Intel 440BX - Bogging with hard drive activity \ VOGONS

Intel 440BX - Bogging with hard drive activity

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First post, by Thohean

Posted on 2016-11-23, 00:32

Thohean Offline

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I have two motherboards with similar chipsets:
intel 440BX-2 with 550 mhz P3
Dell XPS R350 that has an intel 440BX montherboard with 350 mhz P2

The problem I'm experiencing is that the entire system bogs down while the hard drive has activity. It's like the CPU is having to max out to perform hard drive operations. This is all under windows 95, 98 and 98 SE. The mouse stutters, sound is delayed and everything in general is just real slow, until the hard drive activity goes away. It seems to play nice in DOS(not much hard drive activity in DOS though), but I had intended to run windows on it also, for some win9x games.

I was having the problem with the 440BX-2 motherboard, so I set out to find a replacement, thinking the board was bad. I don't remember having this issues, but it's been 10 years at least since using the board. I was able to find the Dell at a near-ish computer shop. I was disappointed to find it had the same issue.

Each computer has it's own set of parts. The only part that's the same is the hard drive, which works fine in a VIA KT133 powered slot a athlon machine. I've run windows 98 and windows 2000 on that machine and it's fine. I've tested the RAM with memtest 86+ and I've put the CPU from the Dell into the 440bx-2 and vice versa with the same effect.

Could it be that my hard drive is too fast and it's overloading it? The last time I was playing with this board, I was using 2-3 gb western digital caviar drives and a 5gb? quantum bigfoot 5.25 drive. The Dell came with a 20 gb WD drive, but it's super noisy. It came with windows xp preloaded, but it was super slow, so I pulled it and haven't touched it. The drive I was trying to use is a maxtor 40GB drive.

I have a PCI IDE/SATA controller on the way for my windows 2000 machine, but I was thinking of trying it in the Dell to see if that fixed the issue.

Has anyone else experienced this issue? I couldn't think of any search terms to scour the forums for my particular issue, so if you know of a thread that might help, please link it.

I'd use the athlon machine for my dos/win9x needs, but the VIA usb legacy support for DOS sucks and the onboard sound isn't DOS compatible. 😢

Reply 1 of 8, by gdjacobs

Posted on 2016-11-23, 00:58

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Check DMA settings for that drive.

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder

Reply 2 of 8, by squareguy

Posted on 2016-11-23, 01:08

squareguy Offline

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Install 3.20.1008 Intel chipset drivers and check DMA.

http://www.philscomputerlab.com/intel.html

Gateway 2000 Case and 200-Watt PSU
Intel SE440BX-2 Motherboard
Intel Pentium III 450 CPU
Micron 384MB SDRAM (3x128)
Compaq Voodoo3 3500 TV Graphics Card
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card
Western Digital 7200-RPM, 8MB-Cache, 160GB Hard Drive
Windows 98 SE

Reply 3 of 8, by Thohean

Posted on 2016-11-23, 01:16

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Thanks! I'll get it going and see if that fixes the issue.

Reply 4 of 8, by Rhuwyn

Posted on 2016-11-23, 05:36

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What kinda hard drive is it and how old? I know a lot of people prefer to keep their systems period accurate, for the hard drive is always the first thing to go due in part to the fact that outside of the cooling fans it's the only mechanical part of the computer that is constantly in use. You would be surprised how much a new hard drive fresh out of the bag can change your experience.

Reply 5 of 8, by chinny22

Posted on 2016-11-30, 13:40

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Definitely install the chipset drivers above, and enable DMA. No matter what hard drive you end up using.
but if that still doesn't work with the 40GB drive, you could try the SATA adaptor, just note BX motherboards only support 28bit LBA so will only support 120GB, You may get away with a larger drive with the extra space unused, you may not and the system may do funny things, only trying will tell.
Some adaptors don't like DMA enabled, so look out for that as well.

You could also try installing XP on the 40GB drive or Win98 on the 10GB drive. just to confirm.
It may be the hard drive, I've got nothing against Maxtor but they were never the fastest. but you say it works on in another system and BX motherboards especially Intel's were one of the most reliable so would be surprised.

Reply 6 of 8, by yawetaG

Posted on 2016-11-30, 14:41

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chinny22 wrote:
It may be the hard drive, I've got nothing against Maxtor but they were never the fastest. but you say it works on in another system and BX motherboards especially Intel's were one of the most reliable so would be surprised.

A 40 Gb Maxtor should be pretty fast in a PII/PIII system, certainly faster than the original drive. But indeed, DMA needs to be enabled.

Reply 7 of 8, by Thohean

Posted on 2016-12-10, 17:51

Thohean Offline

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I've come across a Compaq Deskpro EN that has a similar, if not the same, motherboard as the Dell. I've installed win98 on a 20GB WD drive and all seams well. I've also installed win98 on a 8GB compact flash card and that seems ok also. I tried to use the 8GB CF drive for windows 2000 in my athlon system and it was awful. I'm in process of installing drivers on the 8GB CF installation. Once I've done all that, I'll retry the 40GB maxtor drive to test it out.

Reply 8 of 8, by Thohean

Posted on 2016-12-10, 18:03

Thohean Offline

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Rhuwyn wrote:
What kinda hard drive is it and how old?

The 40GB Maxtor came out of an original xbox that was modded. It's been running in that machine for over 10 years and who knows if it was new when it was installed, as I bought the xbox secondhand. It's worked for over a year in my athlon system with no problems.

Rhuwyn wrote:
I know a lot of people prefer to keep their systems period accurate, for the hard drive is always the first thing to go due in part to the fact that outside of the cooling fans it's the only mechanical part of the computer that is constantly in use. You would be surprised how much a new hard drive fresh out of the bag can change your experience.

I experienced this on my Athlon system when I installed a PCI sata controller card and a used seagate 250GB sata drive. I was amazed by the speed of it. I've used this drive in a windows 7 media center PC and was not impressed with it's lack luster perfomance in that system and eventually replaced it with an SSD. I'm still on the hunt for a cheap SLC ssd for my old, non-trim supporting windows 2000 system. I tried a compact flash card rated at 50MB and it was appalling; poor random read/write.

CF in the P2 system seems fairly decent.

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