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Tyan BM Drivers v. 3.10
I had heard some news of how well the drivers for the Tyan TX and LX boards were working. Upon visiting Tyan's driver page you will find links for Bus Master Drivers and a PIIX4 Windows 95 Fix. Following the Drivers link I found the BM95_31 driver, a README and a link for a benchmark comparing Tyan's UDMA drivers to using Microsoft drivers in PIO mode. A comparison of apples to oranges? Anyway, the increase in performance does * look * impressive.
After going through the README file it becomes apparent that the installation of this driver is not just a matter of clicking on a file and letting it install itself. You will have to delete the old driver and hope that Windows recognizes the upgraded version. If not, there is a procedure to follow which ends with the following statement.
"If the above steps do not work for you, then re-run the Win95 setup. The setup will not destroy your old software but it will correct the system registry. But make sure that you delete the OEMX.INF file first."
Hopefully you will not get to that point in the instructions. All in all, the instructions for removing the old driver and installing the new one are well written and didn't leave me with too many unanswered questions.The PIIX4 Windows 95 Fix installs with less work.
The benchmark results for updating the driver and patch were about 1 to 2% lower than when the same files were added to a clean installation of OSR2. All in all, the results are similar to the TX patch and Intel drivers recommended by Abit and not as good as using the default MS drivers with SETUPEX and REMIDEUP, with or without USBSUPP. Definately not as strong as I had been lead to believe.
The system tested is configured as follows:
Abit AX5 revision 2.22 - 512KB
L2 cache
AMD K6 233 o/c'd to 250 (83 X 3)
Quantum Fireball ST 3.2 - FAT 16
Quantum Fireball SE 3.2 - FAT 16
32 MB generic SDRAM
Jaton 58P 4 MB Video
Matsushita CR-574 CD
From a clean install of OSR2; USBSUPP,BM95_31, and PIIX4 Windows 95 Fix were installed. All procedures for previous tests were followed.
The following programs were installed on the system.
TLIET600 Video driver
CPUIDLE 2.4
Direct X 5.0 (for WinBench98)
WinBench98 v 1.0
Threadmark 2.0
HD Tach 2.00
| Device | Tyan's set up |
| Disk Drives | Quantum Fireball
no DMA check box |
| HD Controller | Tyan 32 bit UDMA
BM Driver |
| HD Controller | PRI PCI BM EIDE
dual fifo |
| HD Controller | SEC PCI BM EIDE
dual fifo |
| ?Other | ? Removed |
| ?Other | ? Removed |
| System Devices | DMA Controller
check 64 K & 4 GB |
| System Devices | 82371AB PCI BM IDE |
| System Devices | 82439TX Pentium Processor to PCI Bridge |
| USB | Gen USB Hub |
| USB | 82371AB/EB PCI to
USB host |
| USB | USB root hub |
| . | . |
| Test | Tyan's set up |
| WinBench 98 v 1.0 | . |
| CPUmark 32 | 644 |
| FPU | 817 |
| Business Disk 98 | 1205 |
| High-End Disk 98 | 3450 |
| CPU Utilization | 43.6% |
| Avg Seek (ms) | 14.4 |
| Transfer - Beginning | 11200 KB per sec |
| Transfer - End | 9250 KB per sec |
| Win95 Build | 1212 |
| . | . |
| Threadmark 2.0 | 5.26 MB per sec @
36.60% Utilization |
| . | . |
| HD Tach 2.00 | . |
| Transfer Rates
Max - Min - Avg In KB per sec |
11067 - 6546 - 9565 |
| Avg Seek -
Peak Transfer Rate |
15.1 ms
20.8 MB per sec |
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Drivers
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& Default MS Drivers |
BMIDE Drivers |
BM Drivers |
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BMIDE Drivers |
Intel Drivers |
& BM Links |
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