Reply 20 of 23, by his.lordship
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Jackal1983 wrote on 2023-07-19, 23:37:his.lordship wrote on 2023-07-19, 13:59:feipoa wrote on 2016-06-02, 09:27:What speed MediaGXm are you using? Benchmark results for all GXm speeds are reported in the Ultimate 686 Benchmark Comparison. […]
What speed MediaGXm are you using? Benchmark results for all GXm speeds are reported in the Ultimate 686 Benchmark Comparison. For example, the FPU ability of a GXm-266 is about that of a Pentium 133, while the ALU ability is similar to that of a Pentium 166. On the other hand, if you look at Quake (software mode), the GXm-266 equates to a Pentium 100. For Quake II, it is similar to a Pentium 120. The DOOM results for the GXm-266 are similar to a Pentium 200 or a Pentium MMX 166.
I found the integrated graphics to have horrendous quality, so I went with a PCI Banshee card. The integrated audio also sounded terrible, so I went with an ISA sound card. There is an ultra DMA driver, which works in Win98SE, but it was a pain to get it working. Ultimately, I use a PCI Ultra100 card.
There are some performance tweaks for the GXm. I have outlined them here, Register settings for various CPUs
One such tweak is enabling FP_FAST, which helps the FPU results. For example, DOS Quake scores went from 33.1 fps to 36.2 fps after enabling FP_FAST on the GXm.Basically, the GXm has speeds similar to the Cyrix 5x86, but are about 10% slower on account of not having any L2 cache. What the GXm has going for it is MMX. What I found surprising was that they didn't bother to fix branch prediction, not even with a GXm at 266 MHz. Yet branch prediction works even on the 6x86-P90.
Hi,
Regarding the UDMA driver, did you ever get it to work? I am testing an IGEL-4 thinclient with board MB-5BLGP its the same as a neoware eon. I am using a 44 pin IDE hdd. When i fisrt updated the driver it gave me conflict in device manager and hdd stop showing on device manager under the disks section. Then since this board only has 1 ide connector i set the controller driver settings to only use the primary IDE, rebooted and conflict went away, this disk showed up again and gave me the option to enable DMA. After enabling and rebooting the system hangs on the windows 98 boot screen, rebooting again and pressing escape there are no messages just hangs with blinking cursor. thanks.
I've had the same issue with a ECS P5GX-M. I'm guessing the reference drivers are hit and miss for DMA compatability and the OEMs modified them to work for their individual use case. I'd see if you could hunt down the driver package that shipped with your thin client.
Thanks. I dont think there are much different drivers around, unfortunately. Besides the official driver package i have a couple loose files but i think they are the same. Now that i think about it seems that the driver package doesnt even contain the udma driver, i think i grabbed it from Philscomputerlab website. Anyway i am now testing on this paricular machine, it seemed like an easier mod for fitting my gravis pnp but only now i am encountering some posts about gus incompatabilities as well, however didnt get there anyway, lets see how it does 😀 i am trying sort this dma thing now, however this is just to say that i have another less common thin client with the same cpu chipset combo, an esesix thintune, that i recall being able to use the dma without issues, strange. Other things that i would like to ask, is regaring the atto disk speed test, i made a test and the max speed i got was just below 1.7MB are these speeds normal even with not using DMA? i feel windows 98se a bit heavy for this machine, i dont remeber it being like that on the esesix machine. I intend to try now with a compact flash card to see if dma works or the atto speed test are different.