If not for it's design then definitely for it's age and design quirks... sockets for a 386 and a 486?! choose a side buddy

Thank you Peter! I don't think, this is it. I have a feeling it's possible to get even more out of it. I'd be curious to know, if your board runs at 40MHz with a 386. May be there is a defect on my board, which prevents it from delivering 80MHz on CLK2.

@@necro_ware I will check that and measure it to verify if it works on my board. 👍🏻

You two have amazing content and have inspired me to push my AMD K6-2 to the max. I know it's much newer than what you work with but it was my first PC in 2000 as a high school present and very important to me

That's the spirit! 🤣

That is the kind of mod I have seen hard core overclockers do on their mainboards (TAGG XOC for example) or I'm mistaken?

LOL, that's a long way to go :) Furthermore, I released less videos last year mostly not because of my work, but because of my volunteer duties.

That's true. Where luck decreases the more experienced you become, since you develop a feeling where to search, if something goes wrong. Often you have no idea what exactly it is, but sometimes you can exclude what it is definitely not. I'm a software developer since 30 years and it's the same there, but I'm by far more confident in that, than in electronic engineering :)

@@necro_ware Yeah. My job involves a lot of troubleshooting, too (and I am a hobby coder as well.) So I'm very familiar with procedural troubleshooting. I always say it's a process of trying to divide the problem domain in half over and over again until you narrow it down. But, sometimes, you just run smack into something by accident, and happen to see a piece of the puzzle. I don't mean that to detract from the skill involved -- it takes skill to be successful. Just kind of marveling at how it is sometimes only fate that leads us to an answer. Or at least, it gets us there more quickly. Just think about how long you could've gone before thinking to check the 5V rail ripple, without having noticed a difference between two PSUs. :-)

Probably, because I usually don't make videos, just to make videos. I do most of my projects to learn something new.

@@necro_ware Right, dealing with practical problems results in most valuable experience. Thank you for sharing it.

I read a lot about power supplies as I did my MMX-VRM project. There such things like ripple are a very important topic.

@@necro_ware I started my computing career using all these types of boards and processors. I remember how excited I used to get when something new came out. Like VLB or the next biggest processor that I couldn’t afford 🤠

Thank you! Yes, I have an WD90C31 and 8900D here, they are indeed similar fast as the Tseng ET4000 and I use them regularly too. At stock clock, I don't see any difference in performance, but the SpeedStar is more reliable with the overclocked ISA bus. I don't have the SpeedStar 24x, hence I say, that the SpeedStar is the fastest ISA card which I have. And I don't like the 8900D, because it produces jailbars on the LCD displays. In my opinion the best compromise card is the CL-GD542x based ones. Since they have a better integrated DAC, a very good image even on LCDs, very good games compatibility (ET4000 is not that great, WD90C3x is much as well) and they are nearly as fast as the others. In my own builds I always go with Cirrus Logic.

@@necro_ware Yeah the ramdacs on Trident cards leave much to be desired but since I am allergic to LCD screens, the destroyers of pixel art the less noticeable difference in quality on most analog CRT screens does not really bother me personally. The best external VGA ramdacs I've used are the BrookTree ones and the early gold ceramic Inmos units. They make every CRT shine ;-) The Inmos DAC on my IBM PS/2 Model 30's MCGA, hooked up to a PVM: 256 color 15KHz CRT heaven ;-) In my experience the Trident 8900D and Speedstar 24x (which is Diamond's iteration of the WD90C31) also work great with an overclocked ISA bus in my case. They're both very stable even in 0WS mode and at higher speeds in my builds which are mostly upgraded 386 machines (SXL2, SXLC2 and DLC) and do beat the Tseng ET4000 albeit by a hair.. The Cirrus ISA cards are indeed very compatible but I find them too slow.. I do really like Cirrus' later VLB iteration of the Alpine series chipset (CL-GD5434) on my P5 Pentium (yes a Pentium with VLB) build with its 64-bit memory bus. That card flies! If you're looking for the holy grail of ISA VGA cards: Look for a Diamond Speedstar 64 which has that exact same CL Alpine chip, breathes through a 16-bit straw yet still manages to kick every other ISA card's @ss ;-)

@@pipschannel1222 Unfortunately for CRT you need a lot of space, which I don't have, so I have to live with LCDs, therefore I have two, which can handle 15kHz. Regarding Cirrus Logic, that's strange. In my tests the GD542x cards were on par with et4000 and the others. Only less stable on higher clocks. But I also should mention, that I have 5 different ET4000 cards and they all behave differently when overclocked, so I guess, it's also a matter of a layout and even day of production.

