Some comments on past generations of PC hardware...
All PCs of given minimum spec are not equal. Those TVGA 9000 VGA cards mentioned, yes, they suck the big one, very slow. I have even found them in cheap pentium systems, couldn't beleive it, that's the way to build a pentium that gets whupped by a well specced 386. I was sorta lucky in getting a used Chips and Technologies VGA card for my 386, was about 5x as fast as a trident TVGA, despite only having 256K of video RAM. It was as fast as some of the cheapest (i.e. slowest) PCI cards, but didn't have the RAM for SVGA modes. Anyhoo, this meant that doom played quite well on a 386sx40 with 4MB, conversely, one guy I knew with a 486dx2-66 had to run it in low res, because his VGA card sucked that bad. That 386 didn't like doom 2 so much, which liked DX CPUs and 8MB of RAM a lot better. PC BIOSes in that era often had a settable divisor of the system clock speed for the ISA bus speed, slowest was 6 I think and was likely the default, worst case scenario woulda been a 25Mhz 486 running the ISA at a little over 4Mhz, slower than an original PC. Highest was usually 3. Jiggling cards around could get this working even with a 50mhz system clock, with the result that you would have a little screamer of a system. That 386sx40 setup I had, I got well tweaked up and balanced and it was the equal of many a cheap 486 system, and some not so cheap. With the talk of Wolfenstein 3D and the 286 though, I think of the extemes I have encountered on that class. The original IBM AT 286... slow as treacle, really slow, faintly faster than the original PC of course, but damn slow. I have had "Turbo XT" class machines that would run rings around an IBM AT. Then on the other end of things was a board I came across with a Harris semiconductor licensed 286 CPU, it ran at 20Mhz. Set this one up to see how it did... it was quite amazing it had some lower end 386es beat for sure. Ran windows 3.0 on it in standard mode and it was very brisk and useable.
Smoothest windows 95 machine I ever had or saw, had a Pentium 60 in it, yes, the 5V space heater version. The motherboard only had ISA slots. I found an ISA orchid SVGA card with something like a GD5340 on it, and it had a bus CD-ROM mitsumi or something, and 3 assorted HDDs which I think I even doublespaced to get some room on. This thing was a rock, it must have been very very close to a MS original development hardware machine spec or something. As long as you didn't try anything particularly processor intensive, like playing a high bitrate MP3, you'd have sworn you were using a P-166MMX or something recent and spendy for the time. It was just as smooth as butter. Other pentium and win95 machines I've had and used just weren't smooth like that was. A close second, was a machine with a Cyrix MII PR366 chip in it, that flew on 95 and when we upgraded to 98SE, felt very fast and was smooth... again, until you did something CPU/FPU intensive. AMD K6-2@450 felt slower as did a PII-400 but when it came to the crunchy stuff, you soon knew you didn't have much of a CPU, a P200 would outperform it on anything needing much FPU. For web-browsing and document thrashing though, those particular systems felt a lot faster than they were.
Anyhoo, my point in this, rather than boring you with all the specifics of PC systems I have thrown together from junk, is to note that some combinations of PC hardware just seem to be a lot nicer than others. Maybe it's the way the timings sync with a particular processor at a particular speed on the motherboard. Maybe it's the perfect combo of graphics card, hard disk and CPU. (I've known theoretically fast HDDs that turn a system into a dog) I wish I knew WHAT made these particular system combos so damn good. I know I would take good care with the setup and try and get the best out of it, but I'd do the same to anything.
Obviously in the Amiga's case, everything was specced to run nicely together. This apparently doesn't happen when you throw a PC together, but sometimes you hit it right, and get a machine, that almost... alllllmost... might compare to the smallest part of what makes an Amiga so satisfying to use.
By the way, some of those IBM "486" desktops shipped with an IBM made cyrix design that was basically a 386, I think IBM managed to cripple it even beyond it's basic cyrixness, and they were real dogs. I don't think I've met a particularly fast IBM machine, ever. Okay, had linux running decent on a PS/2 386/16, but it was a bit like tommy the pinball wizard, given that I intended it to be a router, 'coz I couldn't find any MCA ethernet hardware for it. The only IBM hardware I have much respect for are Model M keyboards and P series monitors, which I'll buy used any time I see them.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled PC h8 in. :-D
RW222
