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Reply 20 of 27, by mothergoose729

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precaud wrote:

Ah, ok, I see it. It's interesting.

Just wondering, why would this work in my setup at 1.4GHz, when S370 P3/133's in quality slotkets don't work higher than 866?

Today I'm going to run the program that supposedly would benefit time-wise from the faster FSB, and see how much faster it actually is.

In all likelihood you would have to run the processor at a 100mhz FSB, but with twice the L1 cache and a high multiplier it would still be the fastest processor for your board.

Reply 21 of 27, by canthearu

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precaud wrote:

Ah, ok, I see it. It's interesting.

Just wondering, why would this work in my setup at 1.4GHz, when S370 P3/133's in quality slotkets don't work higher than 866?

Today I'm going to run the program that supposedly would benefit time-wise from the faster FSB, and see how much faster it actually is.

I'm quite curious, if the program you are running needs more CPU power, why not throw a P4 or Athlon 64 at it? These can still run windows 98SE/DOS, but are considerably faster than any P3 you could assemble?

Reply 22 of 27, by precaud

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canthearu wrote:

I'm quite curious, if the program you are running needs more CPU power, why not throw a P4 or Athlon 64 at it? These can still run windows 98SE/DOS, but are considerably faster than any P3 you could assemble?

Fair question. Yes, I have faster computers. But this station needs two ISA slots. One is for the controller board for a network analyzer. One for a "period-appropriate" GPIB card.

For 95% of what is done with it, 98SE running on a 100MHz FSB board is just fine. It's just this one app, which requires XP and does all its processing on the pc, that is cpu- and i/o- intensive.

A couple months ago, in a effort to speed the XP program up, I moved the system from a Tyan S1830 (running a P3/900) to a Soyo K7VTA Pro (with Athlon XP 2100+). This board has one ISA slot (for the controller), and I used a more modern PCI-GPIB card. Execution time for the XP app went from 97 sec to 61 sec. Everything else worked fine except one instrument would not talk to the more modern PCI-GPIB card in it. Since that function is more important than the app that runs in XP, I have to drop back to the ISA-based AT-GPIB card to make it happy. Hence the two-ISA-slot requirement.

Sorry for the long-winded reply...

Reply 23 of 27, by canthearu

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precaud wrote:
canthearu wrote:

Sorry for the long-winded reply...

Nope, that reply is perfect.

Completely understand, having worked with computers in industrial settings, you often have a limited selection of hardware that will actually work.

Reply 24 of 27, by precaud

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Yes, in this setting you have to have clear priorities and go with what works.

So here's the comparative timing data. The test captures 4 MegaSamples of 16-bit data using a USB-based digital oscilloscope, transfers it to the host computer via USB2.0, multiplies it with a "windowing" function, performs FFT on the whole block, extracts the complex data for one data point, plots it, then repeats the sequence for the next point (there are 42 points in this test).

900MHz P3 @ 100MHz FSB = 97 sec
866MHz P3 @ 133MHz FSB = 90 sec
1.75GHz Athon XP @ 266MHz FSB = 62 Sec
and just for comparison, my personal Win10 laptop with Intel I5-2520M cpu:
2.5GHz dual-core 64-bit P4 @ ?? FSB = 25 Sec

So, the 133MHz FSB on the P2B-F is not making a very big improvement over the 100MHz S1830. Certainly not enough to justify replacing the uber-reliable Tyan board.

More time was lost over the last week or so while running this experiment, than would have been spent waiting for the longer test results many thousands of times...

Sigh.

Reply 25 of 27, by ultra_code

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precaud wrote:
the_ultra_code wrote:

My question is, how much RAM are you using in the system, @precaud? 512MB? 1GB?

512 (2x256)

My intention was to use 1GB but some tests showed it wasn't needed.

Yeah, no, 512MB is the golden amount. You will probably never use that much under 98, and going above that causes stability problems. If you do want your system to have more memory, though, say, for the XP installation, check out HiMemX. It limits the amount the RAM 98 sees, all with one executable and a line in config.sys. I have no issues in my P4 machine with 2GB of RAM installed, which dual-boots 98 and XP.

Now, here's my experience. I own an Asus P3B-F, a slightly newer version of the P2B-F I presume. I had a while ago bought an Intel Pentium III 1.1GHz 100MHz FSB S370 SL5QW (a hard-find online) as well as a MSI MS-6905 Master as per recommended here. I wanted to see, even though the board doesn't officially support it, if I could run the CPU with a slocket, given it has an FSB-speed 100MHz, the same as the board. So, I threw them together, slotted the slocket-CPU combo into my P3B-F, hit the power button, and... nothin'. No POST. So I let the matter rest.