@@necro_ware Yeah there are definitely a lot of differences in board designs of cards using the same chip.. Also BIOS differences can play a big part here, especially in terms of compatibility. One thing is clear about the cards we both mentioned here: For the ISA bus it doesn't get any better as almost all of them manage to fill it up to the brim (which doesn't take a lot) obviously making that old bus the biggest bottleneck of the system. It is however very cool to get the most out of an ISA system. In my experience overclocking the ISA bus is the only way to experience any real speed boosts. The Diamond Speedstar 64 ISA with the Alpine CL-5434 chip is the overall winner in my benchmarks as the ultimate ISA graphics card as it ticks all the boxes: It's very compatible and very fast with old DOS games (it's a Cirrus after all), has an interleaved 64-bit memory interface and advanced GUI acceleration making Win311 and Win95 shine at high res with its 2meg framebuffer and has an excellent internal RAMDAC 👌 The VLB version of this card is also lightning fast and way ahead of its time..

Without the stabilization work, it was not possible to overclock or tweak the board at all. It was more or less stable only on the worst BIOS settings.

absolutely need stable power, years ago my friend was overclocking his 1.6ghz amd althon64 and couldn't get much more then 1.8ghz out of it, months later i put his cpu in my machine and managed to get 2.2ghz. he was using some generic discount psu, while i was using a higher rated psu. even managed to get a better overclock on his ati radeon 9550.

Yes, this is what I meant in the video as I said that an own clock oscillator or generator can be added. But I would have to reverse engineer the traces to know definitely if it is the way to go. In regards of throughput, I made those measurements, just didn't prepare them nicely, because they are more or less the same as what Peter from CPU Galaxy presented once in his video. If the number would deviate, I'd publish them in this video.

@@necro_ware I guess I was a little tired already, I often watch those videos at night... You're right, he benched it already. I guess I didn't notice (saw his video some time ago, too!) Anyway, thanks for sharing something about these rare boards!

If I find a way to convince it to output CLK2 at 80MHz, I'll do such tests.

That's actually just about to change the memory ICs, four of which are even already socketed. I'm not sure if that is very exciting :)

It is to me. I had never thought of that before so it's a new idea to me.

I drew and printed them. May be I should upload the models somewhere, if you need them.

Yes, interesting topics indeed. Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to get a VLB 3D accelerator today. But luckily Atheatos already answered most of the questions regarding Quake on a 386 and FPU. Have fun: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gaqBpq91s5_Ilmw.html kzfaq.info/get/bejne/kNyZpsSQktupoX0.html

@@necro_ware sweet talk Clint from lgr to borrow his. Lol. I learned about it's existence from one of his videos. And I'll check those out.

Я же его в #doscember22 видео рассматривал. На этой платформе запускал тоже, но на видео не снимал.

@@necro_ware Ааа ясно ) Я doscember на сладкое оставил )

@@RetroPeKar Уже следующий скоро ;)

In theory a capacitor between the positive and negative pols acts as a low-pass filter. However, in real life the bigger electrolytic cap filters middle frequencies, but is too inert to react to higher frequencies. The small ceramic capacitor has too low capacity to filter middle frequencies, but is much faster and is able to filter higher frequencies. In combination they act as a proper low-pass filter.

Yes, I also thought about the keyboard, but didn't come to investigate. The keyboard controller is actually polling, it handles the keyboard input and sends an interrupt if something interesting happens. In regards of short, it's almost always a tantalum capacitor. If checked that and they all are good, you could use voltage injection to find the culprit. I showed it once here for a more modern hardware, but this can be of course done for the old hardware as well: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/iayogqmq1ZzZdok.html

@@necro_ware oh, in that case maybe it's as simple as it changing the clock speed of the keyboard controller, causing it to poll faster. or it just sends some kind of command... anyways, i also thought it was a dead tantulum on my system, but even after replacing all of them with new ones the short still persists. and sadly i don't have a bench power supply for voltage injection.

There is nothing wrong with ISA and it still has uses in industrial settings (PC/104).

IDE make nearly no difference. Overclocked ISA make a lot of problems with sound cards indeed, but it heavily depends on the sound card. I have around 30-40 ISA sound cards in my collection, may be I should make a big stability check one day :)

@@necro_ware I've never used a flash drive of any kind on an IDE ISA adapter, are they anywhere near the 5MB/s that ISA SCSI controllers used to list as the maximum recommended speed? With large disks without smartdrv loaded waiting for DIR to calculate the free space is maddening, samething doing a full format, I don't know if using a flash drive improves anything in that sense, otherwise I don't have any problem with the transfer speed of IDE drives.

Because this is part 2 of the video ;)