Performance seems fine in my eyes. Around 10 MB/s is quite fast.

Let's remember, early XTs and ATs were directly working through the front side bus.
In such PCs, using memory on the expansion bus was causing no bottleneck. 😀

I'm curious, did this card run on an 8, 10, 12 or 16 MHz bus?
- I'm asking, because quite a few of these vintage memory boards did officially support up to 12 MHz operation.

Jo22, I'm only looking at the speed of the memory on the expansion card, not the 4 MB RAM on the motherboard. Half-speed memory perf. for the expansion card seems pretty lousy to me.

This system is running on a 16.7 MHz FSB with a SLC2 upgrade kit running at 66 MHz.

Thanks for your reply. I understand, but does thinking in percentage really matter, considering these dimensions ?
If I do have, for example, a CF card that transfers data at 2,7MB/s vs 5MB/s, does it matter so much ?
The numbers might seem drastically different in percentage, but not in actual MB/s.
With merely a 2,3MB/s difference, it's about as fast or slow in practice. 😉

With such limited hardware, I'm personally rather concerned about features such as DMA (on memory boards, this equals capabilities like bank-switching).
A slower card, but with a low access time or DMA, might cause better overall performance by not bothering the CPU with copy operations.

That being said, I do fully understand your point of view and it's perfectly fine, also.
It's just that I do perceive things differently, I guess.
Time is -or at least it's perception is-, relative, after all. 😉

Edit: Never mind. My apologies for writing down things like this, in case it's annoying.
I don't mean to upset people, I just simply think that way and often just realize how my thought process may seem strange to others when it's too late. 😅

Its new to me cachechk runs on a 286? If yes, I can try if I have a board installed next time.

For me it makes totally sense the RAM on the card (connected via ISA bus) is slower than the onboard RAM (connected direclty to CPU).

I did not read anything here which could be perceived as upsetting. It really boils down to one's personal motivations. I am new to the memory expansion card arena and am mostly trying to fully optimise systems for the fun of it. Are you saying that some of these expansion cards do DMA while others do not? If so, do you know which do DMA and which do not? I find it hard to grasp my mind around DMA when considering a memory card.

No, the RAM is not copied/transferred to another location, therefore there is no DMA.

These cards are intended for use in 286 systems. There are usually other bottlenecks than the speed of the XMS. But yes, these cards are slow. You can already see in in the POST screen when RAM counts. The 1st part for the onboard RAM is fast, when switching to the ISA RAM counting gets much slower.

In most 386 systems you can put 16 mb onboard, so these cards are useless there.

Predator99 wrote on 2022-02-14, 08:47:

No, the RAM is not copied/transferred to another location, therefore there is no DMA.

That is kind of what I thought.

Predator99 wrote on 2022-02-14, 08:47:

These cards are intended for use in 286 systems. There are usually other bottlenecks than the speed of the XMS. But yes, these cards are slow. You can already see in in the POST screen when RAM counts. The 1st part for the onboard RAM is fast, when switching to the ISA RAM counting gets much slower.

Yeah, I can definately hear the memory tick sound difference once it passes 3712 KB (BIOS shadow enabled) or 4096 KB (BIOS shadow disabled).

Unfortunately, it looks like cachechk requires a 386 or better. I haven't been able to find a program which works on a 386 and can measure particular memory addresses like cachechk can. There's CCT, but the furthest out it can go is 1.5 MB.

Back to topic...next card I got is a NCR one. Its is labeled
NCR -85 017-0035806
ASSY 017-0035447 D
SCHM 017-0035448 B

User GuillermoXT from dosreloaded.de owns this card, too. He uploaded a manual.
https://dosreloaded.de/forum/index.php?thread … 3256#post133256

The card uses some very special RAM modules I have never seen before. On the top there is a normal 30-pin SIMM for comparision.

NEC MC-41256A4A-15 8632KD
NEC MC-41256A5A-12 8625KD

Unfortunately my card currently refueses to work. The RAM get very hot and nothing is detected. On the back there seems to be some kind of factory repair.

Predator99 wrote on 2022-02-14, 19:52:

The card uses some very special RAM modules I have never seen before. On the top there is a normal 30-pin SIMM for comparision.
NEC MC-41256A4A-15 8632KD
NEC MC-41256A5A-12 8625KD

Looks like NEC made a few variants of these modules, all based on the uPD41256 chips. Curiously they call them SIMMs even though the the PC memory with pins got called SIPP. The 22-pin one actually has a datasheet: https://datasheet.datasheetarchive.com/origin … DSAP0035671.pdf

Predator99 wrote on 2022-02-14, 19:52:

Unfortunately my card currently refueses to work. The RAM get very hot and nothing is detected. On the back there seems to be some kind of factory repair.

All of the chips get hot? These are NMOS but not that power-hungry, datasheet says each chip is about 30mW in standby. Perhaps the driving logic is faulty and more than one bank is trying to drive the bus? Look into /RAS and /CAS signals. Should not be low all of the time.

Deunan wrote on 2022-02-14, 21:43:

Predator99 wrote on 2022-02-14, 19:52:

Unfortunately my card currently refueses to work. The RAM get very hot and nothing is detected. On the back there seems to be some kind of factory repair.

