480 Mbit speeds, you had to have a good controller and a fast CPU. USB was originally intended for peripherals, not storage so it was dreadfully slow when compared to stuff like IEEE 1394 (FireWire) which gave much faster transfer rates regardless of CPU utilization, or even compared to plain ethernet networking.

So if the problem is that transferring data to a storage device on your SS7 system is really slow over USB, that probably just has to do with the fact that your CPU just can't keep up with the demand for the overhead USB 2.0 requires. My SS7 Pentium was always at 100% when doing any USB file transfers.

If, however, your observation is that regular internal data transfers on the IDE bus drop when you have a USB 2.0-controller present, that is something that I can't explain off the top of my head.

Nemo1985 wrote on 2022-08-27, 06:22:

Memory performance on vanilla DFI bios are crippled.
The soggi bios gave me performance similar to the Aopen AX59 Pro.

Soggi BIOS made my machine a brick. I had to use another mobo for hotswap bios. Luckily surgery worked out good. Don't know what was the problem. I have revision B.

leonardo wrote:

If, however, your observation is that regular internal data transfers on the IDE bus drop when you have a USB 2.0-controller present, that is something that I can't explain off the top of my head.

Yes, I was measuring IDE speed while USB just connected! It drops! On both ss7 and socket 370 computer. P3 handling it better though, I understand, but still, kinda same thing

kirikl wrote on 2022-08-27, 08:48:

leonardo wrote:

If, however, your observation is that regular internal data transfers on the IDE bus drop when you have a USB 2.0-controller present, that is something that I can't explain off the top of my head.

Yes, I was measuring IDE speed while USB just connected! It drops! On both ss7 and socket 370 computer. P3 handling it better though, I understand, but still, kinda same thing

I would honestly just do away with the USB 2.0 controller and use 100 Mbit ethernet for file transfers, or do you have a specific use case that requires USB?

leonardo wrote on 2022-08-27, 08:56:

kirikl wrote on 2022-08-27, 08:48:

leonardo wrote:

If, however, your observation is that regular internal data transfers on the IDE bus drop when you have a USB 2.0-controller present, that is something that I can't explain off the top of my head.

Yes, I was measuring IDE speed while USB just connected! It drops! On both ss7 and socket 370 computer. P3 handling it better though, I understand, but still, kinda same thing

I would honestly just do away with the USB 2.0 controller and use 100 Mbit ethernet for file transfers, or do you have a specific use case that requires USB?

I agree, though on a fast P3, Gigabit Ethernet might be worth it . Re: Looking for Windows 95 PCI Gigabit 1000Mbps ethernet card.

Additionally, if external storage is the use case, addingan E-SATA PCI controller to the retro PC and using a drive in an E-SATA enclosure (or even a combo E-SATA / USB one, so using USB with a modern PC is possible ) is an option.

Nemo1985 wrote on 2022-08-27, 06:22:

Memory performance on vanilla DFI bios are crippled.
The soggi bios gave me performance similar to the Aopen AX59 Pro.

What Mobo exactly do You have? So you used with soggi BIOS, or at least boot it good?

darry wrote on 2022-08-27, 09:04:

leonardo wrote on 2022-08-27, 08:56:

kirikl wrote on 2022-08-27, 08:48:

Yes, I was measuring IDE speed while USB just connected! It drops! On both ss7 and socket 370 computer. P3 handling it better though, I understand, but still, kinda same thing

I would honestly just do away with the USB 2.0 controller and use 100 Mbit ethernet for file transfers, or do you have a specific use case that requires USB?

I agree, though on a fast P3, Gigabit Ethernet might be worth it . Re: Looking for Windows 95 PCI Gigabit 1000Mbps ethernet card.

Additionally, if external storage is the use case, addingan E-SATA PCI controller to the retro PC and using a drive in an E-SATA enclosure (or even a combo E-SATA / USB one, so using USB with a modern PC is possible ) is an option.

Yeah. I know, USB 2.0 is not really SS7 thing. I have big case IDE-USB though. I wanted to use it, since SS7 is my main connection hub between modern and retro stuff

kirikl wrote on 2022-08-27, 09:22:

darry wrote on 2022-08-27, 09:04:

leonardo wrote on 2022-08-27, 08:56:

I would honestly just do away with the USB 2.0 controller and use 100 Mbit ethernet for file transfers, or do you have a specific use case that requires USB?

I agree, though on a fast P3, Gigabit Ethernet might be worth it . Re: Looking for Windows 95 PCI Gigabit 1000Mbps ethernet card.

Additionally, if external storage is the use case, addingan E-SATA PCI controller to the retro PC and using a drive in an E-SATA enclosure (or even a combo E-SATA / USB one, so using USB with a modern PC is possible ) is an option.

