*BSD News Article 7795


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From: grog@lemis.uucp (Greg Lehey)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: does the UMC chipset work with 386BSD?
Message-ID: <2399@adagio.lemis.uucp>
Date: 12 Nov 92 17:39:37 GMT
References: <49432@shamash.cdc.com>
Organization: LEMIS, W-6324 Feldatal, Germany
Lines: 28

In article <49432@shamash.cdc.com> pbd@runyon.cim.cdc.com (Paul Dokas x4629) writes:
>I'm looking at a 486DX-33 (2 VESA LB slots, 6 ISA slots, 256K
>cache, 8 MB DRAM) that uses the UMC chipset with an Intel 486.
>Has anyone heard of the UMC chipset?  And does anyone know if
>I'm going to have problems running 386BSD?

Well, I have just removed a 486/50 with UMC from my machine, and gone
back to a 486/33 using an OPTI chip set. Nothing else changed - I had
a different 486/33 OPTI board (same design, though) in there before.
I'm running BSD/386.

The OPTI board ran with no problems since March, and I installed the
UMC board last week. On average, it crashed 5 times a day. This could
be a defective board, of course, but I didn't have another board to
compare it with. 

In the meantime, a report came out in c't, a German magazine,
comparing chipsets. It showed that the UMC board is very conservative
in its bus cycle, and the results with some benchmarks showed down to
40% of the performance of other chipsets (i.e. the program ran 2.5
times as long on a machine with the other chipset). This ties in with
the fact that my initialisation routines showed a speed only about 10%
faster than the 33 MHz OPTI chipset.

-- 
Greg Lehey                       | Tel: +49-6637-1488              
LEMIS                            | Fax: +49-6637-1489
Schellnhausen 2, W-6324 Feldatal, Germany