First post, by Markk
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hello. I'm having a small problem regarding the 386 machine I'm using right now. First the specs of the pc : opti chipset 386dx/40 m/b, 8MB RAM, Cirrus Logic 1MB SVGA, Soundblaster 32pnp, Ethernet card(for which I don't have drivers yet, for the moment I have it just to fill a slot), my old maxtor 240MB disk and a 2GB compact flash card as drive D(The only reason for having that, is that I have lots of games in a few cd-roms, but are zipped and have long filenames, so when I tried to unzip them on DOS it was just impossible to tell which file was what.) I also have removed the (originally dead) on-board battery, and I'm using a battery holder with 3 AA batteries. The pc worked fine, until yesterday when I decided to move al the parts, from a mini tower to a desktop case I found, which I liked more. When I dismantled the mini tower, I saw that I had 4 siemens simms, and 4 samsung ones. But recently I bought a 286 board which had 4 siemens simms, which are identical to those I had, so for my new setup I used all of them. Now, first I got the m/b in the desktop case, and tried it with only the svga and the multi i/o controller inserted. It worked fine, and I had it on for a little so as to fix the cpu speed display. When I finished it worked perfect. So then I install the rest of the cards, HD, CD-ROM, etc. Now, the problem I'm having is that I can't get the turbo button to work. On the AMI BIOS setup there are 2 options, system boot up speed high or low, and turbo button enable or disable. If I have the turbo button option diasbled, it boots at 40MHz, or I can alter the speed manually by the high/low option in the bios. However, if I enable the turbo button option, after the post, the turbo is disabled, no matter the physical state of the switch. By pressing it it does nothing. The switch is fine, as I tried using also a jumber, to have it closed permanently, and it behaves the same way. Then I removed all the cards, just in case one of them was causing that, but it's still the same. I can't really think of anything that sould do that. I would like to have it fixed, even if it isn't that big problem, as I can still controll it from within the bios. Any ideas?
P.S. By running some benchmarks, I measured 4 different speeds, affected by the turbo and the cache. With both on, it's like a regular 40MHz 386. With cache disabled, it's like a 386sx/25. With cache enabled, but turbo off it's like my 286/16, and with turbo and cache off, it's slightly faster than my nec v20/12MHz board.