From: shaker@abhg.uucp (Chris Shaker)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: AMI vs MICRONICS MOTHER BOARDS survey.
Date: 8 Apr 92 11:08:10 GMT
Organization: Kensington Partners

jls@hplvec.LVLD.HP.COM (Jerry Schneider-Contractor) writes:
> 
> In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware, rnegrete@digi.lonestar.org (Ricardo Negrete) writes:
> > I am trying to collect information on the AMI and Micronics 
> > mother boards. I had built 386 computers using both AMI & 
> > Micronics MB's and they just simply work flawless.
> > 
> > Although I had used different type of VGA,I/O etc cards, I like to
> > know if anybody out there has had any compatability problems,either
> > with hardware or software (Novell Unix etc) with both MB's.
> > 
> > AMI is more expensive than Micronics. In your opinion is it worth 
> > the extra cost? (Consider that the AMI has 2s,1p, 2FD,IDE controllers
> > built-in.)
> > 
> > People had told me that if the Built-in IDE controller dies, the mother
> > board has to be replaced. On the other hand, there are claims that one 
> > can just disable the IDE controller through the BIOS and save the MB.
> > What do you think?
> 
> I purchased an AMI Baby Voyager 486/33 for my home system a few months
> ago.  I bought AMI at a price premium with the hope that you get what
> you pay for.  Unfortunately, I have had a couple of problems that AMI
> customer support could not resolve.
> 
> First, I added an Irwin Accutrac250 tape backup as the "third" drive.
> The same setup works on several other 486 and 386 systems, but, after
> shipping back 2 Irwin drives as "possibly defective", Irwin and I
> came to the conclusion that AMI's built-in FD controller may not work
> properly.  I installed a small IDE/Floppy controller board and disabled
> the built-in HD/FDD controller, and the tape drive worked flawlessly.
> 
> Second, I purchased the ATI Graphics Ultra as a display card.  It turns
> out that the 8514 hardware spec uses some of the I/O addresses reserved
> for COM3 (2e8-2ef).  Since I have an internal Modem on COM1, I tried to
> move the AMI built-in com ports to COM2 and COM4.  I couldn't find any
> combination that didn't try to have one of the built-in COM ports at the
> 2e8-2ef address that conflicts with the ATI card.  So, I had to disable
> one of the built-in ports.
> 
> In summary, since I had to disable so much of the built-in "extra"
> hardware, I'm now sorry that I purchased this particular board.  I
> think AMI has an old-style 486/33 board without the built-in stuff
> at a lower price that would have been more suited to my needs.
> 
> As for software compatibility, I have found no problems while using 
> a rather extensive "customizations" of DOS5/Win3/MKS/QEMM.  I haven't
> really stressed it with *nix or OS/2 or NT yet.
> 
> Jerry Schneider            jls@hpisla.lvld.hp.com
> 
> DisClamor:   I am a contractor at HP, and as such, have no connection
>              with official policies or ideas at HP.  This message is
>              not official business, and reflects only my own opinions.


I recently bought a Micronix 486-DX 50 Mhz EISA board, with 256 KB cache.
It comes with 2 serial ports, one parallel port, and a floppy controller.
Each of the onboard IO devices can be seperately disabled or disabled.
If COM1 is enabled, it will be at IO ports 3F8-3FF. If COM2 is enabled,
it will be at IO ports 2F8-2FF. It doesn't appear that they can be
moved at all. The manual doesn't say which interrupts are used, nor
whether or not they can be shared. The parallel port can be configured
at 3 different IO ports. If you want LPT1, it will be at IO ports 3BC
through 3BE. If you want LPT2, it will be 378-37A. If you want LPT3, it
will be 278-27A. The manual doesn't say which interrupt is used, nor
whether or not it can be shared by another device.
It has SIMM sockets for up to 64 MB of 70 ns DRAM on the motherboard, which
was one of the features that I really liked. I got it for $1640, w/o DRAM
in this configuration. It has 8 EISA bus slots, 6 of which can be bus
masters. It has one 32 bit local memory slot, which will use up one of the
EISA nonmaster slots. It uses a Phoenix 486 BIOS, rev 4.03 M1.

Norton 'SI' 5.00 rates the CPU speed at 103.9, and Checkit 3.0 rates it at
23,164 Dhrystones and 8,275.3K Whetstones. It hums.

All of the ISA and EISA cards that I've tried in it so far appear to work
fine:

  DPT PM2012B/90 EISA SCSI (w/o cache upgrade)
  Media Vision Multimedia Upgrade Kit (PAS and Sony SCSI CD-ROM)
  Orchid Pro Designer II SVGA
  Mountain 150 MB tape drive, with MACH2 controller

Note that I'm having a problem with the ISA CMOS configuration and more 
often the EISA CMOS configuration going away when my machine is powered off
for more than one day. The clock often has come up completely scrambled as
well. I've been working with Micronix technical support in an attempt to
resolve this problem. So far, he's had me add an external CMOS battery
to no effect. I am hopeful that we will resolve this problem soon, and
like the fact that I've always gotten through to technical support quickly.

I've also found and reported what appear to be two bugs in the BIOS. The
first is cosmetic. The last two lines on the setup display are messed up.
The answers for the "Coprocessor" and "Reserved Memory" end up one line
below where it should be. The other problem is that when you change the
"BIOS Relocate" on or off, it screws up the "Base Memory" size from 640 to
639. When this happens, you have to manually set the "Base Memory" size
back to 640 before the BIOS will let the system come up. I didn't have
any similar problems with my ALR EISA system, which has a similar Phoenix
bios, and setup screen.

My DPT PM2012B/90 EISA SCSI controller, SmartROM v001.H, firmware Rev 3.C,
works with it, but so far I'm not sure that I've been able to get as good
of disk throughput from it as I got from my ALR 33 Mhz 386 business EISA 
system according to Checkit 3.0's disk benchmark program. I used to get
1.46 MB/sec throughput measured with Checkit 3.0 with my same exact Maxstor
LXT-340 and my previous DPT PM2012A/95 when installed in my ALR business VEISA.
Coretest ver 2.7 thought that this drive combination does 1.34 MB/sec transfer
rates. With the DPT PM2012B/90 in the Micronics 486/50 EISA motherboard,
I get 658.3 KB per second disk transfers, according to Checkit. An interesting
point is that coretest ver 2.7 thinks that the new system does 1.327 MB per
second disk transfers. I find this descrepancy between checkit and coretest
very puzzling.

So far, the only software that hangs or crashes on it is Wing Commander II
and the DOS 5 'print' command. If I do a 'copy <FILE_NAME> PRN" instead of
the 'print' command, it works fine, so I'm puzzled.  All of the other DOS
programs I've run on it have worked fine on it.

Windows 3.0a with Multimedia extensions runs fine on it in enhanced mode and
in real mode.

All in all, I'll be happy with the board once we get the the problems I've
mentioned resolved.

Chris Shaker
shaker@cisco.com

Disclaimer: These opinions are entirely my own, as a customer