27 Oct
2001
27 Oct
'01
12:08 p.m.
I'm not sure what you mean by slower. I found
that no matter how fast the mfg
claims the CPU is running, it does DOS tasks about as fast as a 133 MHz Pentium,
and I also found that the difference in performance between these VIP boards at
133 MHz (not for comparison, but just for reference) and the 150 MHz 6x86's that
I was using back in '92..'94, was not perceptible. The 6x86 boards were
equipped with ISA and PCI, but no VLB, BTW.
Hello? Knock knock...
There was pentium VLB w/ ISA, other pentium has ISA ONLY, and from
what others have seen had or have all three (PCI, ISA and VLB) but
keep in mind, VLB is strictly 486 signal and to some degree 386dx,
pentium pinout isn't compatiable w/ it therefore has to go through
chipsets to work properly. Many of these early rubbish pentium
boards has these features and works w/ one 72 pins to keep cost down.
Remember, at that time cost was expensive for a 1~8MB 72pin
simm (93-96 era).
(Feb 96, paid 700 CDN for pair of EDO 8MB simms)
But these sane quality designers don't use these mish-mash that
chinese cloners (5V pentium era) tend to do in that early times.
Pentium w/ ISA and PCI, while 486 got VLB and ISA later on 486 late
ones got PCI (better).
Important thing, OPTI is ok but that's unknown chipset and most of
cloners didn't have resources to optimize the performance and
reliablity, compatiblity so that OPTI got black eyes, ditto to good
chipsets by SiS (460, 461, 471, 496/497), even intel so on!
I suppose someone will eventually build a motherboard
that runs fast enough so
that when the PCI peripheral interface fails it still saves time to power down
the system, swap the offending device, and restart, but that time isn't here
yet.
Yes, already here now. Look to Serverworks stuff, PCI is already hot
swappable and available w/ 66MHz and 64bit. Also microPCI is hot
swappable as well, primarily used in racks and true server machines.
It's true that it's possible to build a faster
interface on PCI than on VLB.
That doesn't mean that the makers of a given circuit did that, however. I doubt
that a motherboard designed with both VLB and PCI is necessarily slower than one
with PCI only.
Good board makers can make without performance losses on both PCI and
VLB on board and still give top performance w/ 486 type processors.
We had Asus boards of those.
Dick
Cheers,
Wizard