Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

I've been wondering: why would a hardware manufacturer put fake cache on their board? Doesn't the additional chip and soldering works translate to additional costs?

Yes, but it was WAY cheaper to solder some plastic thingies on the board instead of REAL cache chips.
From what I've heard, the BIOS is actually modified to show L2 cache even though it probably hasn't got any. They frauded 😉

When I went through the old man's computer stuff he showed me a plastic bad with a couple motherboards in it and it went like this:

I look into the plastic bag and see a socket 3 motherboard in it (in my head I already went 😁 and .
Then I checked the board out, it kinda went like this:
Socket 3 --> Yay 486 ZIF motherboard!

3 VLB slots!

Coincell battery!!
.

sticker on chipset...

Well, atleast I had fun for about 5 seconds 😁

Weird, my fake cache board doesn't have a chipset sticker.
IIRC It's a UMC 8 something.

TheLazy1 wrote:

Weird, my fake cache board doesn't have a chipset sticker.
IIRC It's a UMC 8 something.

Mine has a socketed BIOS chip instead of a soldered one. I figure there were many varieties of this board floating around.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

I've been wondering: why would a hardware manufacturer put fake cache on their board? Doesn't the additional chip and soldering works translate to additional costs?

Not when you're charging the customer for cache memory that they're not actually getting. I can still remember those days well. There was a shortage of all types of memory due to a factory in Japan suffering some disaster like a fire or earthquake or something and the price of memory went through the roof because there was only one or two other places that made memory chips to take up the slack. It took a few years before supply could catch up with demand and prices came back down again. I remember I went through two computers in those years and one had 14 megs RAM and the other had 48 because I couldn't afford to fully populate the RAM slots.

I remember that Voodoo1 came to market when it did and for the price it did because of that drop in RAM prices in 1996. 4MB of speedy-at-the-time video RAM became more consumer-priced.