Chadti99 wrote on Today, 00:28:

feipoa wrote on Yesterday, 23:46:

Chadti99 wrote on Yesterday, 20:56:

I ended up sourcing another m919 and this one seems to be quite a bit more stable although still inconsistent between boots.

That sounds like the majority of M919's. Maybe it's related to their thin and springy motherboards.

Agreed, you’ve warned me a few times. So far I got through a Windows install no problem but crashes when it finally boots to the desktop. I should really give up on this board.

I also tested the 1:1 pci thing recently with my 180 setup and no go. I used cards that have proven to work at a 60+ mhz bus on other boards previously. My matrox g200 would make it as far as dosbench after being hot switched and then freeze shortly into anything, my sis 6326 wouldn't even make it that far. I suspect they would if I relaxed cache timing....however experience tells me that the loss of speed from relaxing cache is not worth faster pci, so I'm not pursuing the 1:1 avenue any further

Do you have the same crash after windows install /desktop even if you slow down to 180? Also, if you run the quake benchmark from dosbench at 640x480 does it complete, or does it crash? Because if it crashes that just means that cpu won't run 200 reliably

Edit: one more thing if pursuing windows on these- I found both with the matrox card AND with a cl gd5464 laguna VGA card I was using I would have to turn off bus mastering in the driver's (and usually had to use the manufacturers driver for this as the windows one didn't offer it). If i did not, there would be trouble.

i looked at old notes early in this thread and it looks like i was able to run the board at 3x60 1:1 tightest bios timings. results confirm it with the high doom score.
however i was not able to get it stable at 3x66.
so your success is encouraging, may give that a try locally.

so bertram, are your running fully stable 3x66?

this board equipped with the modern 1mb L2 cache module is great for 3x60. probably the best one out there for DOS interactive graphics, but pci divider must be 1:1.
it is somewhat less than ideal for Windows because it is unable to run some specific pci graphics cards such as voodoo3 that offer peak perf in win gui and enable 3d accelerated graphics.

Am I the only one who runs this board with VLB graphics + Voodoo2? This saved me a lot of PCI graphics grief. ARK1000VL with modified MCLK and updated RAMDAC was the winner for me, along with 50/60 ns TSOP EDO modules.

Love the idea, I’d like to do a similar setup, maybe just not with the M919 board 🤣, we’ll see.

“ ARK1000VL with modified MCLK and updated RAMDAC was the winner for me”

I’ve def tried the ARK, it needs 1ms wait state at 50MHz and wouldn’t post higher. Although I think it beats the 33MHz PCI in most dosbench tests.

Tell me more about this modified MCLK and updated RAMDAC.

pshipkov wrote on Today, 05:23:

so bertram, are your running fully stable 3x66?

I couldn't find any issues at 3x66 EXCEPT the freezing at the "windows is shutting down" screen, which does not happen at 3x60. No apparent problem on restart. However, while I do enjoy building and messing with these I don't particularly enjoy registry issues that this may eventually to on a daily driver, hence me running it at 3x60 for normal use.

Perhaps I should add - I run this on an old plug converted ATX power supply that I upgraded some capacitors in to larger values. I also have an extra 100uf (I think) cap slapped on the back of the cache module. In open bench testing this made no apparent difference (the initial setup being done on an old AT supply), however my thinking is some better filtering and perhaps tighter voltage regulation definitely can't hurt when running other components at their limits

bertrammatrix wrote on Today, 16:27:

I couldn't find any issues at 3x66 EXCEPT the freezing at the "windows is shutting down" screen, which does not happen at 3x60. No apparent problem on restart. However, while I do enjoy building and messing with these I don't particularly enjoy registry issues that this may eventually to on a daily driver, hence me running it at 3x60 for normal use.

The freezing at the “windows is shutting down” screen isn’t upan unusual thing for me. Some builds do it, others don’t. I thought it might be driver related. Shut down to DOS always works though.

Win 98SE hangs on shutdown