Linux PCI-HOWTO: ASUS-Boards

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## 3. ASUS-Boards

## 3.1 ASUS and the NMI (Parity) -- impact on Gravis-Ultrasound

The newer trition PCI-Mainboards in 1995 did not seem to support parity-SIMMS anymore. Since I usualy took the cheaper nonparity-SIMMS anyway, I did not consider this a problem until I put the Gravis-Ultrasound into my machine. Under DOS the SBOS-Driver and Setup/Test utility does complain about "nmi procedure disabled on this p.c.". The manual says I'd better get a better mainboard in that case, not very helpful.

The gravis-ultrasound did work nice in the ASUS-SP3 and ASUS-SP4, inspite of this, but the gravis-ultrasound-max I have here got gmod to kernel panic on both boards, and sometimes when playing au-files via /dev/audio did strange things, like playing the rest of an older, previously played sound after the new one. The sounddriver does recommend a buffer of 65536 with the GUS Max instead of the small one like the GUS - why I do not know. I do not have such a problem with the newer ASUS TP4 XE boards, though. Both are equipped with 1M DRAM onboard. These problems are probably not related to the NMI-problem, but because of the sounddriver?

I heard not only ASUS but most of the newer PCI-Mainboards are lacking in parity/NMI-support.

Strange enough - the ASUS-TP4 (Trition Chipset) does work with the GUS Max - it does load the SBOS-Driver. I have to admit, I am confused.

## 3.2 Various types of ASUS Boards

### ASUS SP3 with saturn chipset I (rev. 2) for 486,

- 2 x rs232 with 16550
- NCR53c810 onboard,
- slightly broken saturn-chipset I (rev. 2)

### ASUS SP3G with saturn chipset II (rev. 4) for 486,

like SP3, but less buggy saturn chipset

### ASUS SP3-SiS chipset, for 486

like AP4, but newer, SiS chipset, green functions and all the EIDE, rs232 with 2 16550 and centronics. Only 2 SIMM Slots, Does seem to work with AMD486DX4/120, but was not very reliably on NCR53c810 and various operating systems (Windows-NT, Windows95, OS2), after upgrading to a PentiumBoard ASUS SP4, all the problems vanished, so it must have been the board. Still does seem to work nice for Linux, though.

### ASUS AP4, for 486, with PCI/ISA/VesaLocalbus

green functions, 1VL, 3 ISA, 4 PCI slots, only EIDE onboard, no fd-controller, no rs232/centronics. Very small size.

does recognice AMD486DX2/66 as DX4/100 only. This can be corrected with soldering one pin (which?) to ground, but I would not recommend a board like this anyway.

The one I tested was broken for OS2 and Linux, but people are said to use it for both.

The VesaLocalbus-Slot is expected to be slower than the normal vesa-localbus boards because of the PCI2VL bridge, but without penalty to the PCI section.

### ASUS SP4-SiS, for Pentium90, PCI/ISA

like SP3-SiS, but for Pentium90/100.

### ASUS TP4 with Triton chipset and EDO-Support

has the Triton-Chipset for better performance and supports normal PS2-Simms as well as Fast-Page-Mode and EDO modules.

### ASUS TP4XE with Triton chipset and additional SRAM/EDORAM support

supports the new EDORAM and upcoming SRAM standards. At least SRAM is said to considerabely increase performance. Did for some reason not accept the 8M PS2-SIMMS working ok in ASUS SP4, after changing them against others, bigger looking ones, (16 chips instead of 8 if I remember right) it worked ok. Has been tested with P90 and P100.

### ...and many others now.

if you have new information on problems with them, please report.

## 3.3 Benchmarks on ASUS Mainboards

I tried to compare the speed of CPUs in two ASUS Mainboards: for 486 I tested the SP3 SiS (the one with one vesa-local-bus slot) and for 586 I tested the ASUS TP4/XE, each with 16M RAM, always the same unloaded system with another CPU, with whetstone and dhrystone.

I must admit, I have not read the benchmarks-faq yet, and will probably edit the section a loot soon. If you have any comments, please mail me.

I am especially confused about the amd486DX4/100 being faster on dhrystones than the DX4/120 version? I did not see that kind of inconsistency on comparing the P90 and P100.

Perhaps this was at fault: when I plugged in the amdDX4-100, I had the board jumpered for DX2-66. While the BIOS did report it as an DX4-100, the board might have used the wrong clockspeeds... but since DX2-66 uses 33Mhz * 2 and DX4 uses 33Mhz * 3, this would have been correct?

The board running with DX4-120 is jumpered to 40Mhz * 3 = 120 Mhz.

Another thing I wonder about is why the whetstones-result does yield so even numbers on some machines?

