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Olof F · Contributor Joined: 07 Dec 2005 Posts: 9

I recently bought a K6-III/400 2.4V and upgraded a daughter's MMX/233 machine. This machine has an ASUS TVP4 MB with 66 MHz FSB, 512 KByte L2 cache, 128 MByte EDO. The OS is Windows Me.

The resulting system is much faster, memory benchmarks show reads that are close to twice as fast as with the MMX/233. The MB reports the processor as K6 300 but DMI says it is running at 400 MHz.

The funny thing is that memory writes are the same speed regardless of whether L1, L2, L3 or main memory is being accessed. They all report main memory write times (roughly 109 MBytes/s).

If I were to speculate on what the problem appears to be I'd say that the processor is set to "unconditional write-through cacheing" which means that no write will be acknowledged until it has reached its final destination (main memory).

Does anyone know if this is a K6-III cache option and if there is a 95/98/Me program which will patch the processor to a more "constructive" setting?

Olof F · Contributor Joined: 07 Dec 2005 Posts: 9

Hi guys and thanks for all your help!

I haven't answered because I originally posted on howtofixcomputers and have been monitoring to see replies there (so far, none).

Anyway ...

The MB in question is a good old ASUS TVP4 with 4*32 MB 72-pin EDOs and the intel 430VX chipset. The MB has a stenciled 75 MHz option but it's too fast :-(

The BIOS is ugraded to latest but that hasn't helped (I think).

The board originally ran with a Pentium 233 MMX and when I ran CacheMem with that combo it reported:

L1 cache ??KB 1286/154 MB/s R/W
L2 cache 256KB 239/154 MB/s R/W
Main mem 128MB 85/154 MB/s R/W

I upped the L2 to 512KB by adding an extra COAST and got the same readings except for L2 area twice as big.

Then I changed the EDO timing to x222 which raised the write speed to 169 MB/s and the main memory read speed to 106 MB/s.

Then I dropped in the K6-III and with the 2x multiplier (<=> 6x on AMD) I got

L1 cache ??KB 3041/102 MB/s
L2 cache 256KB 1524/102 MB/s
L3 cache 512KB 313/102 MB/s
Main mem 128MB 150/101 MB/s

So, all in all, my memory reads are much faster but my writes quite a bit slower than before. Maybe the VX chipset has a crappy cache write strategy?

Ideas anyone?

Thanks, Olof

PS I'll check out if Andreas Stiller's program is anywhere to be found DS

George Macdonald · Guest

On Thu, 07 Dec 2006 01:11:40 -0000, no@spam.invalid (Olof F) wrote:

BorisSA · Guest

I've been surpised that someone uses so ancient PC's. smile

So why you
don't upgrade your system at least to Pentium 3/4 level???

--
BorisSA

George Macdonald · Guest

On Sat, 9 Dec 2006 21:22:17 +0000, BorisSA
<BorisSA.2ikw9k@hardwarebanter.com> wrote:

Olof F · Contributor Joined: 07 Dec 2005 Posts: 9