Reply 20 of 32, by dionb
- Rank
- l33t++
wrote:In cases whereby one motherboard shows a marked improvement when using SDRAM over EDO, it would be very interesting to compare such a board with another of an identical chipset which did not show improvement when using SDRAM. It is possible that the board which you suspect is dodgy may just be able to run its EDO as fast as the board which shows a marked improvement when using SDRAM. It could also be a dodgy board. I don't know, but there isn't enough testing to make such determinations.
Pretty sure these boards were up to scratch - in absolute figures the values I got for i430TX with SDRAM were the third best of any So7 motherboard/chipset (only the ALi Aladdin IV+ and V were faster, clock for clock), and the values for both TX boards were almost identical for SDRAM. It was the EDO performance that differed between the two.
Unfortunately I don't have the boards any more, so can't go any deeper into it now.
How did I come up with this theory? I noticed that on some 486 boards which properly support EDO RAM and do show improvement when using EDO over FPM, those boards did not outperform other 486 boards with FPM RAM.
There's support and support... early EDO implementations worked, but were probably less optimized than pure FP. Same thing happened with EDO vs SDRAM: i430HX with pure EDO was about as fast as i430VX with SDRAM and a lot faster than the VX with EDO.