VOGONS


First post, by Deksor

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I bought few month ago this beautiful 386 mobo with a soldered 386DX40 chip, 64KB of ram and a Cyrix FPU. Name is "ISA-386U3PO" and POST string is "30-012b-001292-00101111-050591-ISA386U3-F" which seem to point Asus as the manufacturer.

Chipset is based on UM82C482AF and UM82C481BF chips.

My video card is a Tseng ET4000 with 512KB of memory (for some reasons it only wants to output video in black and white) and my memory is 8MB.

So whats wrong ?

Well when I run speedsys, I get this :

386DX40.GIF

But looking at here, with the same CPU and same chipset, phil managed to get even faster ...

I've checked all the bios settings and everything is set up as fast as possible (I can only choose between "FAST" and "SLOW" for dram, cache, etc ; and everything is set to "FAST")

The turbo is enabled (if you look closely to ram benchmark, you'll see a small spike, that was just me pressing on the button just to check if I was in slow mode, but nope) so that's not the culprit here ...

Is it just my bios that sucks ?

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Reply 1 of 8, by lvader

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Your 386 is actually pretty fast, Speedsys gets confused by the presence of a co processor on a 386 and as as result gives a score approximately half what it should be.

Reply 2 of 8, by matze79

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it looks pretty ok to me.
Phil has 4 times more Cache then your mainboard.

Does your ET4000 has a DIP Switch ? maybe you must set Monitor Type ?
Did you look on the Display Type Jumper on your Mainboard ? did you set it to MONO or Color ?

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Reply 3 of 8, by Deksor

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On the mobo there is a jumper where there's written "MONO" and "CGA". It was on mono so I changed it to CGA, but it doesn't seem to change anything. The bios is set to "VGA/EGA/PGA".

That ET4000 doesn't have any dip switches, just 2 or 3 jumpers.

I'm going to check if disabling the FPU speeds things up or not

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Reply 4 of 8, by Deksor

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So I disabled the FPU and indeed, score increased vastly. Now I reach 9.25.

However, RAM speed is still rather low, but that's probably due to the bios not letting me change much 😒

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Reply 5 of 8, by matze79

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Then your Card fails to detect the VGA Display,
You use a TFT right ?

Modern Displays have EDID on the the same Pins the ET4000 uses to determine B&W or Color Display.

These are:

11 - Monitor ID Bit 0
12 - monitor id 1 in or data from display
15 - monitor id 3 in or data clock

You can try a cable where these pins are not connected.
or maybe isolate them on the VGA Connector.

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Reply 6 of 8, by Tiido

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I overrode the ID pins on my ET4000 card so that it would always see a color monitor.
The memory performance does seem slow, but only way to improve that is if the BIOS allows to adjust memory timings...

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Reply 7 of 8, by Deksor

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That's a 1997 CRT, although I had other cards behaving oddly (sometimes the video card turns to b&w mode after a reset for no reason) and I only used that CRT with them so that's highly possible.

As for the ram speed, I guess the best I could do would be to change the bios to something more permissive.

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Reply 8 of 8, by matze79

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A 1997 can also have EDID 😀

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