Am5x86 slows down when smartdrv is enabled

[carangil]

Hi, I just got my 5x86-133 chip in the mail today (lucky me), and it works great, with one exception:

If smartdrv is enabled in autoexec.bat, ROTT, Descent, etc all are hideously slow! Disabling smartdrv speeds the system up quite a bit.

This is the DOS 6.22 version of smartdrv. What gives?

 

[Agent Orange]

Double check your mobo settings for your new CPU. Next, I would benchmark the CPU to see what speed its running at without loading anything in the CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT. Sounds like the board is not setup right.

 

[Raven]

It's possible that your drive is faster than your CPU/RAM combo, if you're using something relatively modern, I suppose. Try another caching program like LBACACHE, PCCACHE, or otherwise and see if the same problem occurs - this will let us have some more insight as to the nature of the problem.

 

[carangil]

I ran CHKCPU to verify the clock-triple vs clock-quad jumper setting.

My 'HDD' in this machine is a compact flash card. Basically no seek time, so for reading smartdrv is almost useless. I can probably live without it.

I've isolated it to smartdrv. A good example is ROTT.

Start computer, with only himem.sys, emm386, and my Pro Audio Spectrum driver.

Run ROTT. Runs smooth, like 30 fps.

Quit to DOS.
Type SMARTDRV

Run ROTT. About one frame per second. I can barely navigate the menu. With Descent, even the music is slow!

I'll play around with different smartdrv parametes, or different versions. I just think its a weird issue.

 

[Raven]

It's probably SMARTDRV screwing up with a solid state drive - lol. If you want a drive cache just use another program, it will likely work better (or the same, in which case try LBACACHE because it's modern).

 

[Lutiana]

Does the rest of the system work ok with SMARTDRV loaded?

If so just create a batch file to run your games

SMARTDRV A- B- C- D- <etc>
ROTT
SMARTDRV

Problem solved :D (Possibly at least).