First post, by xjas
- Rank
- l33t
Yes, it's ANOTHER "tune up my 386" thread. We've got 3 going on the first page now? L0L.
My DX25 seems too slow and flakey, so I've been trying to get it to perform a bit better. Some stuff seems to run fine, other stuff terribly. For the recoerd it gets about 18FPS in Wolf3D but only 1 FPS(!) in DOOM (full screen, high detail.) I know Doom's not gonna be very fast on any 386 but I expected better results than that.
I was mainly focusing on the Trident video card, but noticed DIAG reported no cache at all. So I went looking for a jumper or BIOS setting that would enable or disable it (fake cache was more of a 486 thing IIRC.) Well, I don't know how I missed this when I was putting it together, but there ARE NO cache sockets and nothing that looks like cache on the board. So yeah.
Here's the best photo I have of it, sorry if it's a little soft.
That doesn't look like a cache bank hidden behind the drive bays either:
Is this common? I thought some cache or at least empty upgrade sockets would have been common by the time the 386 rolled around?? Does this mean this board is bargain-basement stuff?
It came out of a research lab at the university & was decked out with a Cyrix FasMath and 8MB of RAM, so I would've expected they'd have used a quality board too. Somebody paid a lot of money for this thing.
Ironically the board seems to be a CACHING TECH P386S although the layout of mine is a little different from the one in the link.
I wanna make this thing into a nice system and it's got some really good parts in it. I do have a couple other decent 386 boards (including a nice MSI one with a DX/40 and lots of cache) but they're both missing things - BIOS chips, keyboard controllers, etc., and I don't know how much of a pain those are gonna be to get going. What do you guys think, swap or not?
BTW how fast "should" a DX25 be in Doom?
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