I bought some more cheap untested possibly FPM memory since I was converting 16MB EDO sticks to run as FPM, but if you look around then SIMMs can often be had fairly cheaply. One seller was selling them as for a RAID card which was 2x 16MB parity FPM 60ns sticks, the other was memory for a sequencer where they thought it was 1MB sticks but those are 16MB 60ns FPM as well 😀
To test them I first of all stumbled across my Asus PVI-486SP3 that has been sitting in a box for years, it was bought as spares / repairs and for good reason, it has huge gashes across the back destroying many traces. I'd just got my microscope when I was repairing this and although the repairs were messier than I do now, it did work a little better but I could never get L2 cache working which is why it was put back into storage. Not stored very well either, I'm pretty sure some of the scratches on the board were fresh from how I'd stored it 🙁
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I took off all my original repair wires and used thin resistor legs to rebuild traces over the breaks, tidier and easier to do than my original enamel wire fixes.
The added plus of this is that now it's easy to see where every trace connects to since it's using the original traces, my original enamel wire fixes were messy and I couldn't tell what connected to what ~4 years later.
After fixing all the wires and cleaning up all the accidentally joined traces from solder blobs the board posts and L2 now works, but the floppy / serial / parallel ports don't. Tried swapping over the Super IO chip that must've come from a scrap board?? But it's not any better and I don't know what to do to fix it.
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I got lucky though and one of my spare CF cards with an OS installed actually boots on this board with this weird "2a4iba09" BIOS which has better LBA support than the previous BIOS versions. I battled trying to get this thing stable and have so far discovered that this board hates Cyrix chips but loves the AMD 5x86. Can't use both banks of L2 cache either, that'll usually be very unstable so I've only got 128KB of L2 cache right now.
Since it can boot an OS I can live without the floppy / serial ports for now - those don't even work if I install an ISA card set up for floppy / serial / parallel only. Probably a bashed trace I've missed somewhere ergh.
Now the board is kind of working I put on a heatsink and started testing with Dosbench eventually getting Quake and Doom both stable:
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Found some interesting results where I'm not sure if it's the limits of my RAM that I'm hitting but got the best performance adding in a wait state, benchmarking like this is kinda fun and now I can see what difference many of thse settings make:
2a4iba09
Diamond stealth3d 2000 or Stealth 64 DRAM
amd 5x86 @ 160mhz, 16MB RAM 2-1-1-1 0ws speed-slower slow-refresh on, CPU Burst Write off, Cache 2-1-2, L1 16KB Write-Back, L2 128KB Write-Back 8-tag-bits, vbios shadow off - 12.7 fps
amd 5x86 @ 160mhz, 16MB RAM 2-1-1-1 0ws speed-slower slow-refresh on, CPU Burst Write on, Cache 2-1-2, L1 16KB Write-Back, L2 128KB Write-Back 8-tag-bits, vbios shadow off - 12.8 fps
amd 5x86 @ 160mhz, 16MB RAM 2-1-1-1 0ws speed slower slow-refresh on, CPU Burst Write on, Cache 2-1-2, L1 16KB Write-Back, L2 128KB Write-Back 8-tag-bits, vbios shadow off - 12.9 fps
amd 5x86 @ 160mhz, 16MB RAM 2-1-1-1 0ws speed-slower slow-refresh on, CPU Burst Write on, Cache 2-1-2, L1 16KB Write-Back, L2 128KB Write-Back 7-tag-bits, vbios shadow off - 14.9 fps
amd 5x86 @ 160mhz, 16MB RAM 2-1-1-1 0ws speed-slower slow-refresh on, CPU Burst Write on, Cache 2-1-2, L1 16KB Write-Back, L2 128KB Write-Thru 8-tag-bits, vbios shadow off - 15.2 fps
amd 5x86 @ 160mhz, 16MB RAM 2-1-1-1 0ws speed-slower slow-refresh on, CPU Burst Write on, Cache 2-1-2, L1 16KB Write-Back, L2 128KB Write-Thru 7-tag-bits, vbios shadow off - 15.2 fps
amd 5x86 @ 160mhz, 16MB RAM 2-1-1-1 1ws speed-faster slow-refresh on, CPU Burst Write off, Cache 2-1-2, L1 16KB Write-Back, L2 128KB Write-Thru 8-tag-bits, vbios shadow off - 15.4 fps
amd 5x86 @ 160mhz, 16MB RAM 3-1-1-1 1ws speed-fastest slow-refresh on, CPU Burst Write off, Cache 2-1-2, L1 16KB Write-Back, L2 128KB Write-Thru 8-tag-bits, vbios shadow off - 15.6fps
amd 5x86 @ 160mhz, 16MB RAM 2-1-1-2 1ws speed-fastest slow-refresh off, CPU Burst Write off, Cache 2-1-2, L1 16KB Write-Back, L2 128KB Write-Thru 8-tag-bits, vbios shadow off - 16.0fps
amd 5x86 @ 160mhz, 16MB RAM 2-1-1-2 1ws speed-fastest slow-refresh on, CPU Burst Write off, Cache 2-1-2, L1 16KB Write-Back, L2 128KB Write-Thru 8-tag-bits, vbios shadow off - 16.1fps
amd 5x86 @ 160mhz, 16MB RAM 2-1-1-2 1ws speed-fastest slow-refresh on, CPU Burst Write off, Cache 2-1-2, L1 16KB Write-Back, L2 128KB Write-Thru 8-tag-bits, vbios shadow on - 16.1fps
amd 5x86 @ 160mhz, 16MB RAM 2-1-1-2 1ws speed-fastest slow-refresh on, CPU Burst Write on, Cache 2-1-2, L1 16KB Write-Back, L2 128KB Write-Thru 8-tag-bits, vbios shadow on - 16.2fps and 1658/45fps in doom
