Re: Looking for 387 benchmarks
Posted on 2014-01-02, 23:57
Do you have a math coprocessor that is not included in that document? It's pretty thorough.
Re: M396F motherboard
Posted on 2014-01-02, 05:13
Who knows. It's hard enough trying to get information for the mainstream chipsets, much less the smaller guys. SARC seems decent, but usually found on low end 386 and 486 boards.
Re: DX2 chips multiplier locked?
Posted on 2014-01-01, 01:38
You can examine the die casing. Should be smaller like a DX2-66, not like a DX-33. Looking up Sspecs might help too. My understanding is that the majority of DX-50s should be .8 micron. I believe intially intel tried to manufacture the chip at 1 micron, but there were cooling issues. So there was a …
Re: M396F motherboard
Posted on 2013-12-31, 06:12
Some chipsets contain a very small amount of internal cache for low cost systems. On the MX chipset, 8kb. On the SiS Rabbit chipset, there is a miniscule 128byte cache of some sort. I assume this makes a difference. Not sure about the SARC chipset though.
Re: DX2 chips multiplier locked?
Posted on 2013-12-31, 05:58
If you can can get your hands on the 0.8 micron 486DX-50, you can probably get away with 66MHz. It's the same process the DX2-66 uses. I tried it once and it seemed to work okay with a heat sink. Not very practical since 486 motherboards aren't entirely stable at that speed though. 3.3V DX2s can …
Re: Looking for 387 benchmarks
Posted on 2013-12-29, 13:06
There's already an excellent article on the internets that compares all the various coprocessors in detail, including parts you will never get your hands on like the C&T 38700 and RapidCAD. It was written about 20 years ago and is floating around on the newsgroups. To make along story short, Cyrix …
Re: Cache advice on "new" PVI-486SP3
Posted on 2013-12-28, 09:15
Let's not confuse DRAM interleaving and cache interleaving. Every 486 motherboard I have ever seen supported cache bank interleave. (Though I'm sure there are a few that don't) DRAM interleave seems pretty uncommon. Not too many of the mainstream 486 chipsets support it, particularly the PCI …
Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
Posted on 2013-12-27, 06:35
The OAK chipset was pretty crippled since it only had 256kb RAM available and only had a 16-bit data path to the rest of the system. In the second generation of weitek chips Weitek used its own VGA core. They had access to the full 1MB, but I can't recall if they fared any better than the Oaks. I …
Re: Tseng ET4000/w32i VLB
Posted on 2013-12-24, 05:17
From my understanding, bit rot has nothing to do with the sticker coming off the glass window and UV light getting inside. It's caused by the data losing electrical charge due to imperfect insulation. This will happen to every EPROM eventually, and it's only one of several ways a ROM can go bad. If …
Re: Which OS on a faster 486 system.
Posted on 2013-12-23, 06:02
I run PC-DOS 2K which is a slightly updated version of v7.1. To the best of my knowledge it does not support FAT32. In fact, I do not believe it it is related to MS-DOS 7.x at all. MS-DOS seems a lot more advanced in the 7.x release.
Re: Tseng ET4000/w32i VLB
Posted on 2013-12-23, 01:36
If the BIOS went bad, it could be due to bit rot. I have recently been made aware that EPROMs can't hold their contents forever, so it might be smart to dump the ROMs on all your working cards while you still can.
Re: ESS AudioDrive (ES1868) - a surprisingly good ISA sound card
Posted on 2013-12-21, 03:45
I haven't gotten around to testing it out yet. I've had a lot of hardware going bad on me lately, so I'm not in a good position to test at the moment. Testing it is on my to do list though.
Re: The obsidian2 x-24
Posted on 2013-12-18, 01:46
There is an issue. It gets too bloody hot and is prone to overheating. The board also tends to warp in a tower configuration because it's too damn heavy. If you can spare the PCI slots, you're probably better off with regular voodoo2s in SLI. I sold mine (for a pretty penny) a few years back.
Re: Another Am5x86 OC discussion
Posted on 2013-12-17, 00:08
CelGen is using a PS/2 model 95. A planar swap is out of the question. Pretty sure stability won't be an issue because it's an over engineered IBM. According to that post on the Trinity Works Q/A the adapter is running in 3X mode. Isn't 4X mode what you wanted? I have to be honest, squeezing 200MHz …
Re: Another Am5x86 OC discussion
Posted on 2013-12-16, 09:26
I currently only know of one interposer that uses a PLL, and it's 2X not 1.33X. I'd really like to build such an interposer so we could run Cyrix 5x86 chips at 133 though.... Why do you think the trinity works adapter will work better than the kingston?
Re: Another Am5x86 OC discussion
Posted on 2013-12-16, 04:43
Probably you haven't seen my numerous postings about how some older systems (particularly IBMs) won't work with the am5x86 in 4X mode. Apparently the CPU uses different IDs depending on how the multiplier is set. Some BIOSes won't boot with an ID they don't recognise. Short of a BIOS update, there …
Re: 486 ISA SCSI choice
Posted on 2013-12-16, 04:39
It's a tantalum capacitor. I believe it should be 10uf 16V.
Re: 486 ISA SCSI choice
Posted on 2013-12-15, 12:03
You could always solder the capacitor back on, use an ISA graphics card, or buy another VLB.
Re: DTK PKM-0033S +5V pin overheating + PS/2 mouse implementation
Posted on 2013-12-15, 04:34
Now that we have an idea about how to defeat the AMI checksum, perhaps we should isolate which bits DO change and try creating a new ROM image. So since your Enterprise three spits out 9FC0 at 0040:000E, wouldn't that imply that it is hardwired to the "DOS 1KB" option in the CMOS setup? ---edit--- …
Re: 486 ISA SCSI choice
Posted on 2013-12-15, 00:31
Ah, that's the Young Micro. I once had one of these boards, but it was bad. I wanted to try to repair it, but I did an international move and didn't have room for everything so it went to hardware heaven. It's pretty crazy that this board supports 1024kb cache. It's a pretty rare option for a board …
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