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First post, by snorg

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Ok, I was a silly-billy and put this in the wrong forum section. I moved it here since it is a hardware post.
That said...

Question regarding ISA bandwith limitations

Postby snorg » 2013-10-27 @ 14:54
So I've got my little 486 box but have been thinking about transferring everything to either a custom-built chassis or a larger standard case so I don't have to fool around with trying to cram everything into a 1" high case.

The system has a single 16 bit ISA slot, I was going to use an ISA slot extender to try and fit a soundboard/scsi combo, perhaps a better graphics card (I have to see what sort of chip it has on the motherboard but it may be something lame like a trident), and maybe some other card (perhaps an mpeg board or something along those lines).

My concern is: will a single 16 bit ISA slot with a bus extender be able to provide enough bandwidth for all 3 cards? There is an IDE interface on the motherboard itself plus an FDC controller, so at least I don't have to worry about hanging the drive controller off that single slot as well. As I recall, I think bandwidth on the ISA bus was less than 10Mbps? So I think it is going to be really easy to saturate this single slot.

What do you think?

Reply 1 of 4, by Old Thrashbarg

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There is only going to be a single ISA bus regardless of how many slots the board actually has. (With the possible exception of some special server boards or whatnot.) So board with 8 ISA slots is still going to be running them all off the same shared bus... no different than a board with a single slot and an ISA extender.

But yes, it is easy to saturate ISA. That's why local buses became popular so quickly... ISA just became too limiting.

What is the motherboard? Some of the highly integrated ones actually used VLB for the onboard devices, even if they didn't have any VLB expansion slots. If that's the case, then you'd be better off using the onboard video... even crappy VGA running on VLB is usually going to be faster than a good ISA VGA card.

Reply 3 of 4, by snorg

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I have been looking and I can't find a motherboard name/model, other than it was made by Acer.
BIOS shows up as American Megatrends Peaktron F, if that helps
Graphics are Trident TVGA 8900C w/ 1024k RAM

Oddly enough, it has a chip that says Music TR9C1710-66PCA, which leads me to believe it might have some sort of audio capability, but I don't see any audio outs.

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