Yeah. I know, USB 2.0 is not really SS7 thing. I have big case IDE-USB though. I wanted to use it, since SS7 is my main connection hub between modern and retro stuff

Check out the pscp-utility included with the latest PuTTY. It runs on Windows 95 and you can transfer files easily over ssh without having to muck about with fileservers or SMB on Windows!

To use the included pscp-utility to transfer files from another system on your LAN running SSH, simply open Command Prompt and use the following command:

pscp username@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:/Users/username/Downloads/file_you_just_downloaded.zip . [enter]

The above copies file_you_just_downloaded.zip into the directory from which you're running the command. The username is your login-username from the computer on your network, followed by the IP-address of the system, followed by the directory path to the file you want. You can also use wildcards in filenames, or even the -r switch to copy a directory instead of a single file.

To copy a file the other way (from your Windows 95 setup to your more modern system running SSH/SFTP), you have to place the name of the file or folder to be transferred ahead of the directory on the target system:

pscp somecooldoodle.bmp username@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:/Users/username/Desktop [enter]

The above copies somecooldoodle.bmp into the Desktop-directory, in the remote system user's home directory.

kirikl wrote on 2022-08-27, 04:18:

1.Memory performance on MVP3 motherboard is not great at all! Difference is approx 100mb/s apart, According to Everest. And it is degrading according PCI USB and connected devices very bad.

spoiler: its not the ram speed

kirikl wrote on 2022-08-27, 04:18:

2.It is actually not supporting UDMA66 with non-66 drives!!! Wow!

??? non udma66 drive wont work in udma66 mode, were you expecting different outcome?

kirikl wrote on 2022-08-27, 04:18:

If I want Full 50-57Mb/s I don't use USB 2.0 devices... If I want USB 2.0 devices speed of DMA66 lowering as low as 20! and as high as 37 maybe.

USB is a pooling bus, combination of third party USB 2.0 controller and slow CPU will affect whole computer performance.
USB 1.0 pooling rate maxes out at 1ms. USB 2.0 transmits SOF/uSOF at fixed 1 ms/125 μs intervals. https://www.usbmadesimple.co.uk/ums_7.htm#sof_pkt
https://docs.freebsd.org/doc/4.4-RELEASE/usr/ … ook/usb-hc.html
There are two types of usb 2 controllers, OHCI (Open Host Controller Interface) and UHCI (intel).
'The UHCI specification has been designed to reduce hardware complexity by requiring the host controller driver to supply a complete schedule of the transfers for each frame. OHCI type controllers are much more independent by providing a more abstract interface doing alot of work themselves.'

TLDR: USB 2.0 generates 8x more traffic even when doing nothing. Afaik USB controllers (OHCI, UHCI might have this automated) are stupid enough to require manual cpu handling of each individual SOF interrupt.

kirikl wrote on 2022-08-27, 04:18:

I checked it with PIII 1ghz, VIA PLE 133 with built in UDMA66 and PCI (ALI) USB 2.0. When I connect USB 2.0 devices - ATA speed reducing something around 44 to as low as 15.

intel cpu + VIA chipset, another winning combination. I would consider Pentium 3 still too slow for effortless USB 2.0.

kirikl wrote on 2022-08-27, 04:18:

Processor: K6-2+ 570mhz, modded and run as K6-3+ 600mhz, Mobo L2 cache disabled. 512MB (256x2) PC133 @PC100 Cl2

you are almost at Celeron 300A@450 speed level 😀

kirikl wrote on 2022-08-27, 09:19:

Nemo1985 wrote on 2022-08-27, 06:22:

Memory performance on vanilla DFI bios are crippled.
The soggi bios gave me performance similar to the Aopen AX59 Pro.

What Mobo exactly do You have? So you used with soggi BIOS, or at least boot it good?

My rev is B2, with 512kb of cache.
Soggi's bios improved the memory performance and it didn't gave me any issue that I haven't already (my motherboard refuse to boot if ps2 keyboard is connected when turned on, so I have to hotswap it).

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-08-27, 12:31:

??? non udma66 drive wont work in udma66 mode, were you expecting different outcome?

Well if I connect udma100 or udma133 devices it works at only udma33, that's what I meant. Udma66 activates only with ata66 drives. That's known bug of the BIOS, which even soggi couldn't solve in his BIOS. Weird

Thank you for explanation!
Yeah. Basically I just wanted to transfer files via usb flash drives...
I have Ethernet 100mb in there. I'm doing that with my 486. It is 10mbt though, but it still ok speed for 486 sizes of information. I guess I can do it here too, no problem.
I have IDE CF reader as well in my ss7. So now I have DOS/win 3.11 and windows 2K on two separate cards.
Speed on those fast cards is decent, 55-57mbs
Ultra66 is extremely stable controller, on my mobo built-in ide controller sucks a lot, something wrong, it is damaging files.... Dma 33 doesn't work for CD-ROM either. PIO works good. Maybe that's because this Mobo was overclocked to 115mhz, Idk. Everything is stable as 100x6, I even didn't change voltage, it's 2.0v for 95x6 cpu.

