First post, by feipoa
- Rank
- l33t++
Since my old Abit FU340 motherboard died, I decided it was time to test my stockpile of 386 motherboards to find the best replacement.
I used a TSENG LABS ET4000/w32i as the test grahpics card and a Ti486SXL w/Cyrix FasMath FPU as the test processors. While I tried to hold 256 KB L2 cache w/32MB RAM constant, one motherboard was not reliable with more than 64 KB cache and 16 MB of RAM. This condition is noted in the chart.
The chipsets compared were:
CHIPS 351/355/356
UMC 481/482
SiS 460
SiS 206/310/320/330
VIA 481/495
AMI Mark V Baby Screamer (not yet tested)
The surprising outcome for me was that the motherboard which demonstrated the slowest RAM speed had the best benchmark results. The L2 score was not the fastest either. Click images for a larger, more readable, size.
While running this motherboard/chipset test, I decided to benchmark my stockpile of ISA graphics cards. The results are as expected, with the ET4000/W32i as the winner. What was surprising was that a Trident 8900D (and only the D-marked chips) had DOOM performance similar to a ATI Mach64 and CirrusLogic CL-GD5434 (perhaps due to the CPU bottleneck?)
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.