All IDE caching controllers have a CPU to do all the PIO overhead, 286 or 386sx were common for that in the VLB era. In this case it uses a Harris Semi 286-20 CPU. The card itself is screen printed DC-680CD Tekram Tech 1993 rev 2.05 ROM.
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What do you like for benchmarking drive speeds on windows 98?
- Thread starter hunterjwizzard
- Start date
GiGaBiTe
Veteran Member
That has to result in some stiff performance penalties. Even a 486 has a hard time with faster PIO modes, if you have an Am5x86-133 overclocked to 160 MHz and toggle the turbo button, you can watch a large disk transfer speed up and slow down in real time.
A fast 286 is going to have terrible performance, especially managing multiple drives. Though I guess there's a price/performance tradeoff. If they had included a full 486 on the card, the card would have been way more expensive. Though it is strange that they'd use a 16 bit processor on a 32 bit bus.
I wonder if you could do something silly like attach one of those 286 to 486 upgrades to the card and see if it works, and if it works any faster than the stock CPU lol.
A fast 286 is going to have terrible performance, especially managing multiple drives. Though I guess there's a price/performance tradeoff. If they had included a full 486 on the card, the card would have been way more expensive. Though it is strange that they'd use a 16 bit processor on a 32 bit bus.
I wonder if you could do something silly like attach one of those 286 to 486 upgrades to the card and see if it works, and if it works any faster than the stock CPU lol.
A 486 might have problems with PIO mode because of all the other crap it is doing at the same time. A 286/20 just moving big chunks of data to cache and then dumping it to the CPU as requested is probably not a big deal for it.
GiGaBiTe
Veteran Member
Actually, not a lot of stuff was running during said data transfer. It was in pure DOS with minimal drivers loaded, just doing the data transfer.
If the disk controller supported 32 bit disk access, the 286 would have at minimum a 50% performance penalty, and probably much worse for having to do a 32 bit operation as two 16 bit operations.
If the disk controller supported 32 bit disk access, the 286 would have at minimum a 50% performance penalty, and probably much worse for having to do a 32 bit operation as two 16 bit operations.