Yeah, ethernet is the way to go, if you can swing it.
I had a combination USB 2.0 and Firewire card installed in my PIII machine. USB transfer speeds were actually quite decent, around 27 MB/s. However, the mere presence of that card resulted in DPCs and interrupts constantly using 4% of the CPU. I think most PCI USB cards are just badly behaved in general; the older PCI controllers on our retro machines certainly don't help.

Since most of the files and images I use on that machine are on the file server, I wound up just removing the USB/FW card and using ethernet instead. Not only is it faster (~48 MB/s) but the NIC doesn't touch the CPU at all when it's idle.

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2022-08-27, 19:17:

Yeah, ethernet is the way to go, if you can swing it.
I had a combination USB 2.0 and Firewire card installed in my PIII machine. USB transfer speeds were actually quite decent, around 27 MB/s. However, the mere presence of that card resulted in DPCs and interrupts constantly using 4% of the CPU. I think most PCI USB cards are just badly behaved in general; the older PCI controllers on our retro machines certainly don't help.

Since most of the files and images I use on that machine are on the file server, I wound up just removing the USB/FW card and using ethernet instead. Not only is it faster (~48 MB/s) but the NIC doesn't touch the CPU at all when it's idle.

Yes. I just have floppy card/reader combo and front usb on the case. I also ordered powered internal hub, which I stick inside the computer. I can connect those two usb from hub to onboard USB 1.1 and keep my card reader and two front usb connectors as "legacy from the future" option 😀

I actually didn't measure USB 2.0 speed itself... I use OPTi PCI now and waiting for ALI PCI arrives. Cause I know VIA and especially NEC are hungry to resources. I was glad to see OPTi working pretty good and not hungry at all, until I realized OPTi card doesn't want to work as USB 2.0! So it is not showing USB 2.0 Root hub, just root hub. It happened to VIA PCI ones, then I tried another PCI and it worked as it should, but again, speed of ATA was twice reduced.
So anyway, OPTi USB works as 1.1, that's why it is almost no impact on OPTi card. But then if OPTi works as 1.1 I probably need to give it up anyway and connect my internal hub to the onboard one.

Another idea. If you have a spare unused IDE port, you could connect it to an IDE to SATA adapter and terminate that with an E-SATA port.

Then you could use an E-SATA (or USB combo) drive enclosure to transfer DATA. I would not try hot-plugging, but it should work otherwise.

On a VIA IDE controller, you would probably need to use a Marvell based IDE to SATA adapter for DMA to work.

kirikl wrote on 2022-08-27, 04:18:

Hello everyone! I'm recently trying to polish my Super Socket 7 system. Switched from DFI K6Xv3+/66 to Gigabyte GA-5AX rev 4.1 T […]
Show full quote

Hello everyone!
I'm recently trying to polish my Super Socket 7 system.
Switched from DFI K6Xv3+/66 to Gigabyte GA-5AX rev 4.1
There is a reasons for that:
1.Memory performance on MVP3 motherboard is not great at all! Difference is approx 100mb/s apart, According to Everest. And it is degrading according PCI USB and connected devices very bad.
2.It is actually not supporting UDMA66 with non-66 drives!!! Wow!
So I switched to Ali chipset. Where memory performance is very good!
So I have Ultra66 PCI adapter, not gonna worry about that part, but then I want USB 2.0 and here is something I noticed.
If I want Full 50-57Mb/s I don't use USB 2.0 devices... If I want USB 2.0 devices speed of DMA66 lowering as low as 20! and as high as 37 maybe.
OR... If I plug OPTi card for example it is working as USB 1.1 and it is not affecting ATA66 speed much.
I checked it with PIII 1ghz, VIA PLE 133 with built in UDMA66 and PCI (ALI) USB 2.0. When I connect USB 2.0 devices - ATA speed reducing something around 44 to as low as 15.
Sorry my ignorance, maybe I'm missing fundamental knowledge here, but it actually made me more calm and not that mad at SS7.
Am I missing something here, is it possible to run full speed ATA66 and USB 2.0 on SS7?
Or that is normal situation? And I'm trying too hard to make old horse running as Ferrari?

PS:
Memory read on DFI with MVP3 - 180-200Mb/s
Memory read on Gigabyte with Ali - 290-310Mbs. (345 if overclocked 115mhz bus, but I don't do it for long)
Processor: K6-2+ 570mhz, modded and run as K6-3+ 600mhz, Mobo L2 cache disabled. 512MB (256x2) PC133 @PC100 Cl2

What version of Everest are you using to check the memory bandwidth? I'd like to know so I can use the same version for the most accurate comparison. I have Everest 2.20.405.

5.02.1840 beta
Ultimate edition