Happy Weekend everyone. I hope you are all doing well. I am trying to tighten timings to squeeze more performance out of the 100MHz DX4 before trying to find something like a AMD 5x86-133 chip. My biggest bottleneck seems to be memory. I moved the Awe64 Value card to a different slot on the ISA bus and the bus noise has reduced. I thought that the integrated IDE and Floppy were on the VL Bus but I guess that I am incorrect in that thought. I have been trying to tighten memory timings so I pulled the memory out of the system. One of the sticks has HY514400A J-70 on it and the other says RAMS DS4740 AG-60 on it. I can confirm that the Hyundai ram is Fast Page Mode ram, but I have not been able to find anything regarding the DS4740 labeled ram. Strangely enough, I pulled the Hyundai ram out of the system, and the system still reports that there is 16MB installed, that means the Hyundai stick is bad, I think? Or could it be that the DS4740 is EDO and as such the sticks wouldn't run together? Anyway, I have tried to tighten memory and the system tends to lock up and crash when I try to set things low. The Cache is set to 3-1-1-1 I think? It has a setting for 2-1-1-1 or something but I cannot set that. I also tried to reduce the wait states and I can set the RAM wait states to 1 with no issues, but the Cache write wait states can't be moved from 2. I am wondering that if I replace the Cache with different, faster cache chips if that would allow me to tighten timings there. The speeds that are being reported within Speedsys for memory is as follows:
Cache Level 1 Read - 94.29MB/s Write - 31.83MB/s Move - 42.26MB/s Average - 56.12MB/s
Cache Level 2 Read - 51.05MB/s Write - 31.77MB/s Move - 30.04MB/s Average - 37.62MB/s
Memory Read - 17.04MB/s Write 32.02MB/s Move - 13.81MB/s Average - 20.96MB/s
I don't know if these are expected speeds or if they are low or high. Our 486 computer when I was younger was a store bought one and the first PC I built after that was a Pentium 100, so I didn't get to experience configuring these aspects back in the day. I look up the speed information online for FPM and EDO and I see that their max rates are significantly higher than what I am reporting, but I don't even know if I should be getting even remotely near those speeds. I have 128KB of Cache installed and it's UM61256K-15. I recognize that means that they are 15 nanoseconds and 256 Kilobit chips,. But that's about it. I looked up the datasheet to see if I could glean any more information that would be important for me, and I can understand the min/max ns wait times for read and write activity, but aside from that, I am just not educated enough in the other material provided. I did find that they are labeled as 32K x 8 Bit High Speed CMOS RAM. I have 128K more here somewhere, should I install that and increase my cache to 256? Will that improve anything? The machine runs okay for the most part, but there are games that recommend a DX4-100 and when they test the CPU it comes back as a DX-83 or a DX2-66. And this motherboard has jumpers for settings that I am not certain what they pertain to. jumpers for LDEV, which I guess could be Logical Device? But all I can truly ascertain about it, is that it seems to relate to the VL-Bus items. I know I have asked for a ton of help and I consistently keep asking, but any information or suggestions would be very much appreciated.
Thank you,
Nathan