sdw wrote on 2025-04-14, 21:02:In summary there is not a statistical difference between BIOS versions J4 and B24FOX when default performance values are loaded. […]
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In summary there is not a statistical difference between BIOS versions J4 and B24FOX when default performance values are loaded. There is a difference when you manually tweak the common configurations to both BIOS and the additional unhidden configuration values in the J4 version. See attached PDF for detailed metrics.
These values updated for better performance are:
Bank 0/1 DRAM Timing = Turbo
SDRAM Cycle Length = 2
OnChip USB = Disabled
Everything in the PCI Dynamic Bursting column to enabled
Disable both serial and parallel ports.
Disable the onboard sound chip
So, using the 300Mhz k6/2 (2.2V variant) that I have,
S3 Virge/DX 4MB in PCI slot#1,
1x 128MB SDRAM in slot#1(tried one single sided; and then anotherone dual-sided, both with exact same results)
Dos 6.22 from CF card & also tried with WinME System Disk (as an alternative, but with same results)
...here are my scores for both bioses (as they perform IDENTICAL):
***only on the J4, I also tried Enabling PCI Dynamic Bursting, which yielded better performance in some tests***
Speedsys Mem Bandwidth
216.76 MB/s
Speedsys CPU Benchmark
341.04
Speedsys L1 Cache - 32k
1382.82 MB/s
Speedsys L2 Cache - 1024k
256.64 MB/s
Speedsys Memory Throughput
143.49 MB/s
3DBench 1.0c
232.1 ***256.9***
Chris 3D 640x480
Score 77.9 ***85.5***
Frames 46.7 ***51.3***
PC Player 640x480
25.3 ***28.9***
Doom (max)
FPS 78.54 ***88.71***
Quake 360x480
Seconds 41.6
Frames 23.3
Except for PCI Dynamic Bursting, which I usually keep disabled, because the Voodoo2 cards don't like it; I tried setting every performance setting as you described.
But somehow, in SpeedSys, your system scores significantly higher Mem Bandwidth and Motherboard Cache speed..
My onboard cache chips are rated at 5ns; maybe yours are faster... Or maybe your CPU or RAM is more special 😀