Nice machine! Try to get the optional cache socket filled too - it might enable write-back on that cache. I have M321 motherboard, where for writeback, there is a separate (but for mine, different from others) sram chip.
Thanks! That's the next item on the agenda, I've already ordered another SRAM chip and according to the manual the unpopulated optional cache socket is for "Dirty TAG / Alter RAM" which would indicate write-back cache. I've even ordered a faster one (15ns instead of the 20ns of the others) since I found sources that said it's best to populate the SRAM for write-back cache with a faster chip.
I played around with 486 build yesterday , it sooo backfired , by the time I booted into w95 I was 2 tired and shoot it down. (had controller issues with cable manangment , and ticking hdd sound's from the AT PSU...beeing overtaxed. it just won't handle 2x drive's/ items....)
Fixed up card socket services on my NanTan Notebook FMAK9200. Turns out I was able to pull the drivers from the wayback machine, 🤣 - https://web.archive.org/web/19970121183038/ht … m.tw/SELE31.HTM - they have everything except the graphics driver for the CL GD6448 graphics card in it, 🤣, which does not matter anyway as the stock Win31 SVGA drivers work with it just fine.
So now my XJ10bt PCMCIA Ethernet card is working great. Next will be getting networking in tandem with the Cisco Aironet LMC352. Basically, another one done. On Wed of next week I start moving into the new place, hopefully there I can start shooting the FMA3500C for #DOSCember as a repair/upgrade project - I have CMOS Battery, hard drive upgrade, and possibly plans to get my hands on an OldNet WiFi modem and one of those LPT2ADLIB cards for it - either that or figure out the pinout of the expansion connector and sneak a SoundBlaster compatible card in there via ribbon cable (with a 2.5" hard disk there's enough room for one).
I "finished" my Asus P/I-P55T2P4 Rev 3.1. Retro PC that's been 26 years in the making. First I started at the beginning of 1997 with a Pentium 200 MMX on said board along with 32MB EDO-RAM, an Elsa Victory 3D S3 ViRGE with 4MB VRAM and a Terratec Maestro 32/96 soundcard. that sadly died on me after a while. Since the "3D" videocard was pretty lackluster I added a Diamond Monster 3D in the fall of 1997. Until 1999 I upgraded the RAM to 128MB 60ns EDO-RAM, added a TAG RAM to cache more than 64MB of RAM and finally switched CPU for a K6-3 400 as Asus supported those with a Beta-BIOS - pretty awesome for a time where systems became absolete in a matter of months, which is part of the reason I like this motherboard so much.Also I added a 5x DVD-ROM with a Creative Encore Dxr2 MPEG2 decoder card in order to watch and rip DVDs on it. BTW, this led to a double loop-back horror setup since both, the Voodoo 1 and the Dxr2 used loop cables to insert their picture. You can imagine the picture quality... A bit later, must have been 2000, I switched the Victory 3D/Voodoo 1 combo to a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI just to squeeze the last bit of performance out of the PC and installed a Terratec 128i PCI soundcard for the dead Terratec Maestro 32/96. Since I started university in 2001 I gave the PC to my parents for them to watch DVDs in their secondary living room in the attic.
Fast forward about 20 years: some months ago, I clean out said attic and what do I find? My old PC! Still working except for the empty Dallas RTC battery of course that was replaced by a necroware RTC with coin cell battery thanks to a fellow retro fan. Along came the idea to "finish" the upgrade I started all these years ago. Sadly the PSU died on me after a short bit of tinkering with the PC. But after I got a new PSU I could see that nothing else was damaged. I had an old SB Live! player 1024 left that I replaced the 128i with and got to work with the help of the excellent audigy driver tutorial here on Vogons. Back in 1999 nobody thought of SSD, but why not try it today. So today I installed a SiL 3114 based SATA PCI controller alongside a Transcend S230 128GB SSD and after a bit of trial and error got it to work with Windows 98SE, even got the SSD aligned by some miracle. Plus I'm only using a 32GB partition, so that the SSD has some unused cells to work with as Win9x doesn't support TRIM due to its age. I also activated USB that lay dormant on the motherboard all that time and got a matching USB adapter. This makes swapping files way easier. The Voodoo 3 got company in form of a PCI slot fan that sucks the air out of the case. I had to modify the fan to be controllable by a small knob as ut was always spinning at 100%.
