First post, by dacow
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For those of you who like a bit of a challenge, something seems to have happened to my 486 this evening and I'm not exactly sure whats gone wrong. Any help would be good 😀
Motherboard = Freetech 486F38 (massive 0kb cache!! 😮)
CPU = 486SX33
Video= Genoa 8500 VL (Cirrus 5428) 1MB
HDD= CF 4GB..
Sound: Mediavision Jazz 16
OS: DOS 6.22
I pulled the CF card out to put 3dBench on it so I could update the 3DBench CPU Benchmark spreadsheet. Put it all back in, fired her up and scored 25 on the Bench.
I thought I'd go into the BIOS to see if she would go any faster. Started tweaking, went to pull the CF card out to copy some more stuff over, put the CF card back in and bam, started getting corruption errors on the CF card.
At first I thought it was just the CF->IDE adapter was doing funky things, but long story short I hadn't plugged the IDE adapter back in tight and corrupted the CF (bloody Layer 1 issues!). Quick reinstall of DOS 6.22, copied my things back over and we were off and running.
Except, my PC was now a lot slower. I could instantly tell when I ran 3Dbench and the animation was going so much slower. New result was 7.1?!?!
Bios & Sysinfo showed that I was still running a 486 @ 33Mhz (Sysinfo mistakenly reports it as a DX but whatever), but the CPU bench shows 14.0 (386DX33 = 35.9). I thought maybe the Turbo button was stuck and I pressed that and it just slowed it down even more! SpeedSys shows a 486SX34Mhz with a huge score 5.12!
I went back to basics, cleared the CMOS jumpers, booted into DOS without loading config/autoexec and still no go.
Is it just my PC is failing? I noticed after a few soft reboots (ctrl+alt+del), even navigating through the BIOS is slow. You can actually see the screen draw when you switch between options!
Any thoughts? 😀
Edit: OC'd to 40Mhz and CPU bench shows 22.0 now... 3DBench has gone up to 10.1.
The computer stopped posting after a while so I ripped the whole thing apart just to find out that one the VLB slots looks like it might be going. It controlled the I/O card, as soon as I moved the I/O card to a different VLB slot the whole thing started posting again but still no cigar.
I've got a UMC 486 SX33 in a dead mobo at work, I might bring that home if I remember to test it *grin* RedHill doesn't think much of them 😀