First post, by nathanieltolbert
I think I have isolated the issue, but I am not certain on how to correct. I have a VLB PC that I have set up and it's running strange. It is the Biostar MB1433/50UCV-D Rev1.1 motherboard. I have installed a Diamond Stealth 64 DRAM VLB card, a DTK PTI-227W I/O card, a Sound Blaster Vibra 16S card with 8MB of 30-pin SIMM ram all of it at 70ns. The board has 256KB of Cache on it, and installed is a 486DX-33. All of this is put inside of a neat little Techmedia AT case. It's very strange. I run Speedsys 4.78 and the CPU scores a 7.3, which looks to be slower than the 386DX-40, in the Benchmark setup by Phil's Computer Lab doing the benchmark inside of System Information 8.0 it scores a cpu rating of 21.7, which is slower than the 386DX-33 which is 35.9 and way behind the expected score of 71.2 I hopped over to a 486DX2-66 machine to do some comparisons, and in Speedsys it scores an okay 24.7 and in System Information it scores a 126.8. I know those numbers are low too, but it's a packard bell, so I would say that's pretty darn good for it.
So the first discrepancy I have noticed was during the memory test in Speedsys. On the 486DX2-66 there is a drop at the 8K mark, then again at the 128K mark. Both of those are where my caches end, the 8k L1 and I have 128K of L2. On the 486DX-33 machine it's a straight line to 256K before it drops off. So, it appears to not see the 8K L1? Right? Okay, so I go into the bios and check. Internal and External Cache are both enabled. So for whatever reason, the 8K of cache is not being utilized, I think? Is there a jumper on the board to do this? What am I missing. This machine should be significantly faster than what I am seeing, but a setting either I made or the previous owner made is hindering it. If there is additional information needed, please let me know and I will collect it. Thank you for the help.