Chadti99 wrote on 2025-09-05, 12:03:

Completely missed this thread, congrats on the Quake score, wasn’t sure we’d see 23+ fps on a 486, nice work!

Do we have the bios and jumper settings documented for the 23.4 fps Quake score?

Fastest dram and cache settings and I’m assuming 1:1 pci at 66x3? Screenshots of bios settings would be awesome.

Thanks.

Yes, I can get back to you with bios settings, I'm still using this thing almost daily with no changes to the setup.

All of this at a 1/2 pci (30 or 33mhz). This is primarily driven by me being lazy to make the board switch to 60 on the fly and also partly by the decision to use this particular graphics card in the build. Since I'm going for the best playability of early directx (outlaws, jedi knight etc - which when accelerated will run fine at 640x480 on this) this card makes sense to me as it offers the best acceleration on this platform - HOWEVER I don't think it worked at 60mhz, and any of the cards that did work at that frequency may have scored better at SOME benchmarks (doom or 0.5 fps better in quake) but overall were much slower as actual accelerators.

analog_programmer wrote on 2025-09-05, 13:50:

But, but... PCChips M919... "PCChips = cr*p" 🤣 Actually pretty nice system and impressive results 😀

Is the passive cooler simply placed on top of the CPU or there is some kind of retention?

Imho the problem with pc chips is the chipsets used are often great but bios was not (older revisions often being better then newer ones, strange inconsistencies with caching, memory speed timings etc) AND pcb quality was generally low.... leading to unreliability that's often hard to pinpoint. I have 2 identical boards and I couldn't say which one is "better" ...the one that happens to work with all the parts I throw at it 🤣

The cooler just sat on the cpu during bench setup, now it is permanently affixed with 4 dabs of epoxy on the corners and thermal paste in the center. That's my "standard procedure". It's not heavy enough to worry me, especially since there is no fan vibrating on it.

Chadti99 wrote on 2025-09-05, 14:15:

🤣, the m919 board I have was a total pain to work with, kept losing its bios settings on top of other issues. Tempted to pull it back out or find another example. And I agree with OP on forcing the 1:1 after each boot being a pain.

I’m also worried to move my 200Mhz capable 5x86 around too much in fears of killing it from ESD or otherwise.

Interestingly, none of my 919's has ever done that (2x v3.4b/f and one older v1.5 revision board) sort of failure BUT I had a m918 board give me similar bios issues AFTER EXTENDED USE AT 60MHZ PCI. This eventually made the board unusable, though initially slowing the board back down made the bios settings retain again. I tried swapping a bios chip from an identical board but it didn't fix it. I wonder if it could be some damage to whatever onboard memory holds bios settings (is it a little eprom or something?) due to some out of whack bus speed (or just age??)

I totally understand your worry. On one side, it's a cool thought to swap a bunch of hardware for a few more comparative benchmarks, but on the other side sometimes I've taken old hardware out only for it to not work again when it went back in 🤣🤣🤣 it's like a lottery every time

bertrammatrix wrote on 2025-09-05, 18:18:

sometimes I've taken old hardware out only for it to not work again when it went back in 🤣🤣🤣 it's like a lottery every time

I dread taking my completed systems out of the closet for this reason. It will either work just fine, or I’ll spend half the night trying to diagnose the issue. We certainly aren’t collecting baseball cards here.

Chadti99 wrote on 2025-09-05, 12:03:

Completely missed this thread, congrats on the Quake score, wasn’t sure we’d see 23+ fps on a 486, nice work!

Do we have the bios and jumper settings documented for the 23.4 fps Quake score?

Fastest dram and cache settings and I’m assuming 1:1 pci at 66x3? Screenshots of bios settings would be awesome.

Here, nothing special...fastest for cache and most memory and slowest for anything ISA related...to give a chery picked sound card the best chance of working properly. Note also turning off any unnecessary i/o and ide (I use a promise pci controller). Period reviews point especially to the secondary IDE as being problematic/causing errata during use even at stock speeds.

analog_programmer wrote on 2025-09-05, 13:50:

But, but... PCChips M919...

When compared to simplicity of LuckyStar LS-486E C2 overclocking, it's still kinda meh. Nowadays you could say that LuckyStar is for "casuals" though.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2025-09-06, 21:48:

When compared to simplicity of LuckyStar LS-486E C2 overclocking, it's still kinda meh. Nowadays you could say that LuckyStar is for "casuals" though.

I think M919 board is more easily obtainable. But for the "fake cache" revisions (all boards different than rev. 1.xx) it needs a proprietary PCChips COASt module.

I'm not into PCChips hater's club 😀

Thanks for the screenshots! Can anyone remind me what the jp3 jumper block positions are for 60Mhz and 66Mhz bus speeds? Thanks!

I got it!

Closed, open, closed = 66
Open, closed, open = 60

Trying to find stability at 66x3. Does your CHKCPU look like this? Specifically does it mention L1 in Write Through? Noticed my bios also has L1 listed as write through and grayed out. Any chance you could share your jumper settings?

Okay, each boot gives me different results between L1 being enabled or disabled , L2 being WB or WT. Looking at the 1MB pancake cache module I had forgotten it mentions it’s for 3.3v CPU’s only. To get my 5x86 to run at 200MHz it needs the juice at 5v. So it could be a combo of a flaky board and overvolting this cache. The fastest I saw was 22.6 in Quake but that was with 313 cache and 3ws read and write I think and L1 reporting WB mode.