First post, by RetrOli
Hi All,
I've been a silent admirer of this site for quite a while but now is the time to approach the community with an issue I have:
I am working on a period correct system from '97 with the following specs:
AMD K6 233 or P1 MMX 233 - as yet undecided
FIC PA-2007 (PCB Rev. 1.1 with 586A SB)
Hercules Stingray 128 Voodoo Rush 8MB
128MB of eihter EDO or SD-RAM - as yet undecided
Aztech Waverider 32+ (I38-MMSD826)
Everything startet to work out fine, the System ist up and running but then I startet to fiddle around with the benchmarks - of course I need to know weather the system's performance is spot-on or totally off.
Again, everything looked good except for one benchmark: Speedsys. The CPU score is hardly ever in the two digit region.
I used the DOS benchmark pack from Phils Computer Lab (supplemented by an occasional Winstone 97 and 3D Mark 99 Max test run in Win 95).
What shall I say - it grew into a full blown benchmarking project, as I have thrown a wild assortment of processors from my stash at it - paired with an equally wild assortment of memory options and - to make it a real sport - various BIOS revisions. I even switched from an SD-IDE-converter to an IDE DOM and dug-up some old HDDs in the hope to eliminate some storage related issue gobbling-up CPU performance.
The Winstone 97 tests were kind'o o.k. but not really what I hoped: With a score of 53,2 it was in the region of a AMD K6-200 (according Anandtech's test from back in the day) - and that with a K6-3+ running at 6 x 66MHz = 400MHz.
To cut a long story short: I am trying to identify and hopefully eliminate the performance bottleneck.
Please find attached a table of my benchmarking exercise so far - I know, it can still be improved for consistency (I will do some re-runs of some of the CPUs at other BIOSes and RAM fitouts).