Lastly I ran some tests after I installed Windows (twice due to a sill error on my part) and got it configured (I had totally forgotten what a pain all these DirectX versions were):
The attachment Retro(1).jpg is no longer available
Last edited by Siran on 2023-07-15, 05:52. Edited 3 times in total.
I "finished" my Asus P/I-P55T2P4 Rev 3.1. Retro PC that's been 26 years in the making. First I started at the beginning of 1997 with a Pentium 200 MMX on said board along with 32MB EDO-RAM, an Elsa Victory 3D S3 ViRGE with 4MB VRAM and a Terratec Maestro 32/96 soundcard. that sadly died on me after a while. Since the "3D" videocard was pretty lackluster I added a Diamond Monster 3D in the fall of 1997. Until 1999 I upgraded the RAM to 128MB 60ns EDO-RAM, added a TAG RAM to cache more than 64MB of RAM and finally switched CPU for a K6-3 400 as Asus supported those with a Beta-BIOS - pretty awesome for a time where systems became absolete in a matter of months, which is part of the reason I like this motherboard so much.Also I added a 5x DVD-ROM with a Creative Encore Dxr2 MPEG2 decoder card in order to watch and rip F DVDs on it. BTW, this led to a double loop back horror setup since both, the Voodoo 1 and the Dxr2 used loop cables to inert their picture. You can imagine the picture quality... A bit later, must have been 2000, I switched the Victory 3D/Voodoo 1 combo to a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI just to squeeze the last bit of performance out of it and installed a Terratec 128i soundcard for the dead Terratec Maestro 32/96. Since I started university in 2001 I gave the PC to my parents for them to watch DVDs in their secondary living room in the attic.
Fast forward about 20 years: some months ago, I clean out said attic and what do I find? My old PC! Still working except for the empty Dallas RTC battery of course. Along came the idea to "finish" the upgrade I started all these years ago. Sadly the PSU died on me after a short bit of tinkering with the PC. But after I got a new PSU I could see that nothing else was damaged. I has an old SB Live player 1024 that I replaced the 128i got to work with the help of the excellent audigy driver tutorial here on Vogons. Back in 1999 nobody thought of SSD, but why not try it today. So today I installed a SiL 3114 based SATA PCI controller alongside a Transcend S230 128GB SSD and after a bit of trial and error got it to work with Windows 98SE, even got the SSD aligned by some miracle. Plus I'm only using a 32GB partition. I also activated USB and got the USB adapter which is working great and makes swapping files way easier. The Voodoo 3 got company in form of a PCI Slot fan that sucks the air out of the case. Of course I also ran some tests:
Retro(1).jpg
Right when you gave yours to your parents, I picked up one of those and a K6-2+ 475 after reading Tom's Hardwares Oldie Tuning - it was a significant upgrade over the VX chipset Biostar board I had, while fitting into my AT case and using all of the other parts I had.
"We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy."
Right when you gave yours to your parents, I picked up one of those and a K6-2+ 475 after reading Tom's Hardwares Oldie Tuning - it was a significant upgrade over the VX chipset Biostar board I had, while fitting into my AT case and using all of the other parts I had.
I read a similar article in German c't magazine. They also created a software tool for the K6 so that it was properly configured if your BIOS didn't fully support it (which my motherboard didn't at first, only after Asus provided a Beta update, making the tool absolete.). I did my first real tinkering with the T2P4 board and got interested in the inner workings of it. Of course I overclocked the 200MMX to 233MHz installed the TAG RAM a bit later and the K6-3. It never let me down and happily let me modify it which is why I have so many fond memories of it.
Back in 1999 nobody thought of SSD, but why not try it today. So today I installed a SiL 3114 based SATA PCI controller alongside a Transcend S230 128GB SSD and after a bit of trial and error got it to work with Windows 98SE, even got the SSD aligned by some miracle. Plus I'm only using a 32GB partition, so that the SSD has some unused cells to work with as Win9x doesn't support TRIM due to its age.
Back in 1999 nobody thought of SSD, but why not try it today. So today I installed a SiL 3114 based SATA PCI controller alongside a Transcend S230 128GB SSD and after a bit of trial and error got it to work with Windows 98SE, even got the SSD aligned by some miracle. Plus I'm only using a 32GB partition, so that the SSD has some unused cells to work with as Win9x doesn't support TRIM due to its age.
