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PC Chips M326 v5.4 386/40 motherboard slowness issues

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First post, by walterg74

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Hey folks,

I recently dug up the old motherboard/cpu/ram of the subject to test some sound cards that needed testing...

I am finding that some games seem to run very slow, or also specially the scrolling is slow...

My motherboard has the soldered AMD 386 DX 40 MHz CPU, and it also has a 487DLC co-processor installed. Also has 4MB RAM.

I tested to see if maybe turbo was bothering, since I'm just testing the bare board and don't have a lot of pin headers, but no, cpucheck shows it as 40MHz, and if I short the pins it will then show it as 20MHz.

One thing that caught my mind was in BIOS, it has "External Cache" enabled, and lets me enable/disable that, but "Internal Cache" shows as DISABLED, and does not let you change it. Did these CPUs even have cache??

Can the video card be the problem? I am only using an old Realtek 256KB card (and sadly don't have other ISA cards here with me), but I don't remember these issues way back then, but could be my memory too. I have even seen videos of 386 machines running DOOM "ok-ish", and can't imagine why this may be occuring here.

Some example games that are very slow, or have scrolling issues of slow/tearing are: Crazy Cars 3, Blues Brothers, Indy 3, Larry 1, etc. Others *seems* to run ok, like Prince of Persia, of course that even runs on an XT...

Any help appreciated!

Reply 1 of 3, by waterbeesje

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Yes, It can definitely be the slower video card. These realteks are quite compatible but slow as a snail.

Besides that, the 386 indeed does not have internal cache. There were some SLC and DLC around which do have internal cache.

To see where culprit is, you may run some extra tests. The Dos benchmark pak from Phillscomputerlab is great for this and lets je compare with our own results.

Stuck at 10MHz...

Reply 2 of 3, by walterg74

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waterbeesje wrote on 2026-01-14, 21:36:

Yes, It can definitely be the slower video card. These realteks are quite compatible but slow as a snail.

Besides that, the 386 indeed does not have internal cache. There were some SLC and DLC around which do have internal cache.

To see where culprit is, you may run some extra tests. The Dos benchmark pak from Phillscomputerlab is great for this and lets je compare with our own results.

Thanks!

What test(s) do you recommend? I do have the benchmark suite on the machine's HDD (actually CF on CF/IDE adapter unit). I did see one of those (System Information 8.0) for some reason just hangs/freezes at the "Determining system contents" screen/phase...

Reply 3 of 3, by waterbeesje

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These tests depend on the cpu and some depend on the whole system including the graphics card.
I assume your turbo header is working and maybe is even connected to a button already.

You may run the speedsys test to see how fast the CPU works. With less than 6MB of ram you may encounter an error but just ignore this. Run the test with and without turbo enabled, and calculate the difference in %.

Next try Doom on high resolution with birth turbo enabled and disabled and calculate the% again. This test is very graphics intensive.

When the graphics card is up to the CPU the results should give you about the same% difference, if the graphics card is the problem, the Doom should have a much smaller difference.

Ofc best would be to compare with other cards. The Trident 8900B should be a bit faster and the ET4000AX should be faster again.

Stuck at 10MHz...

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