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Intel
BMIDE 3.02 Drivers
I had been looking for a way to test the
new Intel
BMIDE 3.02 Drivers on the operating system that they were designed
for, Windows 95 retail or OSR1 (Win95 versions 4.00.950 and 4.00.950a).
These drivers are not intended for Windows 95 or 98 operating systems
that offer native support for UDMA. I have heard of a couple of hacks
that allow the drivers to be used on OSR2 and Win98, but I haven't tried
them -- yet.
Since I do not have a copy of either of these two versions of Win95, I am unable to test this driver myself. I was hoping that someone would submit some results in the format I have used in the other driver tests. Lorenzo Colò offered to do just that. The following results are from his system. It would appear that the new Intel drivers do a lot to reduce the CPU overhead. Thanks Lorenzo.
Lorenzo's system:
AMD K6 200 (66x3)
QDI P55I430TX-MATX Titanium III (Intel
430TX, 512 KB cache)
48 MB EDO RAM 60 ns
Quantum Fireball ST 3.2GB (alone on primary
IDE channel)
LG CRD-8240B 24X (master on secondary
IDE channel)
Conner 420 MB (slave on secondary IDE
channel)
Diamond Viper V330 PCI (bios 1.49), driver
Diamond 0127
Modem Trust Communicator 33K6 ISP (Rockwell
RCV336DPF/SP)
16bit/SB Pro comp. sound board
Windows 95 (950) with
Intel 82371xB INF Update (Revision 1.0)
installed
ESDI_506.PDR update (4.00.1116)
KERNEL32.DLL update (4.00.951)
WinSock and TCP/IP stack update (2.0)
IE 4.01 installed (with shell update)
I share my PC with my brothers and with my father, so I cannot reinstall Win95 and all applications from scratch before testing. I just checked & defragged my disk. I installed the Intel driver only to the primary controller (a little trick) because version 3.01 gave me a lot of problems when I installed it on both channels.
| Test | MS ESDI_506 Driver | Intel 3.02 BMIDE |
| WinBench 98 v 1.0 | . | . |
| Business Disk 98 | 1050 | 1050 |
| High-End Disk 98 | 2720 | 2790 |
| CPU Utilization | 94.9% | 12.8% |
| Avg Seek (ms) | 12.8 | 12.8 |
| Transfer - Beginning | 9350 KB per sec | 9330 KB per sec |
| Transfer - End | 9050 KB per sec | 9050 KB per sec |
| Win95 Build | 950 | 950 |
| . | . | . |
| Threadmark 2.0 | 3.31 MB per sec @
53.93% Utilization |
3.42 MB per sec @
20.84% Utilization |
| . | . | . |
| HD Tach 2.52 | . | . |
| Transfer Rates
Max - Min - Avg In KB per sec |
9185 - 5336 - 7812 | 9322 - 5339 - 7860 |
| Avg Seek -
Peak Transfer Rate CPU utilization% |
15.3 ms
9.3 MB per sec 82.2% |
15.3 ms
26.2 MB per sec 12.4% |
Real World Tests:
I used ACDSee to read an entire directory
contents (more than 51 MB in 639 files) and display thumbnails. I
also measured the time needed to copy a big file (BIGFILE3.DAT from Winbench
CD, more than 152 MB).
All measures are in seconds. Measures were
taken manually with my stopwatch. Drive assignments C and E are two partitions
on my Quantum, G is my Conner disk.
.
| Test | MS ESDI_506 Driver | Intel 3.02 BMIDE |
| ACDSee Read | 55 seconds | 52 seconds |
| From E: To C: Transfer | 135 seconds | 124 seconds |
| From E: To G: Transfer | 151 seconds | 133 seconds |
Next - Uninstall
Intel 3.01 BMIDE Drivers
|
& Default MS Drivers |
BMIDE Drivers |
BM Drivers |
Triones v. 370 |
|
BMIDE Drivers |
Intel Drivers |
& BM Links |
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