AMD 386 DX-40 and VESA LOCAL BUS - Boardreview and Benchmarks

cpu galaxy hello and welcome to the cpu galaxy channel and today i want to review a motherboard which i was searching for since years to get it a board which gives us a lot of interesting possibilities for testing benchmarking and experiments i wanted to do for a long time already actually i got this beautiful board from my friend mike who is also a fellow collector from my country and for those who don't know yet from which country i am yes i am from austria and no we don't have just mountains cows and farmers here we have also technology in austria and at least two cpu collectors yeah the board we are talking about is the opti 495 sx3 486 right back cache yeah it comes up with the opti4 95 sx chipset 256 kilobytes of l2 cache over here eight sockets for 30 pin ram actually eight megabytes are installed over here we have the standard 80 power connector a battery which was fortunately not leaking and i replaced it already we got eight 16 bit iso slots with and two with additional razer local bus slots the local bus was a huge performance improvement for video cards back in the 90s it is not limited with a bandwidth of 16 bit and 8 megahertz as on the isa bus the local bus is directly connected through the 32-bit bus to the cpu and clocked with the same speed as the cpu yeah and here we come to the interesting part of this board we have here so a 386 cpu and over here we can put a 486 cpu so this board can cover two generations of x86 cpus which makes it very interesting for some benchmarkings and comparisons and the main reason why i wanted to test this board was that we have the possibility to use a base a local bus video card on a 386 cpu which is not very common from 486 systems we know that the choice of a slow iso video card is a bottleneck which is very much affecting games like doom so in this video today i want to see how much performance increasement we can get here with a decent video card yeah but first let's have again a closer look on our sockets here here we have the 132 pin socket for our 386 cpus due to the fact that the main board is a very late main board for 386 cpus it's i think from the middle of 1993 the bios is supporting a lot of different 386 cpus and let me show you what i tested so far so we can put here intel cpus um from 20 to 33 megahertz older versions or a newer version so they are working quite fine in this main board we can also put all kind of amd 386 cpus here from 25 to 40 megahertz as well as some 486 upgrades for the 3d6 sockets like from texas instruments the tx 486 dlc with 40 megahertz actually it's a cyrix core inside we can put here also the texas instruments 486 sxl 250 with a front side bus of 25 megahertz and internal clock doubling uh to 50 megahertz also this kind of cyrix cpus uh same as the texas instruments which gives us 25 megahertz on a phantom bus and clock doubled inside to 50 megahertz we can also put here the cyrix cpu dc x 46 dlc with 33 or also up to 40 megahertz and at the end also something very rare the intel rabbit cat which is also some kind of 486 implementation for s386 so kit but i think i will do on this particular cpu a separate video once so we can see here a lot of uh processors we can put here inside uh these sockets which is at the end very interesting so for a long time i was searching a main watch which can cover all of these chips for this socket also interesting to see inside the socket we can see here some solder beds and we got here the possibility to solder a floating point unit as it is existing from cyrix yeah not that i have the focus to do that but it gives us at least the possibility yeah over here that's okay for our 486 cpu basically we can jumper the board between 20 and 50 megahertz so this gives us also here a lot of possibilities for cpus we can put here yeah for instance we can put here uh all kind of intel 486 cpus from 20 megahertz uh up to uh the dx33 or the x2 66 so everything is possible here also amd cpus the dx40 with 40 megahertz or dx266 as well so everything uh no problem and it runs without any troubles in this board also uh intel overdrives we can put here for instance a 40 megahertz overdrive or 66 megahertz spent uh 46 overdrive up to 100 megahertz um basically this socket provides just five words so unfortunately 3.3 volt cpus uh we cannot put directly into the socket but overdrive as this here has voltage regulators on board and we can put also the 100 megahertz dx4 in this case into these sockets or also maybe a 133 megahertz vpu as this kingston turbo chip which has also voltage regulators on board and comes up with a amd x5 133 megahertz cpu so also here we can see a huge amount of possibilities we have here for testing which makes this board really interesting and you may ask now if we install a 386 cpu which doesn't have a floating point unit inside where the hell we can put a floating point unit so and as we can see here on the socket 486 we have two rows here more than a usual 486 has so the outer three lines of pins are used for the 486 cpu and the inner two lines are used for an floating point unit to use beside the 386 processor so i can tell you now something very tricky and i burnt already my first floating point unit i put here as we can see here and there on the on the silk screen on the board in this this corner is a little bit flattened and this indicates our pin one for the 486 of course and i tried this and this was also working so then i wanted to put here the floating point unit and for me it was clear here we have the pin indicator one and i was putting also our the floating point unit like that into the socket when i switched on i had a full short high current and so on and the floating point unit was of course damaged also here the pins are got a little bit warm and the plastic was a bit melting so i was a little bit confused then i was checking a little bit more the specification and measuring around and this white whatever is this here it's not even a spot should indicate the pin one for the floating point unit so it's exactly turned around yeah very confusing if you have this board please take care that pin number one for the fpu is here and pin number one uh the indicator is here for the 486 so i have no clue why somebody is designing like that um yeah maybe you have an idea let me know because anyhow the pins are not shared between the 486 and the 387 here last but not least due to the fact that we can put here also a floating point unit we got also a lot of possibilities as the intel 387 or from ulsi some floating point units from cyrix we can put here fpu also this uh soldered version um from iit we can put here a different kind of floating point you need or from chip technologies so also in terms of floating point units we can put here everything at the end so i think i will use this board in future um a little bit more often for some testing benchmarkings and comparisons so so you might see this board appearing