hey all, not sure if i'm doing something wrong here, or if i've got a "known bad" config, or if it's just a "thing" but my A3640 card in my A4k....well in short, it sucks! i think its a rev3.1 card.
i've tested it in my A3k and the performance is about same to within a few seconds between the A3k and A4k in test renders at 4hrs 53mins, so i'm pretty sure it's not the machine.
i mean, obviously its a step up from the 030. but still.
for example. An A1200 fitted with a blizzard040@25 is nearly an hour and a half faster at 3hours 30mins, than my A4k with the A3640.
i think it's something ram related, as i was able to bring the render time for the A4k+A3640 combo down to sub 5 hours when i found some more sims to take the mainboard ram from 8 to 16meg - previously it was over 6 hours. which is a bit of a worry when a blizzard030@50 equipped A1200 will so the same job in 5hours 10mins.
Another hint is that sysspeed and bustest still tells me that my fastram access speed is in the low single digits. yes. in some cases it'd be quicker to write out to disk than ram.
however, all the cpu bench programs just confirm that everything is performing as expected mips and mflops wise. which i suppose they would if their test code fits in the cpu cache...
anyway, config as follows if anyone can see anything obvious:-
A4000 desktop with 3.1roms, 32gig CF card and a cdrom on the IDE
A3640 rev3.1 (with heatsink and fan)
2x 8meg sims on the mainboard, + 2meg chip
Mediator 4000Di
Bigram 256meg Zorro3 ram
X-Surf100 in Zorro3 mode
Radeon 9250 128meg PCI (set up as 64meg graphics ram and 64meg ram/PCI DMA space)
some generic 100megabit PCI NIC
hope someone can spot something or have a suggestion of what to do! otherwise i'm on the hunt for a cpu card with it's own memory i guess?
cheers all!
