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Ata100 and powerful SVGA on same PCI bus: conflict?

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First post, by aries-mu

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Hi guys,

I was wondering:

The PCI bus only has 133 MB/sec at its disposal.

If in a 486 or Pentium system you put:
• 1 PCI high performance video card (like, let's say, TNT2 or S3 virge or even an S3968 or S3928 Diamond Stealth or ATI Mach64 4MB)
• 1 Ultra Ata 100 controller (I don't even wanna say Ata 133), very important: assuming an SSD is used that is able to deliver real 100MB/sec and fully "fill" the controller bandwidth

If math isn't wrong 100 MB/sec + XX MB/sec of the video card (I assume such a video card under 3D software at least should vomit about ~40-50 MB/sec data) = 150ish MB/sec data, versus the 133 of the PCI.
Let's even assume in some peaks the video card also gets around 100 MB/sec....

What's gonna happen???
Will the computer shut down? Error messages? or what?

Under MS-DOS 6.22 and WfW 3.11

THANK YOU!

They said therefore to him: Who are you?
Jesus said to them: The beginning, who also speak unto you

Reply 1 of 2, by cyclone3d

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The only thing that would happen if the PCI bus is being saturated, you may get some video and/or sound stuttering in games until the disk I/O is not maxing out the PCI bus anymore.

That used to happen even without SSDs when everything was on the PCI bus.

And yes, you can get PCI SATA 150 cards that have drivers for Windows 9x.. and work without drivers installed although they will be in legacy mode.

Just get a Promise SATA1-150 based card (NOT SATA2-150 - no Win9x drivers for those).

No use is even bothering with IDE ATA controllers at this point unless you really want the headache of trying to find older working drives that are more expensive than their IDE counterparts. You can also use SATA to IDE adapters.. but again.. why?

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Reply 2 of 2, by aries-mu

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cyclone3d wrote:
The only thing that would happen if the PCI bus is being saturated, you may get some video and/or sound stuttering in games unti […]
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The only thing that would happen if the PCI bus is being saturated, you may get some video and/or sound stuttering in games until the disk I/O is not maxing out the PCI bus anymore.

That used to happen even without SSDs when everything was on the PCI bus.

And yes, you can get PCI SATA 150 cards that have drivers for Windows 9x.. and work without drivers installed although they will be in legacy mode.

Just get a Promise SATA1-150 based card (NOT SATA2-150 - no Win9x drivers for those).

No use is even bothering with IDE ATA controllers at this point unless you really want the headache of trying to find older working drives that are more expensive than their IDE counterparts. You can also use SATA to IDE adapters.. but again.. why?

Good points!

• No Win95, I'll use MS-DOS 6.11 + Windows for Workgroup 3.11
• Reason 1 pro-ATA: SATA 150 is gonna saturate the PCI bus even more than ATA (higher speed)
• Reason 2 pro-ATA: sure, you also noticed the cost of the IDE SSDs!! I already have IDE-to-CF adapter and I'll simply get some fast (100 MB/sec) CF cards, relatively small (4 to 8 GB) and cheap 😉 In this way, the fastest the drive will run is 100 MB/sec, which will still leave about 33ish MB/Sec for the video card in any case.

The sound card will be in the ISA slot, so there should be no problem/conflict (unless the ISA bus is interfaced to the CPU through the PCI chipset, than I suspect it might still contribute to PCI saturation... I don't know that's high engineering 🤣)

Thanks!!!

They said therefore to him: Who are you?
Jesus said to them: The beginning, who also speak unto you

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