Modern SSDs have exceptionally good garbage collection and nand longevity to the point that even without native trim the drive will outlive the system its in, leaving some free space would be more than sufficient to let the drives own controller handle garbage collection and levelling.
Really no need for a 3rd party Trim app with modern SSDs, older SSD drives from ~2007 to ~20014 would be the ones that need some form of Trim support. But if you are using a SSD that old then you are already likely aware of the SSD controllers limitations.
I know there will likely now be a discussion about Nand wear .. but again modern Nand will outlast the machine its in even with terabytes of writes to the drive. Not even 95/98 thrashing the swap file will write terrabytes of data to the drive on a retro system in a normal retro use case.
I get that some people might worry about killing the SSD .. but I would worry more about the retro hardware dying first, modern SSDs are mostly bullet proof these days ..unless its Micron based.
I get that some people might worry about killing the SSD .. but I would worry more about the retro hardware dying first, modern SSDs are mostly bullet proof these days ..unless its Micron based.
Pretty much my thoughts. Even if the SSD dies before anything else, replacements are abundant and cheap, especially in the low GB range you commonly need for a retro PC.
I get that some people might worry about killing the SSD .. but I would worry more about the retro hardware dying first, modern SSDs are mostly bullet proof these days ..unless its Micron based.
Pretty much my thoughts. Even if the SSD dies before anything else, replacements are abundant and cheap, especially in the low GB range you commonly need for a retro PC.
I picked up 10 80Gb Intel server SSDs recently, Im guessing they were excess stock as they had never been used ...got 10 of them for a whole 80 bucks, so yup replacement SSDs for retro rigs are dirt cheap and if you are doing backups correctly you shouldnt lose anything important should one die.
I love the cheap Intel S series SSDs, they are damn reliable too and Intel does provide a software toolkit for these drives that includes Trim.
Since I was a kid I was attracted to the video cards bios messages during startup, especially the colourful ones. Always tried to read them before they disappear and frustrated with early LCD screens that couldn't sync on time. I considered them part of the computer's "character" or "personality" if you know what I mean, despite being just the video card.
Nowadays I try to keep a photo as an easy reference about manufacturer, memory size, bios version etc and I thought why not create something that will display this message for me to easily grab it?
So I'm sharing this tiny utility in case others enjoy these messages or want to capture the same photos. It literally does nothing else than calling the entry point of the VGA bios code (CALL FAR C000:3) and the card initializes and displays the bios strings on demand.
Again, it doesn't do anything fancy. Do you have a weird system that hides the original C segment when using shadowing? It won't work. Which Windows versions can cope with re-initialization of the video card? I don't know, run it from DOS. You get the point, hey it's only a 7 bytes .COM file!
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Modern SSDs have exceptionally good garbage collection and nand longevity to the point that even without native trim the drive will outlive the system its in, leaving some free space would be more than sufficient to let the drives own controller handle garbage collection and levelling.
Every consecutive SSD generation uses never NAND with worse parameters, we are currently at hundreds of erase cycle lifetimes and its only getting worse. Drives dont understand file systems, they cant magically self-trim. Your only hope is making partition much smaller than the drive capacity (like 1/10) and somehow telegraphing this information to drives firmware with hacks like:
- zero (drive internally supporting compression will understand that) or Secure Erase, create small partition
- create small partition, Trim
then move it to vintage system and make sure no software touches unpartitioned space (limit drive size with HPA).
Really no need for a 3rd party Trim app with modern SSDs, older SSD drives from ~2007 to ~20014 would be the ones that need some form of Trim support. But if you are using a SSD that old then you are already likely aware of the SSD controllers limitations.
Those drives had 10-50x better write endurance. ~2008 MLC Flash was ~10K cycle, SLC 100K, "modern" drives are build using ~100 cycle garbage. No amount of clever firmware is going to make up for that without clues (trim) and exploiting typical usage patterns (most of data only written once).
I know there will likely now be a discussion about Nand wear .. but again modern Nand will outlast the machine its in even with terabytes of writes to the drive.
This only works because of TRIM 😀 The trick is big size ensuring there is always some spare room for FTL to juggle hot/stale data around and keep erase cycles even thru whole drive.
Not even 95/98 thrashing the swap file will write terrabytes of data to the drive on a retro system in a normal retro use case.
