First post, by Eep386
Hello,
Today I received a L2 cache-free 486 motherboard, an Edom MV035F, based on OPTi's 802 chipset. I wanted something to use up my Cyrix 486DX2 on. When I opened it up and looked it over, I noticed that a lot of components were omitted by the factory, including the jumpers I needed to get the Cyrix to work on it, so I bought some jumpers and a button cell battery holder at Fry's Sacramento and soldered them in. (Interestingly, despite the cache sockets and jumpers being removed, all the low-level components such as the resistors and capacitors are in place, so all those spots are still 100% electrically active; in the future, I might consider re-adding everything. But for now...)
The seller claimed that it POSTed, but all the BIOS options were grayed out. I pulled and dumped the BIOS chip, ran it through MODBIN and found out the OEM of the board simply set all BIOS setup options to 'SHOW-ONLY'. I set all except PCI CONFIGURATION to 'Enabled' (since this board doesn't have any PCI slots), blanked the EPROM and burned the modified BIOS to it, and now I can set all CMOS setup options normally.
I assembled the system and tested CACHECHK, SpeedSys and DOOM -timedemo with it.
The specs:
- CPU: Cyrix 486DX2-66, 5V version
- Motherboard: Edom MV035F
- RAM: 16MB (4 x 4MB 70ns 30-pin SIMMs)
- VGA: BTC Oak Technology OTI087X ISA VGA /w 1MB video memory; 16-bit video memory data bus
- Sound: None
- HDD: Seagate ST32122A
- OS: IBM PC-DOS 6.3 (left-shift boot; no TSRs or memory manager active)
CacheChk V7: (sorry about the poor quality of the shot, rest assured the reality is much clearer than this)
These timings seem kind of fast for a board without L2 cache IMO.
SpeedSys:
Again not bad at all. The lack of L2 cache finally manifests in a really sluggish move score relative to the Read and Write scores, but overall performance seems reasonably good. Better than many 486 systems I've used that had L2 cache, actually!
Doom Shareware 1.9 (doom -timedemo demo3 -nosound -nojoy -nonet): 3645 realtics
I think my OTI087X owes a lot to the realtics score. If there were L2 cache installed it'd probably be higher.
Life isn't long enough to re-enable every hidden option in every BIOS on every board... 🙁