greg@dekalb.UUCP (Greg Philmon) (05/15/89)
Someone called for experiences in buying mail-order. Ok, here's my ongoing
story:
One of my favorite MO places (to date) has to be JDR Microdevices. They
offer a full year warranty on everything they sell, regardless of the original
manufacturers coverage. Also a 30-day money-back guarantee.
So when I decided to upgrade to a 386, I choose their MCT386MB25 (a 25 Mhz
full-sized 386 motherboard). Wow, in their catalog it looks great! Here's
some of the features:
1) Uses 256K or 1 MB chips at 80ns (memory interleaving allows such
"slow" chips).
2) Adjustable bus speed.
3) Upgradable to 8MB on board.
Well, I guess this is starting to sound like a commercial, eh? Ok, I'll
quit there and you can get one of their catalogs if you're interested. Anyway,
the board was $1050 w/ 0k. I then purchased (before the board arrived) 18 1MB
chips from IC Express (great company - best prices and service). The chips
were ordered around 1pm on a Tuesday and arrived by noon Wednesday (from CA to
GA, no less).
The board arrived Thursday and I set to installing it in a tower case (also
from JDR). Here's where the problems began....
First off, the board came with 2 manuals; a "User's Guide" and a "User's
Manual". Something had gotten all over the "Manual" and all the pages were
permanently stuck together. <grrrr> Ok, no biggie, I've done this before and
can figure the installation out, but now I'm annoyed.
Next I discover that my RAM situation is not acceptable. The boards memory
is divided into two banks of 36 chips each. I only have 18 chips. Uh oh. Now
what? I have 1.5 meg in my "old" AT, but it's all 120ns chips. Why did I
assume you could add memory in 1 MB increments? The JDR catalog said so!
Okay, maybe not right out, but they have a "build-it-yourself" system with
the parts itemized. It has this motherboard and "9 x 1MB 100ns DRAM" chips.
So I had assumed it would accept 1 MB increments using 1MB chips. Oh well.
This is the fun part - I, on a dare, went ahead and slapped one meg of 120ns
256K chips in the board. I made sure the Turbo switch was off and hooked up my
monitor .... IT BOOTED! I made it past the memory check and it went to load
the boot-strap ... and went dead. Oh well, what could I expect? So I tried
again <grin>. This time I entered the BIOS-based setup program to see what it
offered. Wow ... MANY options. I found the memory wait-state and toggled it
from zero to one. It then booted fine. Geez, was I on cloud nine. I had been
collecting various benchmark programs ever since the notion of a 386 entered my
mind. Now I put them to work.
Now remember, this is a crippled machine at the moment. It's running at 16
mhz (capable of 25) and has a wait state thrown in. I expect to purchase
another 2 meg soon and see what it'll do at full tilt.
Norton's SI shows 21.0, Landmark SPEED shows 18.5 (newest version - I had an
older one that wrapped the screen and came in around 24 ... I liked that one
better :-). The PCLabs Benchmarks put it right in the middle of the 20mhz
machines reviewed in the recent issue (remember, this is running at 16mhz!).
Especially impressive is the BIOS. It's from AMI and dated 3-3-89. Upon
boot it configured itself; no setup was really necessary! It correctly
identified my hard drive and both floppies (1.44 and 1.2) and wrote these
values to the CMOS, as well as my memory (or lack thereof) configuration.
I did go and enable the BIOS shadowing, as this really improved video times.
All in all, I would highly recommend this board to anyone wanting a good
machine. It will accept a 287, 387, or Weitek (sp?) coprocessor, if that's
important to you.
Ok, that's my lastest experiance with mail order, I hope it helps someone.
Feel free to EMAIL if you have any questions.
(I, of course, have no connection with JDR, IC Express, AMI, or anyone.)
--
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| Greg Philmon ...gatech!dekalb!greg CIS: 72261,1724 |
---------------------------------------------------------davidsen@sungod.steinmetz (William Davidsen) (05/16/89)
In article <506@dekalb.UUCP> greg@dekalb.UUCP (Greg Philmon) writes: | Next I discover that my RAM situation is not acceptable. The boards memory | is divided into two banks of 36 chips each. I only have 18 chips. Uh oh. Now | what? I have 1.5 meg in my "old" AT, but it's all 120ns chips. Why did I | assume you could add memory in 1 MB increments? The JDR catalog said so! Beg to correct you, but you *can* expand in 1MB increments. The board takes either one or two sets of 36 chips, which may be 256k or 1mb. If you had 256k chips you would be working in increments of (surprize) 1MB. The information you read was *not* incorrect, it simply did not go into all the details. Since the chip access 36 bits at a time (32 data + 4 parity), it becomes obvious after you think about it how to do the 1MB increments. Enjoy, you'll like 4MB better anyway ;-) bill davidsen (davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM) {uunet | philabs}!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me