It doesnt have to write terabytes, it doesnt even have to fill the drive, it only needs to write to every sector of the drive once and from that point on SSD firmware will struggle. If you ever watched defragging visualization you will know Windows does all manner of 'clever' write patterns to avoid fragmenting data, sooner or later every sector of the drive will contain some stale long erased data SSD doesnt know about thus has to keep intact.
I picked up 10 80Gb Intel server SSDs recently, Im guessing they were excess stock as they had never been used ...got 10 of them for a whole 80 bucks, so yup replacement SSDs for retro rigs are dirt cheap and if you are doing backups correctly you shouldnt lose anything important should one die.
Who does backups of their retro rigs? 😀 I fully agree SSDs are so cheap nowadays everyone can afford throwaway drives even if they die within one year of unTRIMmed use. But its important to realize that fact and act accordingly. Also dont count on storing something important on modern SSD, throwing it into the closed and retrieving that data after few years. JEDEC requires 1 year in storage at 30C https://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth … -data-retention
I love the cheap Intel S series SSDs, they are damn reliable too
Intel SSDs were terrible and intel was caught lying about them https://techreport.com/review/the-ssd-enduran … heyre-all-dead/
Intel claimed 335 with exhausted write cycles will go into Read Only mode, while in reality it just dies :] After the test Intel PR drones managed to convince techreport this was on purpose 😀 contrary to drive documentation.
Mind you that was 2014 and even then Erase cycles were painfully low. If you divide written data by capacity for all tested drives we get
1400 Samsung 840 Series 22344 Samsung 840 Pro 32400 Kingston HyperX 3K 42800 Intel 335 Series 54400 Corsair Neutron GTX
I still think that the drives that became totally unreadable instead of read-only were firmware bugs. I didn't know that the number of guaranteed erase cycles was that small, though. My Samsung 970 Evo isn't looking that bad now, although the Western Digital SN730 in my laptop is holding up a lot better (I've filled it a few times with video captures - down to 10GB free out of 1TB). I thought the "leave unpartitioned space" thing was just paranoia (but there is still the "don't even save a single text file on an SSD because you'll kill it" thing in the modern computer PCMR "it's unusable if it doesn't have RGB lighting" community).
I'm getting annoyed with how flaky USB mass storage is under Windows 98. All three of my computers with 98 installed will randomly give read errors, and then the only thing I can do is browse through folders (I get more read errors when trying to open a file) until I unplug the drive. I initially thought it was my flash drive, but the same drive and hardware work fine under Windows XP. The drivers I've been using are really old, so that might be the problem. I've also started using CD images since I don't have any working IDE optical drives anymore, so the files are getting much larger. However, I remember copying over a full MAME setup many years ago without any problems (before I had computers that could actually run emulators at any reasonable level of performance and accuracy).
Today, I removed the clicky rust spinner of my 486 (Cyrix 5x86@120)
And replaced it with a random unbranded CF.
Did not expect that huge of a difference.
But...
Now it can play the really higher quality MP3 without any micro lags while I'm moving files over by FTP, I guess it's because it's PIO2 and so the CPU have to wait for the HDD constantly.. 0 ms sync time & TXing data at the maximum PIO2 speed probably help A LOT.
PcByteswrote on 2023-07-11, 21:25:Some more i915GL/skt 478 PCI-Express shenanigans. 3GHz Prescott running a HD7850 lol […] Show full quote
Some more i915GL/skt 478 PCI-Express shenanigans. 3GHz Prescott running a HD7850 🤣
That seems to be living a bit dangerously with that PSU, maybe it gets you to desktop but when you load up CPU and GPU it might use up all the 12V and go pop.
I've been told about it before - it's been one of the two Spire units that I have - the one pictured in there is the unit I personally recapped and rebuilt.
It'll do 300-350W solid as-is, and is currently powering a FX-4300 + HD7850 with no issues. (as a matter of fact, it's that exact HD7850/R7 265 you're seeing in the photo!)
The other one... 300W peak as I didn't do anything else besides cleaning its fan - caps aren't bulging or anything.
"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
Main PC: i5 3470, GB B75M-D3H, 16GB RAM, 2x1TB
98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB
rasz_plwrote on 2023-07-15, 16:35:Every consecutive SSD generation uses never NAND with worse parameters, we are currently at hundreds of erase cycle lifetimes an […] Show full quote
Modern SSDs have exceptionally good garbage collection and nand longevity to the point that even without native trim the drive will outlive the system its in, leaving some free space would be more than sufficient to let the drives own controller handle garbage collection and levelling.
