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Video: 386DX 40 MHz vs 486SX 25 MHz

Dark Forces? I'm sure I played this on a DX4 100 MHz :)

I think our memory likes to play tricks on us. I played Wing Commander on a 10 Mhz 286 with EGA graphics and PC speaker. And in my mind it was fluid. But of course it was a slideshow like no other :)
 
Mau1wurf1977 said:
I'd like to see a run of your 15fps 386. Double the speed of my FX-3000 with 256KB Cache? I don't think so :) Maybe your memory is tricking you a little bit or maybe it was a 486DX 40?
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It was a 386dx-40. While I still have the motherboard, I no longer have the same video card, so an exact comparison is no longer possible.
 
Trixter said:
The ET4000 cards were slower than the CL card in my experience. Also, if you look at the exported TOPBENCH database, the highest 386dx-40 score was achieved with a CL card, a Cirrus CL-GD5428.
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Likely an overclocked ISA bus. The top cards are all even steven, it's not going to make a difference. The CL cards are certainly not any faster. They are knows for being awesome value though.

Just test it with the Tseng please.
 
Mau1wurf1977 said:
Likely an overclocked ISA bus.
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Was there ever really a standard ISA bus speed for aftermarket motherboards? It was really only the OEM systems that locked it down at 8 or 8.33 MHz. With aftermarket boards you were usually free to choose your own ISA bus divider, so you could run it as fast as your cards would allow.
 
vwestlife said:
Was there ever really a standard ISA bus speed for aftermarket motherboards? It was really only the OEM systems that locked it down at 8 or 8.33 MHz. With aftermarket boards you were usually free to choose your own ISA bus divider, so you could run it as fast as your cards would allow.
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Well at least with BIOS defaults it will pick a divider that gets close to 8 MHz. On my DX 40 boards it picks the /5 divider.
 
Most of the books I've read agree that 8MHz is pretty much the standard for 16-bit ISA. Sometimes I can get away with 10MHz, but I run SCSI and ethernet cards so I tend to play it safe.
 
the ISA clock divider was a common tunning parameter that very few people I know runs the bus at 8 MHz :D I think UltraStor spec all their ISA cards to be stable at 16 MHz (I think I still have their 15FM somewhere.) I remember running generic IDE Multi I/O cards at 16 MHz for a few months before it started failing.
 
dorkbert said:
the ISA clock divider was a common tunning parameter that very few people I know runs the bus at 8 MHz :D I think UltraStor spec all their ISA cards to be stable at 16 MHz (I think I still have their 15FM somewhere.) I remember running generic IDE Multi I/O cards at 16 MHz for a few months before it started failing.
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Yeah, did the hardware have a higher built quality back then? How much I hated some PCI devices later on that were failing even with a small frequency increase of the PCI BUS and we had to wait for mainboards to provide a PCI lock to properly overclock.
 
I stand corrected about DOOM and the GUS. However, I'm curious what trouble you had getting it to work... I've never had any trouble getting anything working with a GUS set to 240,7,7,7,7.
 
I had to set separate GUS and MIDI IRQs, otherwise the music would play too slow in Star Control II and would lose many notes and sometimes drop out completely for Epic Pinball. For a 486DX2/66, I had to set the ISA bus speed to 6.6MHz (CLKIN/5) to avoid sound stuttering issues with DOOM and DOOM II. Perhaps the card doesn't like my particular 486 SiS 85C471 + 85C407 chipset.
 
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