🚀 go-pugleaf

I am looking for some guide to judge the performance of various PCs.
Obviously it is impractical to benchmarch all the available clone machines,
also it is hard to design a realistic benchmarch program.

What I would like is a sort of check list of mother board design features
that would tend to indicate that a system is a high performance system.

What started me thinking about this is that my AMD 386DX40 at home seems
faster than a i486DX33 we have at work. Both machines are similarly
configured with 8MB RAM. My home machine has a FOREX FR46C411, FRX46C402
chipset with 64K cache (20ns, 15ns tag). The work 486 has 128K cache
and a UMB (?) chipset.

I won't go on about which bus is best or video and disk performance because
that is another whole set of complicated issues.

Considering the currently available mid to high end processors, the
486DX33, DX2-50, DX50 and DX2-66 it would seem that actual raw compute power
depends only on the internal clock rate of the processor.

Moving data to and from the DRAM memory and I/O is where differences in
motherboard design (and external clock speed) come into play.

I believe the chipset on a PC mother board looks after
  Cache controller
  Memory Controller
  Bus Controller
funtions.

Which chip sets are the fastest?

Which type of second level cache is best?
(lots of buzz words: write through, write back, direct mapped etc. etc.)

Is second level cache much use?
(I think the IBM PS/2 Model 77 486DX2-66 doesn't have any!)

Are all ISA/VL-bus/EISA implementations created equal or are some
designs/chipsets superior to others for a particular bus type?

DX50 v DX2-66 which is better?
(I want to run X, and move bitmaps around, memory to video)


If I get enough responses I will post a summary.

Greg O'Sullivan
(gjo@brt.deakin.edu.au)