Is this normal performance for a 286-16? \ VOGONS

Is this normal performance for a 286-16?

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First post, by appiah4

Posted on 2023-08-10, 10:58

appiah4 Offline

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I'm in the process of building my first 286. I never owned a 286 (or a 386), going from an XT to an A500 then straight to a 486-33. So I thought I'd fire up NSSI to see how well it performed.

When I initially ran the benchmark, I got a score that was basically spot on identical to what the bars imply would be normal for a 286-16. However I was quite surprised to see a rather drastic improvement in performance when I enabled 0WS RAM in the BIOS.. Is this normal for a 286-16? 0WS really improves its performance to about that of a ~386SX20?

The ram in this system is 70ns and seems to be fairing fine at 0WS, am I pushing my luck or is 0WS in spec for 70ns?

Reply 1 of 2, by Grzyb

Posted on 2023-08-10, 11:30

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Yes, it's a well known fact that 286 greatly benefits from 0WS, see also Landmark Hertz

Another well known fast is that 286 is faster than 386SX, due to the latter having paging MMU, ie. additional level of logic between the CPU core and memory.

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Reply 2 of 2, by maxtherabbit

Posted on 2023-08-10, 13:28

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Yeah that's right on target. 70ns is fine for 0WS at 16MHz

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