Check your CMOS setup.
Is the CPU internal (L1) & external (L2) cache enabled?
System boot up speed, if applicable? Should be fast.

Is your vga card ISA or PCI?

vga card is ISA, tseng et4000ax, one of the fastest. But don't tell me ISA is the reason, because a 486dx2-66mhz with 8mb ram and et4000ax vga does better than 21fps. pentium 200 is triple the clock plus superscalar, ~5 times faster on raw cpu power. Now, accounting for same vga speed on both, my system should have been ~x3 faster, at least 60 fps.

L1 and L2 are enabled.

What speed is the ISA bus running at? How many wait states?

I'm not saying that is definitely the problem, but it could be.

What brand/model motherboard are you using?

Makes me want to test it with an ISA ET4000AX on one of my Socket 7 setups.

Aslo, what is the brand and model of the ET4000AX card you are using?

why are you using an ISA card on a 200mhz p1? to slow things down? a utility like ICACHE is great to bring it down to 386DX levels on the fly

Get an S3-Virge325, S3-Trio64-v+ or CL-5446. (All PCI versions) And save that ET4000-ISA for something in between 386dx40 and 486dx33. ET4000 is regarded as a fast card, for a 386/486 system, that only have ISA slots.

mhdbox385 wrote:

vga card is ISA, tseng et4000ax, one of the fastest. But don't tell me ISA is the reason, because a 486dx2-66mhz with 8mb ram and et4000ax vga does better than 21fps. pentium 200 is triple the clock plus superscalar, ~5 times faster on raw cpu power. Now, accounting for same vga speed on both, my system should have been ~x3 faster, at least 60 fps.

ISA cards can be surprisingly slow in certain motherboards. How many chr/ms (kB/s) it gives in Landmark? You need 3840 for the mentioned 60fps, when your PC is not rendering anything just stuffs the VGA with junk with REP STOSW. When it does tricky X-mode pixel juggling like DOOM does it can be much slower. Even on a P3 1GHz.

Like others have said, it is the ISA card that's causing this performance, you've basically introduced a great bottleneck here, especially for Doom and it's use of mode Y.

I did testing of ISA video cards on a Pentium MMX system, with doom:

Doom vs Heretic VGA performance difference

My results CLEARLY indicate you need a PCI video card in your Pentium System. Older ISA systems actually perform better with ISA video cards. Your results are not really terrible given what I have found.

case cloosed.

kase klozed.

just do what bronesten suggest, either of the cards he mentions will be great, compatible and cheap. 😀

I actually don't know when an CL-5446 is a lesser choice than any of the S3's that I mentioned. The CL have vesa out of the box, in that you do not need to load univesa. What I have seen, is that there are no direct speed advantages on S3's, when you are running 486's up to dx4-120 or 5x86-133. Yet on a Pentium-233 you really need to use an S3 over the CL. So were is the limit for CL-5446? What is the "magic" speed barrier?

Another thing you need to look at, is the image quality. On S3-Virge325 (Especially the Number9 branded) and S3-Trio64v+, then you get sharp pixels, and a kind of washed out vibrant to the colours. And low quality S3 cards, usually have no blackness. They display black as a kind of grey. On Cl-5446 cards, you get a kind of more smooth'ish contrast or pixel's if you like. Yet the colour's it produces are rich and vibrant compared to S3's. This gives you a kind of more old school feel on LCD/Flatscreen's, if you run the machine with an CL-5446, instead of an S3-Virge325 or S3-Trio64v+.

And to be honest. In real life feel of the computer, then you really do not notice those few extra performance points that an S3 gives, on an Pentium-166. At least I personally can only tell the difference in the image quality and not in the speed. So my goto card for anything PCI from 486dx2-66 and up to Pentium-166 are one of my CL-5446 cards. They provide me with a more nostalgic feel of mid-90's than my S3's does.

mhdbox385 wrote:

Also, I am not trying to slow it down by using isa vga, it's just what I have at the moment. I was expecting it to run a lot faster than a 486-66 with et4000, because this is p-200 + et4000. I know isa vga is a bottleneck paired with p-200 but doesn't mean it has to be slower than a 486-66 with et4000.

of course, it's bad news if some or all pentium socket 7 boards suck with an isa vga.