All of the chips get hot? These are NMOS but not that power-hungry, datasheet says each chip is about 30mW in standby. Perhaps the driving logic is faulty and more than one bank is trying to drive the bus? Look into /RAS and /CAS signals. Should not be low all of the time.

Yes, the whole memory bank gets hot. I dont know I have the knowledge and energy to dive into that... 😉

But when looking on Pin 19 on the 1st bank (RAS) there seems to be some activity when powering on. On Pin 5 (CAS) there is nothing...

Predator99 wrote on 2022-02-15, 20:57:

Yes, the whole memory bank gets hot. I dont know I have the knowledge and energy to dive into that... 😉

But when looking on Pin 19 on the 1st bank (RAS) there seems to be some activity when powering on. On Pin 5 (CAS) there is nothing...

It would be an interesting project I think, but obviously there's only so much free time. Looks like it's all 74 series, except maybe those two chips in the upper corner near the mounting plate. Chips with stickers like that tend to be PALs or small ROMs. However some of these 74 are uncommon, like the '280 parity and '682 comparator. I actually had to look up that '682, narrow 20-pin ones are somewhat rare.
Anyway, there's some nice yellow resistor pack (or at least that's what I assume those are) and the usual delay line, so it should be possible to re-create the schematic. Obviously thats easier said than done though. I would probably start with removing all memory sticks except one complete bank (L+U on bank 0 seems a good candidate). Then check if they still get hot, and if both sides (partity and non-parity) is equally hot. If only one side or stick, it might be data bus contention.

You can also power up the sticks with 5V outside the circuit, I think there's only one VCC and GND pins? Measure the current draw per stick, see if any draw way more or less. For the test tie both /RAS and /CAS pins high, or add switches to see what current draw is in standby and when driving control lines. This would be without refresh so probably less power draw than on the card, but if you get about 30mW * chip count per stick then you know they are not completly shorted internally at least.

Hey guys,

I recently purchased this 2MB Quadram card for my IBM AT, but it didn't come with any documentation. Would be grateful for any help regarding jumper settings. My system has 640k of base memory already installed.

Best regards, John

This one looks similar, but has 2 DIP blocks
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/qua … am-board.74375/

Did you read the thread from the beginning? If you dont find any information about the card run testext.exe first to get the current configuation.

Predator99 wrote on 2022-07-28, 20:03:

This one looks similar, but has 2 DIP blocks
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/qua … am-board.74375/

Did you read the thread from the beginning? If you dont find any information about the card run testext.exe first to get the current configuation.

Yes, I've read the whole thread a couple of times but I'm not sure I can wrap my head around it just yet 😀 And indeed, my card is similar but it has 10 dip switches on one block instead of 8. I went by his settings for 1-8, and set the last 2 switches to off and got this result, not sure what to make of it:

Does not look that bad. Your card seems to have 2mb onboard. The screenshot Shows 512kb is ok, indicated by the blue 0000000...
The 45080008 indicates some error.
For me it seems only the Last 512kb is working.
I would remove all ICs except the ones in bank 0 first to locate the error. Then run testext again.

I See you have different ram types. Put the ones with 256kb from bank 1 in bank 0 and remove all others...

Predator99 wrote on 2022-07-29, 07:35:

Does not look that bad. Your card seems to have 2mb onboard. The screenshot Shows 512kb is ok, indicated by the blue 0000000... […]
Show full quote

Does not look that bad. Your card seems to have 2mb onboard. The screenshot Shows 512kb is ok, indicated by the blue 0000000...
The 45080008 indicates some error.
For me it seems only the Last 512kb is working.
I would remove all ICs except the ones in bank 0 first to locate the error. Then run testext again.

I See you have different ram types. Put the ones with 256kb from bank 1 in bank 0 and remove all others...

I did what you said and yes, seems like the culprit was one of the chips in bank 0. I've now removed all the Texas Instruments ICs and adjusted the first four dips to make the extended ram start at 1MB instead of 5MB, 3 banks on the board is working and I now have 1,5MB on the card, so that's great. Will probably order a few extra ICs of the TI kind to aid in the search of the bad one 😀

Edit: Seems like the TI ones are 64kb, so that might explain why they're not working correctly in this case. Suspect the card might only work with 256kb ICs.

Therefore the card is working now and you can use the extra RAM under DOS? Great!

Can you please post all the jumper settings for future reference?

Predator99 wrote on 2022-07-29, 13:33:

Therefore the card is working now and you can use the extra RAM under DOS? Great!

Can you please post all the jumper settings for future reference?

Absolutely. These settings give me 1,5MB of extended memory on top of the 640K that was already installed in the system.

DIP1 - OFF
DIP2 - OFF
DIP3 - OFF
DIP4 - ON
DIP5 - OFF
DIP6 - ON
DIP7 - OFF
DIP8 - OFF
DIP9 - OFF
DIP10 - OFF

Got it populated with the full 2 MB now, here are the settings!

DIP1 - OFF
DIP2 - OFF
DIP3 - OFF
DIP4 - ON
DIP5 - OFF
DIP6 - OFF
DIP7 - OFF
DIP8 - OFF
DIP9 - OFF
DIP10 - OFF