We have some new motherboards that use the INTEL 845GV chipset and a P4
Northwood at 2.8 GHz.
For some reason, they boot our system code really slow, slower than some
older P2 systems.
SIN INFO reports 1586/1587 with a 3991 rating.
I realize SIN INFO may be overflowing, so I don’t think it is an issue but
the slow boot up time is real. The slowdown appears to be when reading our
configuration from the EIDE hard disks. Latest Fys.eide AFAIK.
So ATAPI is to replace EIDE? I think we looked at it and found it was a
little too large to fit in our boot image.
Anyways we found the issue. It had to do with the on-board video. Once we
disabled it all was fine, including the sin info score (up to 33344).
Something in the on-board video was slowing things down. We wanted to avoid
a video card so poking around in the BIOS we found the setting that caused
it:
On-Chip Frame Buffer Size: 8MB <-------- BAD, caused slow performance
and low sin info score
On-Chip Frame Buffer Size: 1MB <-------- GOOD
I’m not really sure what this setting does exactly (we don’t use graphics,
just console mode) but it did the trick.