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Optimizing a 386: questions

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Reply 21 of 31, by tayyare

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386SX wrote:

Jee the Am386-40 runs quiet hot to be a 386! 😁

No it is not. 386 CPU's were always like that. My little 386SX16 blistered my finger once.

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Reply 22 of 31, by matze79

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The Trident used in this Machine will prevent the 386 from unleashing its Power in VGA.
The 9000 is slow, a good choice for a 286 CPU or 8088/8086/V20/V30 in 8bit Mode.

There are 32bit 1Mb Ram Versions of the Trident Card, which equal to ET4000/Cirrus Logic GD5422/GD5424.
They where later Manufactured for use with Industrial PCs.
A cheap and good ISA Card at all.
Trident TVGA8900D-R ISA.
This Card will bottlenecked by the CPU, if used with your 386DX40 😀

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Reply 23 of 31, by elianda

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A regular ET4000 is about 4 to 5x faster than a Trident 9000i according to benchmarks.

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Reply 24 of 31, by 386SX

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I expected that this card was a cheap one... I would say not even faster than the Oak I had on my original 386SX-20 in the early 90s.
Unfortunately is the only isa vga I have actually. Lately people sell isa and ancient cards at some extremely high prices..

Reply 26 of 31, by 386SX

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A strange thing it happens. Even if i changed the battery sometimes if i disconnect the power external cable it loose bios config. Not entirely cause the time still is the one when powered down. It doesn.t give me the bios battery error it gave of before. Just press f1. I need new battery or check the mod?

Reply 28 of 31, by Scali

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386SX wrote:

i am also getting some crash with 'memory parity error system halted' message. And at reboot it sound the pc speaker... Is a ram problem or video related?

It could be RAM (which may not necessarily be broken, but you may have set the timings too fast), but parity errors may also appear when the system is locked up for some reason (eg, IRQ conflict), so that it cannot refresh the memory.
Difficult to say.

Last edited by Scali on 2015-09-17, 07:37. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 29 of 31, by brassicGamer

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To answer the question on controller cards, any card with a BIOS will be loaded at boot time, either before or after the system BIOS. Only after all these have been loaded will the secondary storage be accessed. For example, with my Pentium system, it loads the graphics card's BIOS first (some display text on screen, some don't), then the system BIOS, then the RAID card BIOS, all before choosing a device to boot the OS from. Provided the BIOS is good, it will load automatically. 😀

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Reply 30 of 31, by 386SX

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386SX wrote:

A strange thing it happens. Even if i changed the battery sometimes if i disconnect the power external cable it loose bios config. Not entirely cause the time still is the one when powered down. It doesn.t give me the bios battery error it gave of before. Just press f1. I need new battery or check the mod?