In a very hopeful attempt to fix my non-working PS/2 mouse port on the board (it basically renders all keyboards, PS/2 or USB, non-functional, if you enter the BIOS or Windows with a PS/2 mouse plugged in), I decided to recap almost the entire board with brand-new Nichicon polymer caps. 🤣 While it didn't really solve the PS/2 problem, it did however allow me to POST with that slocket combo for the first time. The BIOS detected it well enough, and I was able to get into Windows 98 okay. However, I noticed that I would receive memory errors (?) with certain programs under 98, and when I tried using different AGP GPUs with the slocket combo, I also noticed some GPUs would not initialize properly and I would get no video out on the board.

The take-away is this. While you might be able to run a non-supported fast 100MHz FSB P3 on that board (maybe with a recap with modern capacitors), who knows what issues you'll then run into under Windows and such. If you want a fast Slot 1 motherboard, then get an Asus P3V4X, which I'm happy to say runs my P3 1GHz 133MHz FSB S1 SL4BS just fine. 🤣 If you don't want to get a newer Slot 1 motherboard with better CPU support, then you're kinda stuck to whatever the motherboard officially supports, or at least nothing too far beyond what it does.

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Reply 26 of 27, by precaud

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the_ultra_code wrote:

Yeah, no, 512MB is the golden amount. You will probably never use that much under 98, and going above that causes stability problems. If you do want your system to have more memory, though, say, for the XP installation, check out HiMemX. It limits the amount the RAM 98 sees, all with one executable and a line in config.sys. I have no issues in my P4 machine with 2GB of RAM installed, which dual-boots 98 and XP.

One of the programs I use the most in 98SE loads the Pharlap memory manager in System.ini . I was concerned Himemx would conflict with it.

Now, here's my experience. I own an Asus P3B-F, a slightly newer version of the P2B-F I presume. I had a while ago bought an Intel Pentium III 1.1GHz 100MHz FSB S370 SL5QW (a hard-find online) as well as a MSI MS-6905 Master as per recommended here. I wanted to see, even though the board doesn't officially support it, if I could run the CPU with a slocket, given it has an FSB-speed 100MHz, the same as the board. So, I threw them together, slotted the slocket-CPU combo into my P3B-F, hit the power button, and... nothin'. No POST. So I let the matter rest.

Interesting...

In a very hopeful attempt to fix my non-working PS/2 mouse port on the board (it basically renders all keyboards, PS/2 or USB, non-functional, if you enter the BIOS or Windows with a PS/2 mouse plugged in), I decided to recap almost the entire board with brand-new Nichicon polymer caps. 🤣

That IS a bit over-the-top... maybe their impedance was too low at high freq's?

While it didn't really solve the PS/2 problem, it did however allow me to POST with that slocket combo for the first time. The BIOS detected it well enough, and I was able to get into Windows 98 okay. However, I noticed that I would receive memory errors (?) with certain programs under 98, and when I tried using different AGP GPUs with the slocket combo, I also noticed some GPUs would not initialize properly and I would get no video out on the board.

What a mess.

The take-away is this. While you might be able to run a non-supported fast 100MHz FSB P3 on that board (maybe with a recap with modern capacitors), who knows what issues you'll then run into under Windows and such. If you want a fast Slot 1 motherboard, then get an Asus P3V4X, which I'm happy to say runs my P3 1GHz 133MHz FSB S1 SL4BS just fine. 🤣 If you don't want to get a newer Slot 1 motherboard with better CPU support, then you're kinda stuck to whatever the motherboard officially supports, or at least nothing too far beyond what it does.

I looked at the P3V4X specs a while ago and ruled it out, it only has one ISA slot. All the VIA 133A boards seem only to have one, if any.

I agree with your takeaway. And as the numbers spread in my test shows, getting the execution time numbers down significantly requires everything to be significantly better: faster and wider data bus; and much faster cpu clock. A 5-10% improvement is simply not worth pushing a vintage system to the bleeding edge for.

Reply 27 of 27, by precaud

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Peserverence furthers. Before putting it aside, I decided to try the other two slotkets, just so I would know in the future that they were as good as the Asus. One is a Gigabyte GA-6R7Pro, the other a generic one labeled "370SP Rev 2.0". The latter has been modified (the well-known pin jumper mod) to work with Coppermines. Both slotkets were set for 1,8V, and both worked fine with the 866/133 cpu.

On a whim, I decided to try the 1GHz/133 in the S370. To my great surprise, it booted up fine! As did the Gigabyte. So the Asus was actually holding it back.

That was with one stick of 256MB SDRAM. I added another one in dimm slot 2, and it would not boot. I moved the 2nd stick to the 3rd dimm slot and voila it booted up again. Very touchy about ram placement.

I then went into XP and ran the tests again to see where it stood relative to the 900/100 and the 1.8GHz Athlon XP 2200+. (The test was modified slightly to better reflect actual use conditions).
The Athlon ran it in 56 sec. The 1GHz/133 ran it in 66 sec. The 900/100 did it in 79 sec.

This is now much closer to the 2200+, which is surprising, given its much higher cpu clock and 266MHz bus. Is the P3 FPU better than the AMD's?

So a 1GHz 133MHz P3 works fine in the P2B-F after all.