Every consecutive SSD generation uses never NAND with worse parameters, we are currently at hundreds of erase cycle lifetimes and its only getting worse. Drives dont understand file systems, they cant magically self-trim. Your only hope is making partition much smaller than the drive capacity (like 1/10) and somehow telegraphing this information to drives firmware with hacks like:
- zero (drive internally supporting compression will understand that) or Secure Erase, create small partition
- create small partition, Trim
then move it to vintage system and make sure no software touches unpartitioned space (limit drive size with HPA).
Really no need for a 3rd party Trim app with modern SSDs, older SSD drives from ~2007 to ~20014 would be the ones that need some form of Trim support. But if you are using a SSD that old then you are already likely aware of the SSD controllers limitations.
Those drives had 10-50x better write endurance. ~2008 MLC Flash was ~10K cycle, SLC 100K, "modern" drives are build using ~100 cycle garbage. No amount of clever firmware is going to make up for that without clues (trim) and exploiting typical usage patterns (most of data only written once).
I know there will likely now be a discussion about Nand wear .. but again modern Nand will outlast the machine its in even with terabytes of writes to the drive.
This only works because of TRIM 😀 The trick is big size ensuring there is always some spare room for FTL to juggle hot/stale data around and keep erase cycles even thru whole drive.
Not even 95/98 thrashing the swap file will write terrabytes of data to the drive on a retro system in a normal retro use case.
It doesnt have to write terabytes, it doesnt even have to fill the drive, it only needs to write to every sector of the drive once and from that point on SSD firmware will struggle. If you ever watched defragging visualization you will know Windows does all manner of 'clever' write patterns to avoid fragmenting data, sooner or later every sector of the drive will contain some stale long erased data SSD doesnt know about thus has to keep intact.
I picked up 10 80Gb Intel server SSDs recently, Im guessing they were excess stock as they had never been used ...got 10 of them for a whole 80 bucks, so yup replacement SSDs for retro rigs are dirt cheap and if you are doing backups correctly you shouldnt lose anything important should one die.
Who does backups of their retro rigs? 😀 I fully agree SSDs are so cheap nowadays everyone can afford throwaway drives even if they die within one year of unTRIMmed use. But its important to realize that fact and act accordingly. Also dont count on storing something important on modern SSD, throwing it into the closed and retrieving that data after few years. JEDEC requires 1 year in storage at 30C https://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth … -data-retention
I love the cheap Intel S series SSDs, they are damn reliable too
Intel SSDs were terrible and intel was caught lying about them https://techreport.com/review/the-ssd-enduran … heyre-all-dead/
Intel claimed 335 with exhausted write cycles will go into Read Only mode, while in reality it just dies :] After the test Intel PR drones managed to convince techreport this was on purpose 😀 contrary to drive documentation.
Mind you that was 2014 and even then Erase cycles were painfully low. If you divide written data by capacity for all tested drives we get
1400 Samsung 840 Series 22344 Samsung 840 Pro 32400 Kingston HyperX 3K 42800 Intel 335 Series 54400 Corsair Neutron GTX
Unless you are buying cheap nasty QLC drives, most modern drives are using MLC or TLC with massive SDram caches with crazy TBW figures of 1,200 Terrabytes*, so I think you are overstating the issue here, we are talking about a retro rig not some 24/7 daily driver.
Trim simply isn't required and not something you need to worry about for retro applications and it shouldn't be stopping you from throwing a SSD into a build, HOWEVER it is available should you feel the need for it but requires some work on your part.
The drive will happily take care of itself for many years so long as you leave some free space for garbage collection and provisioning/leveling, I think 25% of the drive capacity is fine but 50% wouldn't be weird either due to partition limits.
Unless you are buying cheap nasty QLC drives, most modern drives are using MLC or TLC with massive SDram caches with crazy TBW figures of 1,200 Terrabytes*
For a 1TB drive, so a modern fancy drive with cache and best NAND gets 1200 cycle warranty from manufacturer nowadays compared to 10K for the worst NAND flash in 2008.
The drive will happily take care of itself for many years so long as you leave some free space for garbage collection and provisioning/leveling, I think 25% of the drive capacity is fine but 50% wouldn't be weird either due to partition limits.
and the only way to let drive know that some space is free without trimming are hacks I described above (zeroing/secure erase, smaller partition, hpa).
