The Successor - 9577-DNA
8570's are 'way cool but 77's rule

Ed. This page was originally HERE.

9577-DNA 23NPTFZ

This is a wonderful machine. And I've recently had the chance to make it an even better critter than it was. It's a 33 Mhz Bermuda-board 9577, and it's always had the planar limit of 32MB RAM, but the processor's been upgraded to a 33/133 Kingston Turbochip (AMD K5), and I've replaced the original XGA card with an XGA-2. Storage capabilities have grown with the addition of a 200MB IBM disk in addition to the original 540MB Seagate. Also added a CDROM II and a M-ACPA card, to round out the hardware improvements.

This has been for the longest time my machine of all-work and it does the job remarkably well. Has been run consistently under OS/2 Warp 4 and (despite my occasional attempts to do something incredibly stupid) has never TRAPed once. Under the ol' Intel 486/66 performance was pretty good - but did noticeably improve with the new AMD chip. Biggest improvements (of course) seemed to come by way of floating-point math: my SETI@home work unit processing time dropped & FP-intensive apps like TSPG became much more responsive. The XGA-2 card had much to do with that performance increase as well... and of itself was as impressive as the processor upgrade alone.

I realize that the later 77's - the Lacunas - are generally considered better bets with their L2 Caches, S3 video, IDE support and greater RAM expansion possibilities. But this 77 is an eminently capable of doing everything I've needed done... and then some. Now, there's a lot of folks out there that would be... not impressed by this machine. Frankly... I don't care, it answers my needs for a rugged dependable box. I don't see blue-screens-of-death, Unrecoverable-whatsit-exceptions, or have problems with the Registry (what registry?). Its a nice way to live:)

The kicker is I got this prize for US$25... Thank you IBM!

For Grins & Giggles, here's Sysbench results on the '77. The results posted for the 9577-DNG were acquired from a hardware twin of my own machine that I set up for my grandfather, but with Warp 3 as the resident OS instead. Thought the benchmark differences between Warp 3 & 4 on identical hardware were... interesting :)

Sysbench 0.9.4e Condensed test results

                   Warp 4 'stock'          Warp 4 'improved'       Warp 3, for comparison     
                   Aug  6 2000             Dec 27 2001             Nov  9 2001

Machine name       IBM 9577-DNA PS/2       IBM 9577-DNA PS/2       IBM 9577-DNG PS/2
Motherboard        Bermuda                 Bermuda                 Bermuda
Processor          80486DX 66Mhz           AMD 5x86 133MHz step 4.14.4    Intel486DX2(TM) stepping 4.3.5
External cache     0kb                     0kb                     0kb
Graphics card      IBM XGA-1 1MB           IBM XGA-2 1MB           IBM XGA-2 1MB
Coprocessor        Yes                     Yes                     Yes
Processors         1                       1                       1
RAM                32.00 MB                32.00 MB                32.00 MB

Operating System data
OS/2 version       20.40                   20.40                   20.30
CSDLevel           XR04000_                XR0M012_                XR0W040_
FIXLevel           Unknown                 XR0M012_                XR0W040_
Revision number    9.023                   9.036                   8.264
Priority           Dynamic                 Dynamic                 Dynamic
Maxwait            3                       3                       3
Timeslice          (32,32)                 (32,32)                 (32,32)
Protectonly        YES                     YES                     NO
Swap file size     20.00MB                 30.00MB                 2.00MB
  ...initially     20.00MB                 30.00MB                 2.00MB        

Video data
Resolution         640x480x8 bits/pixel    640x480x8 bits/pixel    640x480x16 bits/pixel
Screen Access      Direct                  Direct                  Direct
Bank Switched      No                      No                      No
Bytes/scanline     640                     640                     1280
Aperture size      307200                  307200                  614400

PM-Graphics-marks  7.780                   13.269                  8.631
CPU integer-marks  27.841                  33.862                  28.152
CPU FP-marks       3.160                   5.756                   3.222
DIVE-marks         7.899                   8.072                   8.052
File I/O marks     1142.143                1132.358                1486.130  
Memory-marks       30.518                  41.695                  31.014  
Simultaneous I/O   2.438                   2.720                   2.535
Disk I/O marks C:  14.689                  15.316                  15.840
Disk I/O marks D:                          8.941

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You can't consider this good literature but I can't forget my first 9577: Requiem for 9577-DNG 23THNLT