Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!apple!well!mitsu
From: mitsu@well.UUCP (Mitsuharu Hadeishi)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: 80386 components/ BIOS summary
Summary: AMI good, Award bad
Keywords: 80386 Motherboards BIOS Phoenix Award AMI
Message-ID: <12945@well.UUCP>
Date: 1 Aug 89 05:11:57 GMT
References: <15617@ut-emx.UUCP> <15771@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <7449@athertn.Atherton.COM> <15744@ut-emx.UUCP>
Reply-To: mitsu@well.UUCP (Mitsuharu Hadeishi)
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, Sausalito, CA
Lines: 22


	I have recently purchased an AMAX 386/20 with AMI BIOS, Neat chip set,
and up to 8mb on the motherboard (with 1 mbit DRAMs) and up to 16mb total RAM
(using their one 32-bit slot).  It is a very inexpensive, high quality clone
(oh yes, zero wait state, no cache, though a cache card as an option will be
available "in a month" to plug into the 32-bit slot).  I've so far had no
problems with the AMI BIOS, though it does in fact require the entire 64K of
ROM to operate properly (some BIOSes, in particular Award BIOS, can function
even if you convert up to about the bottom 32K of the ROM to RAM using a 386
memory manager, believe it or not!).  Performance is not too hot, but hey, I'm
not going to quibble over 10% speed difference (it is about the same as other
386 clones, that is to say about 20% slower than an Everex Step 386/20, SI 21.0
as opposed to SI 24.3).  Overall I'm VERY happy with the price/performance; I
could have spent more on an Everex, but then I could have spent about the same
amount more and got a 25Mhz machine with superior performance to the Step 20.

	I've had innumerable problems with an Advent 386/16 I used to use
at work with Award BIOS and many of my coworkers also had such problems (many
of which went away when some of them switched to Phoenix.)  These problems
included crashing when accessing the floppy drive under Desqview, intermittent
unpredictable crashes, etc.  No such problems on my current machine (I've
tried to reproduce a few).