on my channel for several times of course yeah and that what was not even the last thing this board can offer in terms of cpu compatibility if you would like to do so you can also solder here um the qfp packages for the 386 or it's also existing for the 486 the sx were sx version so if you have mood and and and a lot of uh fun with soldering you could solder here also one of those cpus yeah the only thing unfortunately you cannot leave the 386 and the 486 inside the board and just a jumper the version you want to use you need to remove always the other one but nevertheless a very interesting and powerful board and yeah so let's go ahead now with some testing and let's see the outcome so it's time now to build up our setup for the cpu i will go for the amd 386dx with 40 megahertz is actually the fastest 3d6 cpu we can get why these things are always falling with the hard disk drive i will go for the western digital 2850 with 850 megabytes so this is also a quite fast hard disk drive from the middle of the 90s and we are going to check the transfer rate between a 16 bit controller compared to the local bus controller here for the 16-bit setup we need of course then io controller a just common one from winbond which gives us the possibility to connect our hard-disk drive for the video card we will go for the sarah's logic gd5428 uh it's one of the fastest 16-bit video cards uh it's actually also a very late one from 1995 so this is uh quite a good challenge at the end to compare with the razer local bus card so for the 32-bit setup we have of course then every local bus i o controller here we have the possibility to connect to hard disk drive i am also very curious if we can increase the performance for the hard disk transfer rate with the vlb controller for the video card on the mesa local bus we go for the tank et 4000 wp 32 so this is also one of the fastest visa local bus video cards yeah let's see if we can get a decent performance improve with the 386 cpu within gaming [Music] so time to switch on i love the sound of the hard disk yeah the bios is also just straightforward with all these standard stuff we know already but once demo set up not many things to set here internal external cache memory can enable disable of course internal right now it is not possible because our 3d6 don't have an internal cache so what else does this bios have here we have hard disk utility and auto detect hard disk so this is very comfortable so we can automatically detect the parameters of our hard drive let's check if it's still here yes everything fine 814 megabytes so everything detected nicely so then let's boot up the thing yeah and it's booting straight away without any issues yeah then let's start first with norton sysinfo we can see here our 386 dx clocked at 40 megahertz also a quick cpu benchmarks gives us here almost a rating of 40. and let's go on with speedsies to check the memory throughput of the video cards and the performance of the hard disk drive here for our 16 bit configuration we get here around 4 megabytes throughput for the video card which is not that bad for a 16 bit card the hard disk drive shows up with 1.8 megabytes of transfer rate and an average seek time of 8.77 milliseconds and a maximum seek time of 12.34 milliseconds so and that our local bus configuration it's getting interesting now the video performance comes up with a throughput rate of about 20 megabytes per seconds yeah this is 5 times faster than on the previous card so we can see here a huge improvement in terms of moving data through but for the hard disk drive to my surprise we don't see any improvements instead it is getting slower we got only a transfer rate of 1.4 megabytes so 400 kilobytes per second slower and also the timings are a little bit slower interesting and i have no idea why this is happening i cross checked also with other controllers and i get always the same values so leave me a comment below if you have any idea why this is happening at landmark we get about 5100 characters per seconds for the 16 bit video card and about 15 000 with the et4000 visa local bus card so again here in big improvement of three times also at doctor hardware we can measure a big improvement for 8 16 and 32 bit operations on the video cards although these are just some synthetic benchmarks i'm already very curious how big the gap is going to be at gaming and 3d benchmarks especially doom i'm looking forward how much frames we can get more with the razer local bus card then let's summarize now in between before we go for gaming the hard disk drive is out of the game and the isa controller made it clearly in this comparison transfer rate and timings are significant better there at the video cards we have also a clear result which i was expecting in terms of memory throughput and characters per seconds the local bus card can shine here because of its 32 bits and the high clock rate on the bus so a clear massive improvement yeah then let's go ahead with gaming for 3d benchmarking i was using of course 3d bench pc player at 320-200 and doom yeah all of them wear slideshows and no matter if i use the isa card or the local bus card especially doom of course we know that doom is not nicely playable on a 386 but the results were anyhow disappointing to me and here the chart at pc player we gained nothing 0.1 frames also not even one frame more at doom with the local bus card and 3d bench was so kind to give us a bit more than 1 frames per seconds of course we can measure a slight improvement but nothing serious so what does this tell us now the local bus card is of course much faster to push data through but if it comes to process the data the bottleneck is then clearly the cpu i think 8 frames at doom is the limit with a 386 dx40 and a screen size of 8 and high details although i was hoping to get a little bit more yet does it make sense to have a local bus configuration on a 386 definitely no those words are nowadays very rare and hard to find and also very expensive so if you go for a 386 setup just consider to use a good iso video card all games of this era are working quite fine no matter if you play any pinball flippers which i like very much by the way or monkey island with its great sound at prince of persia running through the temple basement to save the princess or wolfenstein all these games are not so the cpu demanding and they fit perfectly for a 386 setup at the end of the video let's play a little bit of extreme pinball i pimped the 386 with a gravity sound card to enjoy the game thank you very much for watching and see you soon [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: CPU Galaxy

Views: 26,237

Keywords: retro computer, vintage computer, vintage cpu, cpu galaxy, AMD, Intel, 386 cpu, 486 cpu, Vesa Loal Bus, VLB, Opti 495SX, Benchmark, Doom, doom on 386, Tseng ET4000, Cirrus Logic, GD5428, Dos gaming, retro gaming setup

Id: qaGQxZEYby0

Length: 20min 38sec (1238 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 26 2020