I remember years ago there was a scandal about boards being sold with fake cache chips

Davros wrote:

I remember years ago there was a scandal about boards being sold with fake cache chips

I think that was a 486 board made by the infamous PC Chips company.

Check what cache configurations your mobo supports (http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/). With 256 kb modules you should be able to run it with 128 kB using 4 modules. This way you should be able to find the buggy chip (unless there are 5 of them). BTW. Cache chips use sockets, not slots 😀 (at least the ones you are writing about).

Sorry, sockets!!

That's a good idea - to try 128k of cache, but there's a problem. Written on the mobo, is a helpful cache configuration table. It tells me that in order to use 128k cache, I need to change the tag ram chip. For 256k cache, the tag chip I have inserted seems to be the same as the other 8 cache chips, and that is 1 piece of 32kx8. But if I want to switch over to 128k configuration, the tag chip it says I need to use is: 8k8. I don't know what one of these chips looks like. (This area of retro computers, ram and cache ram, is one that confuses me the most.)

With external cache disabled in the bios, I ran speedsys and doom, and both seemed to run reasonably normally. speedsys gave me a speed of 24.8 something, and doom ran ok.

When does external cache on a 486 mobo improve performance in games?

Thanks a lot. 😀

It should allways improve perfromance afterall pentium + no cache = celeron (ok not exactly 😉)