Uphill upgrade




My machine has an ISA motherboard. If I replace this with a PCI motherboard (and recycle my DX4-100 onto it), will I still be able to use my current video card (Actix Graphics Engine Ultra Plus 32), disk controller and Sound Blaster 16? I thought I would have to buy the PCI versions. Also, as a matter of interest, I use the Western Digital OnTrack disk manager so that I can use the 630Mb hard drive with my old BIOS. Presumably the new BIOS on the new motherboard will obviate the need for disk manager. Is this also likely to increase the disk performance?
Is it possible to re-use old SIMMs in some way? Hard disk caches used to be all the rage before SmartDrive arrived, but I haven't seen them advertised for a few years now. Having 8Mb of dedicated disk cache on top of 16Mb of system RAM may help the performance. Is it still possible to buy hard disk caches and, if so, will they clash with the software caching of Win95? Or is the whole thing just a silly idea?
- Mark Kohout


Mark, most PCI motherboards have a few ISA slots. The trick is to make sure it has enough slots to take all your ISA cards. The modern BIOS on the motherboard will handle your disk without the BIOS-tricking software from OnTrack, but the speed difference will not be noticeable. A new motherboard is very likely to include an integrated IDE disk controller, as well as parallel and serial ports. That means you won't need your old disk controller and I/O cards, so you'll only need two ISA slots in the new system, for your video and sound cards. You will find that a PCI-based video card is much faster than the ISA cards, so you might want to upgrade in the future to a new video graphics card.
You will have trouble using the old SIMMs unless your existing motherboard uses 72-pin rather than the older 30-pin SIMMs. Nearly all the new motherboards on the market use the newer 72-pin SIMMs. You can buy an adaptor board that lets you plug old 30-pin SIMMs into it, then plug the adaptor into a 72-pin slot. However, memory is cheap at the moment, and now is a good time to buy 16Mb for your new system. There is a strong feeling around that the 30- to 72-pin adaptor boards are not worth the trouble.
Most modern IDE drives have between 256K and 512K of on-board cache to speed up data access. Windows 95 uses system RAM to further cache the data, but it does this intelligently, increasing and decreasing the cache to suit the requirements of different programs that are running. You will get better overall performance by adding the extra RAM into the main system memory, rather than dedicating it to a disk cache. In that way, if the RAM is not needed for disk caching, Win95 can re-allocate it to other processes that are asking for it.
- Ian Yates


Category: Hardware
Issue: Oct 1996
Pages: 166

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