The bottleneck is the ISA bus it self. You get more performance form an PCI version of the ET-4000. Yet that will still give you slower performance than other and better and cheaper PCI cards. Like those that I mentioned. ET4000 was the king of speed, back in the ISA-Only days, before VLB came out. That would be around 1989/91. The ET4000ax-ISA is better for machines from 386dx-40 to 486dx-33, that only have ISA slots. It would actually be an awesomme choice for an 386dx-40 machine with 64/128kb cache and 8mb of Ram. 😉

My first machine, was an 486slc2-50, that only had ISA slots. I bought it brand new back in the early 90's, and it had an ET4000ax-ISA. It was an ok machine, yet it struggeled with Doom. Not until 1994, when I got an explanation, that I realised that it was basically just an supercharged 386sx machine. And it was sold as a true 486 to me. That was the selling point. Then it was too late to complain, and to be honest, I never ever bought anything from that store again. I went to another store and got me self a 486dx2-66 with VLB when I was told what the Cyrix basically was. Yeah... I was young, and knew nothing about PC hardware at all. All I knew was Amiga and C64 hardware at that point.

kaze ckolzzed.

The ISA bus on the socket 7 PCI chipsets is technically a 2-hop bus from the CPU. The cycles have to go through an ISA bridge. I am not sure how technical you would like to take the discussion into, the ISA bridge on the PCI bus is also doing subtractive decoding on the bus. In lay man term, this means it will be the last agent to ACK on the incoming cycles and replay the cycles on the downstream ISA bus.

This is quite different from 386/486 with ISA/VLB where the ISA bus is simply direct decode from the CPU address/data. Unlike ISA/VLB, PCI bus system architecture does not overload the CPU address/data bus. It is based on bridge concepts, which is technically more sophisticated than ISA/VLB.

It is very common that legacy bus will either be crippled or completely deprecated as time progresses and more advanced bus topology arise. Today, PCI bus, if you still have one, it's not exactly the same anymore on Intel 440FX/LX/BX PCIsets.

mhdbox385 wrote:

I know that bottleneck is isa vga in this system. But saying that doesn't explain why it is a bit slower than (or comparable to) 486-66 + et4000ax, and not faster.

It is slower because the video card is being the bottleneck in both systems, but the bottleneck is worse on the Socket 7 system because it's ISA bus is slower than the one on the 486. If you were to try a different game, like Quake, which requires more CPU performance, you would find that the Socket 7 is significantly faster.

As others have explained, the ISA bus on the Socket 7 motherboard requires data traversing 2 bridges to send information to the ISA bus, while the ISA bus on the 486 only has a single bridge, if any at all. Additionally, and probably more importantly, because the ISA bus is bridged on the Pentium and not regarded as performance critical, the timings and frequency of the ISA are set conservatively to maximize compatibility. On the other hand, on 486 VLB and ISA motherboards, you typically have more control of the timings and frequency of the ISA, allowing more performance from ISA cards.

mhdbox385 wrote:

mobo is lucky star 5i-vx2b, jumper and bios settings are set correctly, as far as I can tell. […]
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mobo is lucky star 5i-vx2b, jumper and bios settings are set correctly, as far as I can tell.

don't know what et4000ax is, have a separate topic trying to identify it.

cyclone3d can you test isa on your socket 7?

*also any other info/photo you need to help you help me solve this, if possible, please request it. for ex: mobo photo or maybe bios screenshot

What is the link to the other thread about the video card?

I should be able to test fairly easily a few different motherboards with different chipsets. Easy swap out of parts since it is just DOS.

Topic 67600