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Article by Gilbert Lefebvre ©March 2001AOpen PA256 MX: http://aoaen.aopen.com/products/vga/pa256mx.htm |
I consider myself as one of the lesser known OS/2
users although I have been using it since version 1.3 but really got into it at
version 2. I am also one of the co founders of the Montreal OS/2 user group and
present president. Ever since I have been involved in personal computers, I have
been interested in hardware: hard disks at first but nearly all the rest of the
system as time went by. I spend a good two hours every day fulfilling my hardware
curiosity.
In September of 1999, I upgraded most of my system
with a new full tower case with 300W power supply to house a new Abit BP6 twin Celeron
motherboard, new 19" ViewSonic G790 monitor and new Lexmark Z51 printer. My
main hard drive was less than a year old as well as my CD-ROM reader.
There was one weak component to this system and it
was my graphic card which was a Matrox Mystique 220. I felt ready to wait until
something special appeared. Choosing the right video card for OS/2 is not the easiest
task as one needs a good driver. With the exception of Matrox, there are not many
manufacturers that still support OS/2. The other aspect of the equation is that
most hardware sites are nearly exclusively Windows oriented. How the card will fare
under OS/2 is something that often remains a well kept secret.
In early Fall of 2000, I read good reviews of NVIDIA
Geforce 2 MX chipsets as providing the best bang for the buck. I wrote Scitech's
Kendall Bennett about possible OS/2 future support and he answered back that it
was to be in the next beta of Scitech's Display Doctor(SDD). I asked in comp.os.os2.video
about Nvidia's driver satisfaction for OS/2 but never got an answer. When I searched
Deja News for info on NVIDIA, I did not find much of a lead. I kept reading reviews
upon reviews on implementations of this chipset from different manufacturers such
as Asus, MSI, Guillemot, Hercules, Creative Labs etc. All reviewers agreed that
it was the best card one could get for one on a budget. Let's say I don't believe
that getting a second mortgage on the house is a good idea to purchase computer
hardware and also believe the cheapest is probably not the best buy one can make.
I ended up with an AOpen PA256MX.
There are three flavors of this card: no tv output, tv output,
tv and digital output. My choice was on the no tv output. For full
specifications on this card: http://aoaen.aopen.com/products/vga/pa256mx.htm
The situation was different for my NT4 partition and,
to make a long story short, requires that you assign an IRQ to VGA in the BIOS.
Since my screen is 19", my favorite resolution is 1280 by 1024 pixels. With
my Matrox, the color depth was 65,566 colors with a 65 Hz refresh rate. I had done
quite a few tests with Trevor Hemsley's Benchmark at these setting and proceeded
to do the same with the new card. Here are my Matrox results with Sysbench 0.9.4d
result file created Wed Feb 16 01:04:24 2000:
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Here are the results with the Aopen MX256 using Sysbench 0.9.4f result file created
Fri Jan 12 03:48:45 2001
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Matrox: 372.820 PM-Graphics-marks et 93.801 DIVE-marksThe difference can be felt. As to the quality of the screen output, Matrox has the reputation of offering the best but could not notice a difference in this regard with the new card.
Aopen: 683.581 PM-Graphics-marks et 290.716 DIVE-marks
The Matrox is a 4 MB card of 1997 vintage while the
Aopen has 32 MB and is a 2000 vintage. The new card offers additional capabilities
such as true color depth and higher refresh rates. I then proceeded to set the card
for 32 bits per pixel and 85 Hz refresh rate and proceeded to run the benchmark
using Sysbench 0.9.4f, result file created Fri Jan 12 03:59:19 2001:
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The speed penalty is quite high for running in 32M
colors. Is this setting worth it? I would say it is not worth it for the desktop
and web browsing. For those occasions where you do some photo retouching, you can
always set it at true color but do not see the need for general use that the home
user is likely to do considering the speed penalty. Of course, the speed is quite
acceptable but not as snappy.
How would it do on a smaller monitors such as a 15"
running at 800 by 600? I just put up a new system with an AMD Duron running at 750
Mhz at true color on Warp4 fp14:
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I can't explain the low DIVE results.
My WSeB takes advantage of both of my processors but had disappointing benchmark
results showing to be somewhat slower than Warp4. WSeB SMP benchmark tests:
At 16 bits per pixel: 643.813 PM-Graphics-marks 206.522 DIVE-marks.I wrote SDD about this and was told it was a known problem that would be eventually fixed.
At 32 bits per pixel: 290.459 PM-Graphics-marks 187.477 DIVE-marks.
One can wonder if a faster cpu would have much of
an effect on these benchmarks. I ran the following on the AMD Duron 750 MHz at 16
bits per pixel at 800 by 600:
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I then overclocked the 750 Mhz to 918 Mhz (9*102 Mhz)
with the same screen size and color depth:
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There is not much of a difference considering the
cpu speed increase.