rec.autos.simulators

Hello all hardware guru's,
I have a Quantex Pentium 100, Biostar MB8500TEC motherboard, Award flash
bios(updated to the latest available for this board 8/31/95 ver. 4.50PG)
I decided to try the Intergraph Reactor last week. Well, Just as I
expected my Reactor card arrived promptly at 9:00 am, Dec.31st after
just 22 hours! I spent four hours trying to get it to work, then put
back in my trusty old Mach64 and accepted the fact that, "this thing
ain't gonna work." Two days later I finally had time to call tech
support. The lines were all busy, but within an hour a nice fellow from
Intergraph called me back and tried to help. We tried the install again
just to be sure. The conclusion, if you read all the readme's, flash the
bios, get the latest drivers, determine there's no actual hardware
conflict & try vgafix, your screwed. You need a PCI 2.1 compliant
motherboard. If you have a computer made in 1995, you probably can't use
this card, and just to clear this up, there is NO WAY to determine this
for sure unless you get the card and try it. Even if it works you may
not get acceptable DMA performance.

So now that you know my situation, can anyone help me by recommending a
motherboard that gets very good performance with the Reactor, will work
with MMX and possibly Cyrix, will work with my RAM (4- 8meg 70ns 72pin
simms)? I will probably reuse my board and Pentium 100 to build a PC for
my mom, so all is not lost. In the meantime I will be using the Pentium
100 from this PC and my memory. Also how important is DIMM, SDRAM, and
USB capability. Finally is a 512k cache worth the extra $30 to $40.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions,
Matt Howell

BTW, if anyone has a computer remotely like mine and has gotten the
reactor to work, I'll gladly eat crow and bow down to a hardware god!

One of the fastest boards is the ABIT IT5H.  It's quite a nice board
and just jumperless (all the settings are made in the BIOS).  It's
faster than the ASUS P/I-P55T2P4, but it lacks the ASUS' 83mhz bus
speed (it only goes up to 75mhz).  They both support split voltage, so
they should work just fine with the new MMX chips.  They use the HX
chipset, and as such do not support SDRAM.  For that, you'd need one of
the VX boards (like the ABIT IT5V) .  SDRAM is the future, but unless
your going to be buying any memory soon I wouldn't get a VX board (even
with SDRAM they're no faster than the HX boards).  I'm giving my board,
CPU, and RAM to my dad.  I figure if I have to buy all new RAM anyway,
why settle for the outdated EDO?  Sure I may not be getting much out of
the SDRAM now (the VX boards don't do much with it), but it will be
helpful down the road (it will be required for the higher bus speeds).
I'm getting a VX board for the time being, which I'll swap out for one
of the TX boards when their released.  It should be a nice system, a
P200MMX (running at 230mhx 73x3 + the 5mhz turbo frequency the ABIT
boards offer), w/ 32-64 megs of SDRAM (I have to see how much I can
afford).

I use a lot of parentheses don't I...

--

Emory University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
The IWCCCARS Project: Q & A Representative
Nascar Setups Page: http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~ebusch/

Yeah, I just found that out (I don't blame them, I'd wait for the TX
too).  Do they have any kind of timeframe for the TX chipset yet?

--

Emory University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
The IWCCCARS Project: Q & A Representative
Nascar Setups Page: http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~ebusch/

I just read this on Tom's Hardware page:

"ABIT obviously didn't expect the IT5H to become successful, due to the
increased popularity of the VX chipset (which I actually don't
understand - it's the worse chipset!). This is the reason, why they
have pushed the IT5V into production as fast as possible and still the
IT5H is officially unavailable. ABIT has promised me though, that the
IT5H will be available as soon as possible, so let's hope you're able
to purchase it soon."

--

Emory University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
The IWCCCARS Project: Q & A Representative
Nascar Setups Page: http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~ebusch/

ABIT is sending their TX boards (engineering samples) to beta testers
by the end of the month, and is hoping to have mass production started
as early as March.

--

Emory University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
The IWCCCARS Project: Q & A Representative
Nascar Setups Page: http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~ebusch/

i would wait untill all the mmx boards are out iam sure it would be worth
the wait

The MMX chips and boards that work with them are already out.  As long
as it supports the split voltage, nearly any current motherboard will
work with the MMX CPUs.

--

Emory University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
The IWCCCARS Project: Q & A Representative
Nascar Setups Page: http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~ebusch/

Thanks for the info,

Mick in Tampa
--
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Umm, you wil probably have to download a BIOS update however, one you get
it
up and running. I have that board and it would NOT run Nascar II until I
flashed in a new bios off of Asus's web page. It is otherwise a bulletproof
MB. Also, if you didn't get it, there is a Mouse port adaptor to free up
the second serial port, however, it runs off IRQ 11, which I have been
reading the video cards like take for their own(don't know, don't have a
3d card, have a Stealth 64 Vram, and am very happy with it.)

Later. -Mark

I just ordered a Tyan S1470 VX motherboard, with a P200 chip from
Intel.  Despite what others are saying, I am not disappointed in the
least bit with the performance.  I upgraded from a P75, and am even
using old 70ns ram.