### ASUS SP3 with amd486DX4-100

- Dhrystone time for 500000 passes = 7 by 63559 dhrystones/second
- Whetstone time for 1000 passes = 5 by 200.0000 Whetstones/second

### ASUS SP3 with amd486DX4-120

- Dhrystone time for 500000 passes = 8 by 56074 dhrystones/second
- Whetstone time for 1000 passes = 4 by 250.0000 Whetstones/second

### ASUS SP3 with intel486DX2-66

- Dhrystone time for 500000 passes = 9 by 50761 dhrystones/second
- Whetstone time for 1000 passes = 7 by 142.8571 Whetstones/second

### ASUS TP4/XE with intel586-90

- Dhrystone time for 500000 passes = 4 by 101010 dhrystones/second
- Whetstone time for 1000 passes = 3 by 333.3333 Whetstones/second

### ASUS TP4/XE with intel586-100

- Dhrystone time for 500000 passes = 4 by 102040 dhrystones/second
- Whetstone time for 1000 passes = 2 by 500.0000 Whetstones/second

## 3.4 Detailed information on the old ASUS PCI-I-SP3 with saturn chipset from heinrich@zsv.gmd.de:

- 3 PCI, 4 ISA Slots (3x16, 1x8 Bit)
- ZIF Socket for the CPU
- room for 4 72pin-SIMMs (max. 128M)
- Award BIOS in Flash-Eprom
- Onboard: NCR-SCSI, 1par, 2ser (with FIFO), AT-Bus, Floppy

The board does like most in that price class -- write-through cache, no write-back. This should not be significant, maybe 3% of performance.

The BIOS supports scsi-drives under DOS/Windows without additional drivers, but with the board come additional drivers which are said to give better performance, for DOS/Windows(ASPI), OS2, Windows-NT, SCO-Unix, Netware (3.11 and 4, if interpreted correctly)

Gert Doering (gert@greenie.muc.de) was saying the SCO-Unix-driver for the onboard-SCSI-Chip was not working properly. After two or three times doing: "time dd if=/dev/rhd20 of=/dev/null bs=100k count=500" it kernel-paniced...

The trouble some people experienced with this board might be due to them using an outboard Adaptec-SCSI-Controller with "sync negotiation" turned on. (This predates the NCR driver release; hence the use of the Adaptec.) Please check that in the BIOS-Setup of the Adaptec-1542C if you use one and have problems with occasional hangups!

There is a new version of the ASUS-Board which should have definitely less problems. It is called ASUS-PCI-I/SP3G, the G is important. It has the new Saturn-chipset rev. 4 and the bugs should be gone. They use the Saturn-ZX-variant and the new SP3G has fully PCI conforming level-triggered (thus shareable), BIOS-configurable interrupts. It has an on-board PS/2-mouseport, EPA-power-saving-modes and DX4-support, too. It performs excellently. If you can get the German computer magazine C't from July (?), you will find a test report where the ASUS-Board is the best around.

Latest information about ASUS-SP3-G: You might experience crashes when using PCI-to-Memory-Posting. If you disable this, all works perfect. jw@peanuts.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de said he believed it to be a problem of the current Linux-kernel rather than the hardware, because part of the system still works when crashing, looking like a deadlock in the swapper, and OS2/DOS/WINDOZE don't crash at all.

Someone else with a very old ASUS-SP3 (saturn-I chipset) reported crashes with using XFree86, which went away when he installed the very latest betaversion which seems to work around a bit of the problems.

## 3.5 Pat Dowler (dowler@pt1B1106.FSH.UVic.CA) with ASUS SP3G

- ASUS SP3G board (it is rev.4 == saturn II)
- AMD DX4-100 CPU (need to set jumper 36 to 1&2 rather than 2&3, otherwise it's set the same as other 486DXn chips)
- 256K cache (comes with 15ns cache :-)
- 16meg RAM (2x8meg)
- ET4000 ISA video card
- quantum IDE hard drive
- SMC Elitel16 combo ethernet card

Unlike some other reports, I find the mouse pointer moves very smoothy under X (just like the ol' 386) - it is jumpy under some, but not all, DOS games though...

Performance is great!! I ran some large floating point tests and found the performance in 3x33 (100MHz) mode to be almost 1.5x that in 2x (66MHz) mode (large being 500x500 doubles - 4meg or so)... I was a little dubious about clock-tripling but I seem to be getting full benefit :-)

The heavily configurable energy star stuff doesn't work with the current AMD DX4 chips - you need an SL chip

I really need a SCSI disk and a PCI video card :-)

(I had a phonecall by a person who had this problem with the buggy SMC FIFO chipset, after using X-window they hung.)

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