First post, by Gahhhrrrlic
I came across this handy little survival guide for my AMI BIOS because I wanted to better understand what slack there was in my system, where the bottlenecks were etc.:
http://margo.student.utwente.nl/el/pc/bios/ami31.htm
After seeing some of the impressive numbers people have gotten from their machines, I decided to bench my own and I wanted to use some of the same tools as others so I used SysInfo from Norton Tools to bench my CPU. Sadly my AMD-40DX (which happens to be locked at 33 by the crystal) came in at 31.7 when the "typical" 33 comes in at 35.9. I was pretty depressed about this, thinking I got a lemon of a computer or something but then it occurred to me that maybe the CPU wasn't to blame. Maybe something else was holding it back, like the RAM - pissing away CPU cycles, so I went to my BIOS and looked at all the wait states. I have 70nS RAM but beyond that I don't really know how many wait states it needs so I just looked for the biggest number and dropped it down 1. To my delight, it actually made a noticeable difference. I didn't want to crash the computer or anything but I started dropping wait states by a point or 2 across the board and managed to get my CPU score up to about 34... still short of the typical rig but noticeably faster. One thing I didn't need the score to tell me was the boot speed - I "felt" that. Also Doom seemed less choppy. I don't think this was a Placebo. It really did run faster.
I'm curious. Of those of you with 386s, what numbers do you have for your wait states that work for you? Do you have normal RAM or special RAM? I heard about "zero wait state ram". Anybody have this?
Also, while I didn't try it, is it worth overclocking the bus speeds? Does that tend to bottleneck or is it mostly ram killing cpu performance?